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Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation
In 2016, even as Ohio helped deliver victory to presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cincinnati voters also passed a ballot initiative for universal preschool. The margin was so large that many who elected Trump must have—paradoxically—also voted for the initiative: how could the same citizens support such philosophically disparate aims? What had convinced residents of this Midwestern, Rust Belt community to raise their own taxes to provide early childhood education focused on the poorest—and mostly Black—communities?
When political scientist Hahrie Han set out to answer that question, her investigations led straight to an unlikely origin: the white-dominant evangelical megachurch Crossroads, where Pastor Chuck Mingo had delivered a sermon the prior year that set in motion a chain of surprising events. Raised in the Black church, Mingo felt called by God, he told Crossroads parishioners, to combat racial injustice, and to do it through the very church in which they were gathered.
The result was Undivided, a faith-based program designed to foster antiracism and systemic change. The creators of Undivided recognized that any effort to combat racial injustice must move beyond recognizing and overcoming individual prejudices. Real change would have to be radical—from the very roots.
In Undivided, Han chronicles the story of four participants—two men, one Black and one white, and two women, one Black and one white—whose lives were fundamentally altered by the program. As each of their journeys unfolded, in unpredictable and sometimes painful ways, they came to better understand one another, and to believe in the transformative possibilities for racial solidarity in a moment of deep divisiveness in America. The lessons they learned have the power to teach us all what an undivided society might look like—and how we can help achieve it.
In 2016, even as Ohio helped deliver victory to presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cincinnati voters also passed a ballot initiative for universal preschool. The margin was so large that many who elected Trump must have—paradoxically—also voted for the initiative: how could the same citizens support such philosophically disparate aims? What had convinced residents of this Midwestern, Rust Belt community to raise their own taxes to provide early childhood education focused on the poorest—and mostly Black—communities?
When political scientist Hahrie Han set out to answer that question, her investigations led straight to an unlikely origin: the white-dominant evangelical megachurch Crossroads, where Pastor Chuck Mingo had delivered a sermon the prior year that set in motion a chain of surprising events. Raised in the Black church, Mingo felt called by God, he told Crossroads parishioners, to combat racial injustice, and to do it through the very church in which they were gathered.
The result was Undivided, a faith-based program designed to foster antiracism and systemic change. The creators of Undivided recognized that any effort to combat racial injustice must move beyond recognizing and overcoming individual prejudices. Real change would have to be radical—from the very roots.
In Undivided, Han chronicles the story of four participants—two men, one Black and one white, and two women, one Black and one white—whose lives were fundamentally altered by the program. As each of their journeys unfolded, in unpredictable and sometimes painful ways, they came to better understand one another, and to believe in the transformative possibilities for racial solidarity in a moment of deep divisiveness in America. The lessons they learned have the power to teach us all what an undivided society might look like—and how we can help achieve it.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 24, 2024
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2689 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
March 29, 2025
3.5 stars?
Well research and an interesting topic for sure, especially if you know about these spaces. But I think the tagline is a little misleading as it is more about a few people who took steps toward racial solidarity and racial reconciliation and less about the work of the church organization itself, even though the church started the process for those people.
In the end it reminded me that a lot of the important work that needs to be done is on a local level. Looking around to see what you can do (with others) to improve things in your community can make a huge difference in the long run, even if it doesn't end up perfect.
Well research and an interesting topic for sure, especially if you know about these spaces. But I think the tagline is a little misleading as it is more about a few people who took steps toward racial solidarity and racial reconciliation and less about the work of the church organization itself, even though the church started the process for those people.
In the end it reminded me that a lot of the important work that needs to be done is on a local level. Looking around to see what you can do (with others) to improve things in your community can make a huge difference in the long run, even if it doesn't end up perfect.
November 2, 2024
What is the antidote for racism in the evangelical church? While I don't have the definitive answer, this book by Hahrie Han shares compelling stories of how a vision of reconciliation from a church leader sparked a movement of ordinary people striving to create a world that aligns with God's vision.
Hahrie Han takes us through the journeys of four individuals who participated in the Undivided six-week program, birthed out of a megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio. These individuals come from diverse backgrounds, bringing different baggage and perspectives on faith and race in America. Spanning from 2016 to 2023, the book illustrates how ordinary people grapple with their responses to both conscious and unconscious racism. It doesn't provide easy answers to these complex issues but instead shares the humanity of each individual, showcasing their personal struggles and triumphs throughout the journey.
"Undivided" made me reflect on the idea that sometimes, the answer to big problems is simply to keep living in the world between what it is and what we hope it becomes.
Hahrie Han takes us through the journeys of four individuals who participated in the Undivided six-week program, birthed out of a megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio. These individuals come from diverse backgrounds, bringing different baggage and perspectives on faith and race in America. Spanning from 2016 to 2023, the book illustrates how ordinary people grapple with their responses to both conscious and unconscious racism. It doesn't provide easy answers to these complex issues but instead shares the humanity of each individual, showcasing their personal struggles and triumphs throughout the journey.
"Undivided" made me reflect on the idea that sometimes, the answer to big problems is simply to keep living in the world between what it is and what we hope it becomes.
January 3, 2025
This is my backyard. I was thoroughly and thoughtfully engaged in this book.
July 16, 2025
Undivided is not a book I’d have picked up had it not been selected for one of my book clubs. These days, I have increasingly less patience for American Evangelicalism, which seems to have lost touch with anything resembling Christianity. Their supposed belief in the infallibility of the Christian Bible seems not to extend past the first three books of Genesis (not that they notice the inconsistencies in the two different creation stories, but I digress). When the Sermon on the Mount is too “woke” for these people, well, spare me the claims that they’re “Christian.” So even the premise of the book, that it’s about a megachurch’s “unlikely” success at bridging racial gaps, had me pretty skeptical.
After finishing the book, I am painfully aware that the narrative ends in 2021, and since then, things have only gotten worse among evangelicals/Christian nationalists. The “anti-woke” movement has pretty much triumphed, and support for Black Lives Matter, DEI, and so on have mostly gone silent, for any number of reasons, many of them having to do with fear of retribution from “Christians” in power.
All that said, I ended finding the book informative and interesting, though I couldn’t help noticing that the evangelicals who participated in the Undivided program were a distinct minority, ideologically and racially, within the Crossroads megachurch.
Undivided was a program designed to foster antiracism and systemic change. As far as I could tell, its one “systemic” accomplishment was promoting a universal pre-K program in Cincinnati, via a tax levy which passed with far more votes in 2016 than Hillary Clinton received in Cincinnati, indicating that Trump voters also voted for the levy, a result supposedly attributed in part to the efforts of Crossroads parishioners. The odd thing is that the book hardly talks about this at all, despite the fact that it shows up in the book’s blurb. I’m not yet persuaded that the success of a school levy in a Democratic city can necessarily be credited to a church group. Maybe, but the book doesn’t support that with evidence.
Instead, the book tells the stories of several parishioners who participated in the Undivided program, which somewhat contradicts the argument that antiracism is about changing racist systems rather than changing the hearts and minds of individuals. To be sure, we follow the ways that the book’s characters learned about systemic problems and in some cases learned how to pass along that recognition to others, including racists in their lives. But the one man who worked in Ohio’s state prison system and attempted to alter the system ended up resigning in frustration. At least he learned enough to try, but . . . . I’ll also grant that the book is an effective read largely because it does a good job of making me care about the individuals profiled.
So, if, as far as I could tell, the fostering of systemic change had EXTREMELY limited success, why did I find the book a worthwhile read? Well, first off, I did see that the Undivided program helped many individuals become less racist or, in the case of the Black participants, get in better touch with their racial identities. More to the point, from my own completely practical perspective (what’s in this book for ME, someone who is emphatically NOT an evangelical Christian?), the book analyzed why the program was effective at fostering relationships among diverse people and encouraging (some of) them to participate in social justice activities. Basically, the program, through various exercises described in the book, fostered trust and community among participants. And that’s an approach that organizers of all kinds—like me—can adopt. It dovetails nicely with what I just read in another book, that the most effective ways to get out the vote are through personal interactions with trusted associates.
In our all-too-disconnected culture, it’s valuable to know that connections are not only emotionally rewarding but can be politically powerful.
After finishing the book, I am painfully aware that the narrative ends in 2021, and since then, things have only gotten worse among evangelicals/Christian nationalists. The “anti-woke” movement has pretty much triumphed, and support for Black Lives Matter, DEI, and so on have mostly gone silent, for any number of reasons, many of them having to do with fear of retribution from “Christians” in power.
All that said, I ended finding the book informative and interesting, though I couldn’t help noticing that the evangelicals who participated in the Undivided program were a distinct minority, ideologically and racially, within the Crossroads megachurch.
Undivided was a program designed to foster antiracism and systemic change. As far as I could tell, its one “systemic” accomplishment was promoting a universal pre-K program in Cincinnati, via a tax levy which passed with far more votes in 2016 than Hillary Clinton received in Cincinnati, indicating that Trump voters also voted for the levy, a result supposedly attributed in part to the efforts of Crossroads parishioners. The odd thing is that the book hardly talks about this at all, despite the fact that it shows up in the book’s blurb. I’m not yet persuaded that the success of a school levy in a Democratic city can necessarily be credited to a church group. Maybe, but the book doesn’t support that with evidence.
Instead, the book tells the stories of several parishioners who participated in the Undivided program, which somewhat contradicts the argument that antiracism is about changing racist systems rather than changing the hearts and minds of individuals. To be sure, we follow the ways that the book’s characters learned about systemic problems and in some cases learned how to pass along that recognition to others, including racists in their lives. But the one man who worked in Ohio’s state prison system and attempted to alter the system ended up resigning in frustration. At least he learned enough to try, but . . . . I’ll also grant that the book is an effective read largely because it does a good job of making me care about the individuals profiled.
So, if, as far as I could tell, the fostering of systemic change had EXTREMELY limited success, why did I find the book a worthwhile read? Well, first off, I did see that the Undivided program helped many individuals become less racist or, in the case of the Black participants, get in better touch with their racial identities. More to the point, from my own completely practical perspective (what’s in this book for ME, someone who is emphatically NOT an evangelical Christian?), the book analyzed why the program was effective at fostering relationships among diverse people and encouraging (some of) them to participate in social justice activities. Basically, the program, through various exercises described in the book, fostered trust and community among participants. And that’s an approach that organizers of all kinds—like me—can adopt. It dovetails nicely with what I just read in another book, that the most effective ways to get out the vote are through personal interactions with trusted associates.
In our all-too-disconnected culture, it’s valuable to know that connections are not only emotionally rewarding but can be politically powerful.
January 19, 2025
In this book, Hahrie Han addresses racism—a topic that, while some white people may be tired of hearing about it, most Black people are tired of experiencing it in real life at almost every level of society. The characters presented are real people, with lives that come alive before your eyes—thus Han uses pseudonyms to protect the subjects from being trolled or otherwise harmed, a factor that indicates how disruptive their actions are to those who are offended by their efforts to make life better for our fellow humans. The quest of the Undivided initiative differed from corporate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) training programs in several key ways—one of those key objectives was to actually help people see each other as fellow humans, instead of just checking lawyerly boxes by a company's general counsel.
Han describes the visceral effects on relationships from confronting documented systemic racism, in both the persons chronicled and the pushback they encountered as they sought tangible remedies for it. Real people struggle to determine the appropriate way forward for them individually, even though there is clear right and wrong in front of them. The choices aren't easy, and there's a larger reason for that in the form of general societal norms. Much of the source of the problems with amplification of embedded fascist propaganda lies with billionaire funding of media outlets that purposefully cultivate hatred between groups of people. Evidence points to the profitability (for some) that results from fanning inter-cultural hate—and the resultant incentive to manipulate poor people to turn on their fellow humans for artificially constructed reasons.
As long as such profitability exists, persons engaged in genuine anti-racist efforts will have an uphill climb—although not an unattainable one, even as some find they've lost friends, jobs, status, and even spouses in the process. Although the people and events in this book are in the context of a specific branch of Christianity (i.e. Evangelicalism), the issues addressed span all of humanity regardless of religious or secular environment—underneath the sectarian orientation lies a foundation that is universally human. All church denominations are limited to some degree by restrictions placed on them by donors, whose funding is essential for infrastructure and programs, and who are often from the same class of the wealthy who profit the most from racist systems—this includes self-proclaimed progressive churches as well.
The successes of Undivided that Han documents are amazing, considering the headwinds they faced. Even so, everyone who has awareness of the racism that's been embedded in society since the Colonial era has some means at their disposal within their area of influence to advance universal human dignity—and no area of influence is too small or too large to engage. The larger areas of influence will require that racist propaganda in the media (including the mainstream and fringe) be debunked both publicly and individually with solid logical and emotional counterpoints. Much of that progress will be attained to the degree that racist systems become unprofitable—let us help that business case proceed.
Han describes the visceral effects on relationships from confronting documented systemic racism, in both the persons chronicled and the pushback they encountered as they sought tangible remedies for it. Real people struggle to determine the appropriate way forward for them individually, even though there is clear right and wrong in front of them. The choices aren't easy, and there's a larger reason for that in the form of general societal norms. Much of the source of the problems with amplification of embedded fascist propaganda lies with billionaire funding of media outlets that purposefully cultivate hatred between groups of people. Evidence points to the profitability (for some) that results from fanning inter-cultural hate—and the resultant incentive to manipulate poor people to turn on their fellow humans for artificially constructed reasons.
As long as such profitability exists, persons engaged in genuine anti-racist efforts will have an uphill climb—although not an unattainable one, even as some find they've lost friends, jobs, status, and even spouses in the process. Although the people and events in this book are in the context of a specific branch of Christianity (i.e. Evangelicalism), the issues addressed span all of humanity regardless of religious or secular environment—underneath the sectarian orientation lies a foundation that is universally human. All church denominations are limited to some degree by restrictions placed on them by donors, whose funding is essential for infrastructure and programs, and who are often from the same class of the wealthy who profit the most from racist systems—this includes self-proclaimed progressive churches as well.
The successes of Undivided that Han documents are amazing, considering the headwinds they faced. Even so, everyone who has awareness of the racism that's been embedded in society since the Colonial era has some means at their disposal within their area of influence to advance universal human dignity—and no area of influence is too small or too large to engage. The larger areas of influence will require that racist propaganda in the media (including the mainstream and fringe) be debunked both publicly and individually with solid logical and emotional counterpoints. Much of that progress will be attained to the degree that racist systems become unprofitable—let us help that business case proceed.
October 9, 2025
I'm going to be the a-hole that gives a 1-star rating to a newly-minted Macarthur Grant winner. It's all about timing.
This is not a scholarly pursuit. The author, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, camps out with members of a megachurch in Cincinnati attempting to understand how an electorate can elect Donald Trump in 2016 AND pass a local issue to provide free pre-school/headstart programming to every child.
This is not answered or fully addressed.
The author instead acts as a fly on the wall, introducing a megachurch and the program, Undivided, seemingly a class on how not to be a racist.
We have four subjects. These characters' stories are treated haphazardly. We jump from job to job, relationship to relationship and circumstance to circumstance with no context. So much is going on and the reader does not know why. The subjects also are rarely quoted directly.
As a political scientist and academic, I hoped the author would draw conclusions, theorize, compare to other examples of a faith-based entity successfully united for social justice. She doesn't.
I think, too, the author misses an opportunity to tell the history of the Christian church in the United States and its role in slavery and the subjugation of African Americans. Even Catholics, Jews and members of the LGBT+ community. The Christian church disliking people that were not white (or even male) did not start in 2016.
Or perhaps why do these people need a class to learn how not to be a bigot? Why do we need a deity to be respectful to others? And why just this one church in Cincinnati? Why not find churches around the country (perhaps the world?) that installed groundbreaking curriculum to change attitudes?
I realize my rating is an outlier. But reading other comments, my criticism is not off track. I think I'm just the only one to give it such a low score.
Why do I think this happened? If you're a white church-going Christian, you'll LOVE this book. It tells you how great you actually are.
This is not a scholarly pursuit. The author, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, camps out with members of a megachurch in Cincinnati attempting to understand how an electorate can elect Donald Trump in 2016 AND pass a local issue to provide free pre-school/headstart programming to every child.
This is not answered or fully addressed.
The author instead acts as a fly on the wall, introducing a megachurch and the program, Undivided, seemingly a class on how not to be a racist.
We have four subjects. These characters' stories are treated haphazardly. We jump from job to job, relationship to relationship and circumstance to circumstance with no context. So much is going on and the reader does not know why. The subjects also are rarely quoted directly.
As a political scientist and academic, I hoped the author would draw conclusions, theorize, compare to other examples of a faith-based entity successfully united for social justice. She doesn't.
I think, too, the author misses an opportunity to tell the history of the Christian church in the United States and its role in slavery and the subjugation of African Americans. Even Catholics, Jews and members of the LGBT+ community. The Christian church disliking people that were not white (or even male) did not start in 2016.
Or perhaps why do these people need a class to learn how not to be a bigot? Why do we need a deity to be respectful to others? And why just this one church in Cincinnati? Why not find churches around the country (perhaps the world?) that installed groundbreaking curriculum to change attitudes?
I realize my rating is an outlier. But reading other comments, my criticism is not off track. I think I'm just the only one to give it such a low score.
Why do I think this happened? If you're a white church-going Christian, you'll LOVE this book. It tells you how great you actually are.
December 8, 2024
5 stars because this is a book I want to have on my shelf permanently. Hahrie Han condenses seven years of research into a highly readable and insightful story: Ordinary people from different backgrounds coming together to tackle growing divisiveness in the US around the topic of race, exacerbated within Christian communities by the blurring lines between white nationalism and evangelicalism.
My biggest takeaway from Undivided is that systemic issues aren’t dismantled by individual actions, even if they feel more tangible (like donations or reading a book). Instead, community-driven activism creates the most meaningful change. When we build genuine relationships with people who hold different points of view, that shared history of trust and respect makes it easier to engage in difficult conversations and hold each other accountable.
Even though this book is about a movement from the perspective of an evangelical Christian church, its lessons hold true for any kind of grassroots organizing and initiatives that seek to enact meaningful change. Undivided doesn’t have all the answers, but perhaps unity isn’t forged through finding and agreeing on one perfect solution. It’s from accepting that systemic change is slow, messy, and bogged down by the challenges of daily life, but also finding strength from your community to keep pushing for it.
My biggest takeaway from Undivided is that systemic issues aren’t dismantled by individual actions, even if they feel more tangible (like donations or reading a book). Instead, community-driven activism creates the most meaningful change. When we build genuine relationships with people who hold different points of view, that shared history of trust and respect makes it easier to engage in difficult conversations and hold each other accountable.
Even though this book is about a movement from the perspective of an evangelical Christian church, its lessons hold true for any kind of grassroots organizing and initiatives that seek to enact meaningful change. Undivided doesn’t have all the answers, but perhaps unity isn’t forged through finding and agreeing on one perfect solution. It’s from accepting that systemic change is slow, messy, and bogged down by the challenges of daily life, but also finding strength from your community to keep pushing for it.
April 21, 2025
This was surprisingly optimistic to me. It was really interesting to read about an evangelical church’s interest in taking on racial justice and fascinating to read about each person’s journey. She raises good questions about how movement work can happen on an individual basis, and how institutions can change if the individuals within them trying to make change keep getting stymied, but mostly focuses on bringing this to life with a small handful of people. I found it heartening - the story of how Jess got her uncle to a point where he removed his swastika tattoo is remarkable.
February 20, 2025
I grew up in a rapidly expanding mega church. This book was incredibly riveting to me. A reminder that good can be done in an evangelical setting, but that that system is still so deeply flawed. Ultimately I may have more questions than answers, but I thought this was a very well researched and presented case study.
The side plot I kept coming back for was whether Sandra was going to divorce her husband. Goodness gracious that woman deserves so much more.
The side plot I kept coming back for was whether Sandra was going to divorce her husband. Goodness gracious that woman deserves so much more.
March 26, 2025
I greatly appreciated this book's thorough research and enjoyed its captivating character-centered structure. The writing and reporting were on the whole solid, but the unfortunately disengaging telling-over-showing motif left some to be desired. Overall, it struck me as an impressive project and inspiring work of narrative nonfiction to strive towards! Happy to read and investigate this book.
March 23, 2025
I might be rating a bit based on topic more than writing style, but I liked this book. I appreciate the digging the author did to understand everyone featured, their back story and their journey. It wasn't quite what I expected from the title and I'm glad I read it.
May 23, 2025
A nuanced account of movement building and the power of perseverance and grace in antiracism work. Academic writing for a general audience at a level of excellence rarely seen. Couldn’t put it down.
March 18, 2025
Interesting and inspiring program. Got a bit repetitive.
April 15, 2025
“Change only happens when the majority demand it.” So how did that change occur in this Cincinnati suburb? The conservative district voted to increase their taxes to provide early childhood education for primarily black preschoolers. What happened in this community to spur this grassroots movement? The author spent seven years researching and following four members of an evangelical church to find answers. Undivided reignited my passion to seek meaningful social justice.
May 6, 2025
Appreciated being able to follow along and kind of put myself into the lives of real people who participated in this program. Definitely gives me a lot to chew on for a while.
January 11, 2025
Summary: An ethnographic study of an antiracism program in a Cincinnati evangelical megachurch.
Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.
Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.
Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters over time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.
I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)
I do not think I am an average reader for Undivided. I both have a good background in reading various ethnographies, but I am deeply invested in antiracism work in the evangelical world. I was interested in the book because I was well aware of a small meeting of Evangelical leaders which happened to be meeting at my Alma Mater, Wheaton College. Until recently I spent 15 years as a member of a different megachurch where I strongly advocated for racial awareness programs and called on the church to be more attuned to the need to center justice in their work. Throughout the 2016 to 2023 study of Undivided, I was involved in similar program in a different church and a different city. This story of Undivided is a largely positive one, but In 2021 I left my church after having lost faith that there could be change there.
There are a variety of reasons which I have mostly detailed in other places, but one aspect which I do not think got enough attention in Undivided, although it did get some, is that the megachurch model I think is inherently flawed. Even if I had full confidence in the leadership of my former church, I have come to believe that two aspects of the megachurch mean that I will never be satisfied. One, the megachurch model has been influenced by the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of the church growth movement. Han mentions this in Undivided, but just in passing. The HUP was developed in a missionary context of India and then was brought back to the US and became part of a church planting and church growth movement in the 1970 to early 2000s. HUP suggests that the way to attract people to the church is to narrowly target a small demographic and cultural segment to meet the needs and attract just that group through culturally specific evangelism. A second aspect to the growth of the megachurch is not just HUP, but also targeting programming toward people who were not familiar with or uninterested in traditional church. My old church used to have the tag line, “A church for the unchurched.”
These two aspect matter to why predominately white evangelical megachurches are so bad at racial issues. The very DNA of most megachurches is a narrowly targeted cultural group. Willow Creek popularized Unchurched Harry and Mary as their target demographic and then proceeded to teach other churches to do the same. Part of my work in the late 1990s was working for a local association of churches and doing demographic reports for churches and church plants who were trying to find the narrow group they should be targeting in order to quickly grow. Once churches have this in their DNA, and then they prioritize being a comfortable place to go to church, avoidance of discomfort becomes the priority of the local church. A church that prioritizes avoidance of discomfort and who has a narrow cultural demographic as the base of its congregation, cannot address an inherently uncomfortable topic like race, which is not salient to most of the members because those members have been attracted because it is monocultural.
Again, it is mentioned, but the added layer to the problem is the increasing role of Christian Nationalism which has been empowered by the increasing reliance of fear of the other by the religious right. There have been whole books about the relationship of Christian nationalism to the rise of the religious right and how race is inherently tied into the very concept of Christian nationalism and to a lesser extent the development of the white evangelical movement. Books like Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and Religion of Whiteness by Emerson and Bracey approach the history and sociology of race within the evangelical church world.
The real draw to the book Undivided is how much the writing is centered on the characters. The reader learns about the program and about the issues of race within the evangelical world as the characters come to understand themselves and one another through the program and their relationships with others. These are not simply stories. As I hinted above in introducing the characters, each of them had significant changes in their life as a result of their connection to the program and one another. In many ways those changes were positive, but not all of them were. Undivided is in part about the cost that it takes to address race in a system that discourages the directness.
One of the difficulties of discussing race or economics or other topics that are “just in the water” is that language is difficult. For instance, Han occasionally uses the word “Whiteness” to describe the cultural belief in a system of racialization and hierarchy. Some readers view “whiteness” as meaning “all white people,” but the sociological definition does not mean all white people. Jonathan Walton likes to use the phrase “White American Folk Religion” instead of Christian Nationalism even if they have overlapping meanings because he wants to use language that is less fraught. The two different approaches of using whiteness to specifically name a problem with a name that can be misunderstood, or using a name like "White American Folk Religion" which needs to be defined but has less initial baggage is a topic that repeatedly comes up in Undivided. Studying the culture, something that people don't directly talk about because it is assumed to be understood, is necessary in a pluralistic world where people do not necessarily mean the same thing when using the same language.
The idea of ethnography centers the experience of the focus characters both as particular people, but also models who stand in for larger groups. The pastor, Chuck, grew up in the Black church and intially left Crossroads because of frustration over racial issues. But he came back and was hired and the social capital he earned through long term relationship with the church leadership allowed him some leeway to press in on difficult issues. But the tension on maintaining those relationships means that he was always wondering if he was not pushing enough or was pushing too much and if he was self censoring so that he could maintain relationship. Grant was a young white man who thought he knew it all because he had a black friend and a black brother. As he explored racial issues and the way that race played a role within his work at the Department of Corrections he became an activist. He started a prison ministry group at the church. And he work in his role as a social media manager to profile inmates through podcast interview and written profiles. But eventually he left the Department of Corrections because of backlash against his activism. Becoming a church staff members who continued his activism around racial issues there.
Sandra was a Black woman who was married to a white man. She grew up being taught by her father to not trust white people. After an early divorce and a young child, she was brought back to faith through Crossroads church. She eventually remarried a white man and had three additional children. Again, the book skillfully tells the story of how racial identity matters not just to white racism, but also the racial identity of those who are not black. It takes years and many small steps, but she comes to find her voice and understand how gender and race both play a role in her marriage struggles.
Jess is the youngest character in the book. She grew up in a family that was overt white supremacist, her father (who died when she was 11) had "White Power" and other similar tattoos and her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest while in prison. Jess also spent time in prison after a felony conviction and a serious drug addiction. While in prison she became a Christian and upon release she found Crossroads, regained custody of her son, and was just getting settled when she started participating in Undivided. She eventually completed college and becomes a social worker and presses back against the racism of her family and the systems she works and lives in.
It is very clear in Undivided that struggle is central to growth. The point is growth, not a particular destination. Even as the book is very clear about the struggle I think it may be too positively framed. The backlash, which is clearly the focus of the second half of the book I think is stronger than what just what is talked about. The book was published in September, 2024, which means it was largely finished in 2023 and written about events that were mostly 2022 or before. The reelection of Trump, the continuing overt Christian nationalism within the christian community and the backlash against DEI, immigration, and other topics I do not think have reached their zenith yet.
One of the strengths of Undivided is that Hahrie Han is not an evangelical insider. She is coming at the story with a different lens and different assumptions. But her not being an insider means that there are a lot of minor issues which I see as an insider. Some are minor fact problems like identifying Charlie Dates as the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago starting in 2023. He actually became pastor of Progressive Baptist in 2011, but in 2023 also became senior pastor of Salem Baptist, jointly pastoring two different churches. The unusualness of the situation can be a part of why the detail was wrong. But there were a dozen or so similar minor errors that I think show a lack of evangelical editorial input. She also had some framing issues with describing people as "in the faith" in a way that felt very unevangelical. When she talks about Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral and the National Evangelical Association, she incorrectly identifies them as nondenominational.
I think some of the lack of detail in the backlash section also is attributable to her outsider status. While she details the 2018 Wheaton meeting, she doesn't detail the 2018 MLK 50 or the 2018 T4G meeting which were both very much concerned with race in the Evangelical world. MLK 50 was jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist ELRC and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and is arguably part of the impetus of the national anti CRT movement. MLK 50 is regularly cited as evidence of those very conservative evangelical organization being "woke". TGC in 2019 published The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity, which directly identified the language being used in antiracism programs like MLK 50 or Undivided as being incompatible with Christianity. That eventually morphed into opposition to Critical Race Theory and the SBC's resolution about CRT and SBC seminary presidents unequivocally opposing CRT. That anti CRT eventually spread to school and political world with Trump's anti CRT statement in the fall of 2020. Part of the reality of the problem of race and Trump is that those who are opposing Trump and those who are trying to address race often, but not necessarily, overlap.
As detailed more in the discussion on the Holy Post than in the book, many who were willing to speak out about racial issues are no longer willing or able to speak out because of the identification of discussion of race with political issues. One of the issues that led to my leaving from my church was the church's unwillingness to simply say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not an active attender of the church. She was baptized in 2011, but according to staff who I have talked to, there is no evidence that she had any church involvement after 2013. In 2020, when she ran for congress she identified the church as her church and that she was involved in small group ministry there. The church was at the same time trying to address racial issues through small group and larger groups not unlike Undivided. In direct conversations with leaders at the church I told them that they could not be taken seriously as addressing race while avoiding other discussions trying not to offend. The problem is not conservative members of the church who are republicans, but the rhetoric being used.
I think Undivided made the very good point that to help people changes over time requires relationship. And that withdrawing from relationship precludes the ability to speak into people's lives. Undivided talks about how Jess' continued involvement with her uncle led to him having his swastika tattoo removed. And that she was able to discuss the problems of race within policing with officers who she regularly worked with in her role as a social worker. But the book also talks about how eventually Sandra and her husband divorced in part because of issues of race and his attraction to Christian Nationalism and how that impacted their relationship. There just are not simple solutions and what works in one case will not work in another.
.....this review was too long for Goodreads, you can read the rest of it on my blog at https://bookwi.se/undivided/
Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.
Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.
Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters over time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.
I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)
I do not think I am an average reader for Undivided. I both have a good background in reading various ethnographies, but I am deeply invested in antiracism work in the evangelical world. I was interested in the book because I was well aware of a small meeting of Evangelical leaders which happened to be meeting at my Alma Mater, Wheaton College. Until recently I spent 15 years as a member of a different megachurch where I strongly advocated for racial awareness programs and called on the church to be more attuned to the need to center justice in their work. Throughout the 2016 to 2023 study of Undivided, I was involved in similar program in a different church and a different city. This story of Undivided is a largely positive one, but In 2021 I left my church after having lost faith that there could be change there.
There are a variety of reasons which I have mostly detailed in other places, but one aspect which I do not think got enough attention in Undivided, although it did get some, is that the megachurch model I think is inherently flawed. Even if I had full confidence in the leadership of my former church, I have come to believe that two aspects of the megachurch mean that I will never be satisfied. One, the megachurch model has been influenced by the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) of the church growth movement. Han mentions this in Undivided, but just in passing. The HUP was developed in a missionary context of India and then was brought back to the US and became part of a church planting and church growth movement in the 1970 to early 2000s. HUP suggests that the way to attract people to the church is to narrowly target a small demographic and cultural segment to meet the needs and attract just that group through culturally specific evangelism. A second aspect to the growth of the megachurch is not just HUP, but also targeting programming toward people who were not familiar with or uninterested in traditional church. My old church used to have the tag line, “A church for the unchurched.”
These two aspect matter to why predominately white evangelical megachurches are so bad at racial issues. The very DNA of most megachurches is a narrowly targeted cultural group. Willow Creek popularized Unchurched Harry and Mary as their target demographic and then proceeded to teach other churches to do the same. Part of my work in the late 1990s was working for a local association of churches and doing demographic reports for churches and church plants who were trying to find the narrow group they should be targeting in order to quickly grow. Once churches have this in their DNA, and then they prioritize being a comfortable place to go to church, avoidance of discomfort becomes the priority of the local church. A church that prioritizes avoidance of discomfort and who has a narrow cultural demographic as the base of its congregation, cannot address an inherently uncomfortable topic like race, which is not salient to most of the members because those members have been attracted because it is monocultural.
Again, it is mentioned, but the added layer to the problem is the increasing role of Christian Nationalism which has been empowered by the increasing reliance of fear of the other by the religious right. There have been whole books about the relationship of Christian nationalism to the rise of the religious right and how race is inherently tied into the very concept of Christian nationalism and to a lesser extent the development of the white evangelical movement. Books like Bad Faith by Randall Balmer and Religion of Whiteness by Emerson and Bracey approach the history and sociology of race within the evangelical church world.
The real draw to the book Undivided is how much the writing is centered on the characters. The reader learns about the program and about the issues of race within the evangelical world as the characters come to understand themselves and one another through the program and their relationships with others. These are not simply stories. As I hinted above in introducing the characters, each of them had significant changes in their life as a result of their connection to the program and one another. In many ways those changes were positive, but not all of them were. Undivided is in part about the cost that it takes to address race in a system that discourages the directness.
One of the difficulties of discussing race or economics or other topics that are “just in the water” is that language is difficult. For instance, Han occasionally uses the word “Whiteness” to describe the cultural belief in a system of racialization and hierarchy. Some readers view “whiteness” as meaning “all white people,” but the sociological definition does not mean all white people. Jonathan Walton likes to use the phrase “White American Folk Religion” instead of Christian Nationalism even if they have overlapping meanings because he wants to use language that is less fraught. The two different approaches of using whiteness to specifically name a problem with a name that can be misunderstood, or using a name like "White American Folk Religion" which needs to be defined but has less initial baggage is a topic that repeatedly comes up in Undivided. Studying the culture, something that people don't directly talk about because it is assumed to be understood, is necessary in a pluralistic world where people do not necessarily mean the same thing when using the same language.
The idea of ethnography centers the experience of the focus characters both as particular people, but also models who stand in for larger groups. The pastor, Chuck, grew up in the Black church and intially left Crossroads because of frustration over racial issues. But he came back and was hired and the social capital he earned through long term relationship with the church leadership allowed him some leeway to press in on difficult issues. But the tension on maintaining those relationships means that he was always wondering if he was not pushing enough or was pushing too much and if he was self censoring so that he could maintain relationship. Grant was a young white man who thought he knew it all because he had a black friend and a black brother. As he explored racial issues and the way that race played a role within his work at the Department of Corrections he became an activist. He started a prison ministry group at the church. And he work in his role as a social media manager to profile inmates through podcast interview and written profiles. But eventually he left the Department of Corrections because of backlash against his activism. Becoming a church staff members who continued his activism around racial issues there.
Sandra was a Black woman who was married to a white man. She grew up being taught by her father to not trust white people. After an early divorce and a young child, she was brought back to faith through Crossroads church. She eventually remarried a white man and had three additional children. Again, the book skillfully tells the story of how racial identity matters not just to white racism, but also the racial identity of those who are not black. It takes years and many small steps, but she comes to find her voice and understand how gender and race both play a role in her marriage struggles.
Jess is the youngest character in the book. She grew up in a family that was overt white supremacist, her father (who died when she was 11) had "White Power" and other similar tattoos and her uncle had a swastika tattooed on his chest while in prison. Jess also spent time in prison after a felony conviction and a serious drug addiction. While in prison she became a Christian and upon release she found Crossroads, regained custody of her son, and was just getting settled when she started participating in Undivided. She eventually completed college and becomes a social worker and presses back against the racism of her family and the systems she works and lives in.
It is very clear in Undivided that struggle is central to growth. The point is growth, not a particular destination. Even as the book is very clear about the struggle I think it may be too positively framed. The backlash, which is clearly the focus of the second half of the book I think is stronger than what just what is talked about. The book was published in September, 2024, which means it was largely finished in 2023 and written about events that were mostly 2022 or before. The reelection of Trump, the continuing overt Christian nationalism within the christian community and the backlash against DEI, immigration, and other topics I do not think have reached their zenith yet.
One of the strengths of Undivided is that Hahrie Han is not an evangelical insider. She is coming at the story with a different lens and different assumptions. But her not being an insider means that there are a lot of minor issues which I see as an insider. Some are minor fact problems like identifying Charlie Dates as the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago starting in 2023. He actually became pastor of Progressive Baptist in 2011, but in 2023 also became senior pastor of Salem Baptist, jointly pastoring two different churches. The unusualness of the situation can be a part of why the detail was wrong. But there were a dozen or so similar minor errors that I think show a lack of evangelical editorial input. She also had some framing issues with describing people as "in the faith" in a way that felt very unevangelical. When she talks about Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral and the National Evangelical Association, she incorrectly identifies them as nondenominational.
I think some of the lack of detail in the backlash section also is attributable to her outsider status. While she details the 2018 Wheaton meeting, she doesn't detail the 2018 MLK 50 or the 2018 T4G meeting which were both very much concerned with race in the Evangelical world. MLK 50 was jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist ELRC and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and is arguably part of the impetus of the national anti CRT movement. MLK 50 is regularly cited as evidence of those very conservative evangelical organization being "woke". TGC in 2019 published The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity, which directly identified the language being used in antiracism programs like MLK 50 or Undivided as being incompatible with Christianity. That eventually morphed into opposition to Critical Race Theory and the SBC's resolution about CRT and SBC seminary presidents unequivocally opposing CRT. That anti CRT eventually spread to school and political world with Trump's anti CRT statement in the fall of 2020. Part of the reality of the problem of race and Trump is that those who are opposing Trump and those who are trying to address race often, but not necessarily, overlap.
As detailed more in the discussion on the Holy Post than in the book, many who were willing to speak out about racial issues are no longer willing or able to speak out because of the identification of discussion of race with political issues. One of the issues that led to my leaving from my church was the church's unwillingness to simply say that Marjorie Taylor Greene was not an active attender of the church. She was baptized in 2011, but according to staff who I have talked to, there is no evidence that she had any church involvement after 2013. In 2020, when she ran for congress she identified the church as her church and that she was involved in small group ministry there. The church was at the same time trying to address racial issues through small group and larger groups not unlike Undivided. In direct conversations with leaders at the church I told them that they could not be taken seriously as addressing race while avoiding other discussions trying not to offend. The problem is not conservative members of the church who are republicans, but the rhetoric being used.
I think Undivided made the very good point that to help people changes over time requires relationship. And that withdrawing from relationship precludes the ability to speak into people's lives. Undivided talks about how Jess' continued involvement with her uncle led to him having his swastika tattoo removed. And that she was able to discuss the problems of race within policing with officers who she regularly worked with in her role as a social worker. But the book also talks about how eventually Sandra and her husband divorced in part because of issues of race and his attraction to Christian Nationalism and how that impacted their relationship. There just are not simple solutions and what works in one case will not work in another.
.....this review was too long for Goodreads, you can read the rest of it on my blog at https://bookwi.se/undivided/
March 10, 2025
Very similar to Circle of Hope in it’s approach, Hahrie Han doesn’t hold back when it comes to examining the good, the bad, and the ugly of what happens when a megachurch implements a racial justice program.
August 18, 2024
At age nineteen I married a seminary student with a student pastoral charge in rural Ohio. For most of the next forty-two years I was a pastor’s wife.
The seminary professors and dean of the school had been active in the Civil Rights movement. We were Social Gospel progressives by education and inclination. My husband served in the Philadelphia area and in Michigan, with churches in the inner city, a large city, the suburbs of a large city, and in rural churches in small towns and resort towns. All but one church was exclusively white and leaned conservative.
The last church split over the church’s social creed on abortion, which read that it was a regrettable but sometimes necessary choice to save the life of the mother. They were anti LGBTQ. This was an area where the KKK was still present and that voted for Trump in 2016. The element that left the church had been vicious and divisive, more intent on harm than transformation.
When Undivided was offered to me by the publisher I thought I would check it out but was uncertain about it. I found it fascinating, inspiring, and frustrating.
The book’s start was in an academic project by Hahrie Han, who was studying grassroots organizing campaigns. She was struck by the idea of a Protestant evangelical megachurch, predominately white in “numbers and culture,” had become involved with promoting a policy that added the Black community. Issue 44 addressed racial disparities and universal preschool in Cincinnati. “Thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported Issue 44,” she knew. She traced the movement to a group of volunteers from the Crossroads church, all of whom had participated in a racial justice program called Undivided. Not only had the participants talked about race, they were impelled to put what they had learned into action.
This book, based on seven years of reporting, is a history of how Undivided came to be, the people whose lives it impacted, and its legacy. We learn about the transformative power of communicating and befriending people across the color line, and about the limits of any organization–or church–to change.
It began when an African American pastor knew it was time to stop avoiding the hard conversations, and in a Sunday morning sermon shared his anger and frustration. He was supported to create a small group experience that brought together black and white members of the parish. The book takes us into the lives of some of these people, showing how they were transformed because of Undivided.
She originally thought the goal of the six-week program was to inspire people’s journey toward antiracism. But Jess realized that the true impact of Undivided was not as a prejudice reduction program, but rather as a learning experience that lit the tinder. from Undivided by Hahrie Han
The success stories are inspiring. But the book also shows how hard it is for any institution to change. The lack of their church’s action to take a stance against police violence against black men and to support the Black Lives Matter movement angered some of the Undivided members. The church leaders were trying to keep to the middle ground so as to not alienate anyone.
The program, Han writes, didn’t work by converting committed white supremacists, but by equipping “the other evangelicals” to understand “the interpersonal and systemic dimensions of racial injustice and offered them tools to have difficult conversations around race.”
I was interested to learn that other Evangelical church adopted the Undivided program, including one a few miles away from where I live.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
The seminary professors and dean of the school had been active in the Civil Rights movement. We were Social Gospel progressives by education and inclination. My husband served in the Philadelphia area and in Michigan, with churches in the inner city, a large city, the suburbs of a large city, and in rural churches in small towns and resort towns. All but one church was exclusively white and leaned conservative.
The last church split over the church’s social creed on abortion, which read that it was a regrettable but sometimes necessary choice to save the life of the mother. They were anti LGBTQ. This was an area where the KKK was still present and that voted for Trump in 2016. The element that left the church had been vicious and divisive, more intent on harm than transformation.
When Undivided was offered to me by the publisher I thought I would check it out but was uncertain about it. I found it fascinating, inspiring, and frustrating.
The book’s start was in an academic project by Hahrie Han, who was studying grassroots organizing campaigns. She was struck by the idea of a Protestant evangelical megachurch, predominately white in “numbers and culture,” had become involved with promoting a policy that added the Black community. Issue 44 addressed racial disparities and universal preschool in Cincinnati. “Thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported Issue 44,” she knew. She traced the movement to a group of volunteers from the Crossroads church, all of whom had participated in a racial justice program called Undivided. Not only had the participants talked about race, they were impelled to put what they had learned into action.
This book, based on seven years of reporting, is a history of how Undivided came to be, the people whose lives it impacted, and its legacy. We learn about the transformative power of communicating and befriending people across the color line, and about the limits of any organization–or church–to change.
It began when an African American pastor knew it was time to stop avoiding the hard conversations, and in a Sunday morning sermon shared his anger and frustration. He was supported to create a small group experience that brought together black and white members of the parish. The book takes us into the lives of some of these people, showing how they were transformed because of Undivided.
She originally thought the goal of the six-week program was to inspire people’s journey toward antiracism. But Jess realized that the true impact of Undivided was not as a prejudice reduction program, but rather as a learning experience that lit the tinder. from Undivided by Hahrie Han
The success stories are inspiring. But the book also shows how hard it is for any institution to change. The lack of their church’s action to take a stance against police violence against black men and to support the Black Lives Matter movement angered some of the Undivided members. The church leaders were trying to keep to the middle ground so as to not alienate anyone.
The program, Han writes, didn’t work by converting committed white supremacists, but by equipping “the other evangelicals” to understand “the interpersonal and systemic dimensions of racial injustice and offered them tools to have difficult conversations around race.”
I was interested to learn that other Evangelical church adopted the Undivided program, including one a few miles away from where I live.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
September 29, 2025
Gonna copy paste this from another review written by another reader named Beth. Pretty much sums up my exact thought as well.
“Instead, the book tells the stories of several parishioners who participated in the Undivided program, which somewhat contradicts the argument that antiracism is about changing racist systems rather than changing the hearts and minds of individuals. To be sure, we follow the ways that the book's characters learned about systemic problems and in some cases learned how to pass along that recognition to others, including racists in their lives.
But the one man who worked in Ohio's state prison system and attempted to alter the system ended up resigning in frustration. At least he learned enough to try, but.... I'll also grant that the book is an effective read largely because it does a good job of making me care about the individuals profiled.
So, if, as far as I could tell, the fostering of systemic change had EXTREMELY limited success, why did I find the book a worthwhile read? Well, first off, I did see that the Undivided program helped many individuals become less racist or, in the case of the Black participants, get in better touch with their racial identities. More to the point, from my own completely practical perspective (what's in this book for ME, someone who is emphatically NOT an evangelical Christian?), the book analyzed why the program was effective at fostering relationships among diverse people and encouraging (some of) them to participate in social justice activities. Basically, the program, through various exercises described in the book, fostered trust and community among participants.
And that's an approach that organizers of all kinds-like me-can adopt. It dovetails nicely with what I just read in another book, that the most effective ways to get out the vote are through personal interactions with trusted associates.”
“Instead, the book tells the stories of several parishioners who participated in the Undivided program, which somewhat contradicts the argument that antiracism is about changing racist systems rather than changing the hearts and minds of individuals. To be sure, we follow the ways that the book's characters learned about systemic problems and in some cases learned how to pass along that recognition to others, including racists in their lives.
But the one man who worked in Ohio's state prison system and attempted to alter the system ended up resigning in frustration. At least he learned enough to try, but.... I'll also grant that the book is an effective read largely because it does a good job of making me care about the individuals profiled.
So, if, as far as I could tell, the fostering of systemic change had EXTREMELY limited success, why did I find the book a worthwhile read? Well, first off, I did see that the Undivided program helped many individuals become less racist or, in the case of the Black participants, get in better touch with their racial identities. More to the point, from my own completely practical perspective (what's in this book for ME, someone who is emphatically NOT an evangelical Christian?), the book analyzed why the program was effective at fostering relationships among diverse people and encouraging (some of) them to participate in social justice activities. Basically, the program, through various exercises described in the book, fostered trust and community among participants.
And that's an approach that organizers of all kinds-like me-can adopt. It dovetails nicely with what I just read in another book, that the most effective ways to get out the vote are through personal interactions with trusted associates.”
February 7, 2025
Undivided was a program launched at a mega church in Cincinnati, OH to fight bias and promote racial justice. It follows several participants through their personal lives, during the program, and after to see how the information affected them. The congregation was primarily white, but gathered a diverse group of attendees to provide a deeper context into race in America.
One participant grew up with a white supremacist father. A Black woman denied her Black identity to fit in with her primary white community. One man was raised with an adopted Black brother and thought that meant he was run expert on race. A Black man rises to pastoral leadership in the church and feels pressure and criticism from all sides when he speaks up or expresses anger.
Each account is vulnerable and relatable. Each of them wrestles with how best to advocate, knowing what they know.
The author is a secular political scientist, adding another layer to the complex mix of this work.
As a former Evangelical I have experienced many of the tensions described; the personal reckoning with being white, my bias, the role of the church in social advocacy, the separation of church and state, the racist history of America and the church, passionate monologues that cause tension in relationships, the discomfort with veering from the status quo, the floundering and not knowing how best to act on new information.
This book should be read by anyone within the Evangelical church!!! It should be ready by white people from any stage of racial reckoning. These questions need to be pondered and asked, especially at this time in history. Five stars!
One participant grew up with a white supremacist father. A Black woman denied her Black identity to fit in with her primary white community. One man was raised with an adopted Black brother and thought that meant he was run expert on race. A Black man rises to pastoral leadership in the church and feels pressure and criticism from all sides when he speaks up or expresses anger.
Each account is vulnerable and relatable. Each of them wrestles with how best to advocate, knowing what they know.
The author is a secular political scientist, adding another layer to the complex mix of this work.
As a former Evangelical I have experienced many of the tensions described; the personal reckoning with being white, my bias, the role of the church in social advocacy, the separation of church and state, the racist history of America and the church, passionate monologues that cause tension in relationships, the discomfort with veering from the status quo, the floundering and not knowing how best to act on new information.
This book should be read by anyone within the Evangelical church!!! It should be ready by white people from any stage of racial reckoning. These questions need to be pondered and asked, especially at this time in history. Five stars!
October 2, 2024
A refreshing reminder in the current political landscape that ordinary people choose to show up every day, committed to the work of community and justice for all. Deeply impacted by racial divides in their city, members of Crossroads megachurch developed a program designed to dispel racial differences and unite people across divides. Over 7,000 people participated in the experience, and this book follows 4 of them.
As an ex-Crossroads member and early Undivided adopter, I was nervous that it would be impossible to capture the conflicting narratives that existed while living through the experiences chronicled in the book. On one hand, there's the deep personal faith of thousands of individual members who were driven by a theological belief that systemic oppression is counterintuitive to the Christian faith. On the other hand, there's the system that the program was designed inside of that was struggling to maintain the status quo on every level.
Hahrie Han masterfully narrates these complexities by highlighting the everyday realities of what it means for individuals to get involved in the work of changing systems. This book understands that the work done by Undivided serves as an alternative microcosm of current white Christian America, one where evangelicals champion the cause of an inclusive future free from oppression. I hope other readers do as well.
**This is my personal review, written without knowledge of the author**
As an ex-Crossroads member and early Undivided adopter, I was nervous that it would be impossible to capture the conflicting narratives that existed while living through the experiences chronicled in the book. On one hand, there's the deep personal faith of thousands of individual members who were driven by a theological belief that systemic oppression is counterintuitive to the Christian faith. On the other hand, there's the system that the program was designed inside of that was struggling to maintain the status quo on every level.
Hahrie Han masterfully narrates these complexities by highlighting the everyday realities of what it means for individuals to get involved in the work of changing systems. This book understands that the work done by Undivided serves as an alternative microcosm of current white Christian America, one where evangelicals champion the cause of an inclusive future free from oppression. I hope other readers do as well.
**This is my personal review, written without knowledge of the author**
February 10, 2025
It took me a while to get bought into the various storylines but this was ultimately a solid read. Although I can't see myself in a community like Crossroads, I love that it was their faith that activated their concrete efforts and that their trust in each other gave them courage to persist at dismantling racism in spite of the many barriers, truly a "revolution by trial and error".
A few (of many) things that I'm noodling over:
-courage at the interpersonal level as foundation for larger-scale change
-how they built a curriculum that minimized the burden of nonwhite folks to explain racism to white folks
-Han's framing of what radical means- "Most use the word radical to refer to change that is extreme...But the word radical actually comes from the idea of being rooted. Change is radical not when it is extreme, but when it makes change from the roots up. And what I learned from the people I met through Undivided was that making change not only had to alter the roots of an unjust system, but it also had to be rooted in real people. Systems as complex as racism in America do not change when disconnected people without any roots in a community yell a little louder or reshuffle a few priorities. Instead, it changes when people rooted in their own interests and connected to one another organize themselves into just structures that enable them to put their hands on the complex levers of change."
A few (of many) things that I'm noodling over:
-courage at the interpersonal level as foundation for larger-scale change
-how they built a curriculum that minimized the burden of nonwhite folks to explain racism to white folks
-Han's framing of what radical means- "Most use the word radical to refer to change that is extreme...But the word radical actually comes from the idea of being rooted. Change is radical not when it is extreme, but when it makes change from the roots up. And what I learned from the people I met through Undivided was that making change not only had to alter the roots of an unjust system, but it also had to be rooted in real people. Systems as complex as racism in America do not change when disconnected people without any roots in a community yell a little louder or reshuffle a few priorities. Instead, it changes when people rooted in their own interests and connected to one another organize themselves into just structures that enable them to put their hands on the complex levers of change."
June 4, 2025
unlike some of Han's other books, Undivided is a less academic and much more narrative-driven work that serves as a much-needed reminder about the importance of grace, personal relationships and perseverance. Han infuses ethnographic and historical details to develop a compelling view of the ways that persistent *and intentional, action-oriented* anti-racism work holds profound impacts for both the individual and their surroundings. She rightfully levies criticism on hollow, often corporate, DEI initiatives and anti-racism grifts that leave no lasting marks while demonstrating how proper engagement about race in America can have positive affects for all people regardless of race.
In addition to insightful micro/macro perspectives, Han also leaves space to examine how internal, individual change can impact your relationship to institutions of power and the tensions that misalignment or downright rejection can create. In doing so, and in writing a well-detailed accounting of interviewees' lives, she provides a vision of a path forward for those interested in doing the work. Work that is persistently and sorely needed. Work that serves as a stark reminder of the importance of relational organizing and personal relationships.
Definitely worth the read~
In addition to insightful micro/macro perspectives, Han also leaves space to examine how internal, individual change can impact your relationship to institutions of power and the tensions that misalignment or downright rejection can create. In doing so, and in writing a well-detailed accounting of interviewees' lives, she provides a vision of a path forward for those interested in doing the work. Work that is persistently and sorely needed. Work that serves as a stark reminder of the importance of relational organizing and personal relationships.
Definitely worth the read~
July 4, 2025
Hahrie Han’s "Undivided" is an honest, insightful examination of social change in evangelical America. It provides some insights into organizing for change, given the current divided social and political climate we face. The book refuses tidy narratives. Instead, it acknowledges imperfections and the unevenness of participants’ experiences. Han leverages her academic skills to provide somewhat objective assessments and commentary. What emerges is a story rooted not in easy solutions but in risk and uncertainty—where transformation is neither linear nor guaranteed, and the work remains necessarily unfinished. Han observes that many contemporary efforts toward justice often begin with outrage but quickly dissipate, yet Undivided distinguishes itself by targeting the underlying structures of injustice, not just surface-level change. The narrative recognizes the fragility of this work, likening it to a grain of sand that might become a pearl. Through complexity and vulnerability, Han captures both the promise and the ongoing challenge of forging authentic solidarity across profound social divides.
August 18, 2025
This was a decent book though nothing very memorable.
I guess I mostly read to put myself in other people's shoes and try to understand how they think. (That sounds more high minded than it is, it's partly to be better to other people and partly to satisfy my own curiosity.) I'm not religious and I admit I have a hard time understanding what it would be like to believe in god as an adult.
But I was still interested to see how people who ARE Christians tackle an issue that's ordinarily associated with left wing politics. In my past as a child in Georgia, evangelicalism was common among both black and white people, but the churches were pretty strictly (though never officially) segregated. And the white faction skewed very heavily toward Republican politics and anti black attitudes. (I wonder if the pastors from my childhood church talk about politics from the pulpit now?)
This book was a good example of the transformative power that belief in God has on some people's lives. The writing was well organized. There was nothing groundbreaking in this book, but the members of Undivided are an interesting and good group of people, so I enjoyed hearing their stories.
3 / 5 stars.
I guess I mostly read to put myself in other people's shoes and try to understand how they think. (That sounds more high minded than it is, it's partly to be better to other people and partly to satisfy my own curiosity.) I'm not religious and I admit I have a hard time understanding what it would be like to believe in god as an adult.
But I was still interested to see how people who ARE Christians tackle an issue that's ordinarily associated with left wing politics. In my past as a child in Georgia, evangelicalism was common among both black and white people, but the churches were pretty strictly (though never officially) segregated. And the white faction skewed very heavily toward Republican politics and anti black attitudes. (I wonder if the pastors from my childhood church talk about politics from the pulpit now?)
This book was a good example of the transformative power that belief in God has on some people's lives. The writing was well organized. There was nothing groundbreaking in this book, but the members of Undivided are an interesting and good group of people, so I enjoyed hearing their stories.
3 / 5 stars.
December 27, 2024
A must read!
Hahrie has taken me on a journey of enlightenment, challenge, fear, frustration, and hope. She has awakened in me the reality of racism that continues to exist in America and the dire need to eradicate the actions that continue to deny justice and the freedom to live without fear to people of color. The impact of Undivided on the four people, whose journey Hahrie follows, is a significant one taking place in the every day lives of real people when faced with decisions to live just lives and to be agents for social justice. This book is the deeply personal story about people; it is an academic study of racism in institutions that should aim higher and how one church organized in order to do so. It is a “can’t put down” book that has ignited a spark in me to be better and do better — to continue to strive for justice knowing that I have been given the grace to do so.
Hahrie has taken me on a journey of enlightenment, challenge, fear, frustration, and hope. She has awakened in me the reality of racism that continues to exist in America and the dire need to eradicate the actions that continue to deny justice and the freedom to live without fear to people of color. The impact of Undivided on the four people, whose journey Hahrie follows, is a significant one taking place in the every day lives of real people when faced with decisions to live just lives and to be agents for social justice. This book is the deeply personal story about people; it is an academic study of racism in institutions that should aim higher and how one church organized in order to do so. It is a “can’t put down” book that has ignited a spark in me to be better and do better — to continue to strive for justice knowing that I have been given the grace to do so.
March 31, 2025
The book examines the development and launch of a racial recognition program by a megachurch in Cincinnati. I'm not interested in megachurches or programs. From that standpoint I'd give the book a 2 or 3-star review. However the book also covered how the program's founder (Black) and five or the original participants (Black and White) dealt with each other and what they discovered about themselves. These portions get a 5.
This material is tough. None of us are color blind and, citing a 2020 PRRI study included in the book, Christians present more racist opinions and practices than nonChristians. As Whites, we are blind to the racism experienced by others and we are generally ignorant of how even our best intentions are received. From that standpoint the book left me frustrated and a bit hopeless. I interact with so few Blacks, that I wonder how I can ever grow in this area.
Why does the author capitalize Blacks and leave whites in lowercase?
This material is tough. None of us are color blind and, citing a 2020 PRRI study included in the book, Christians present more racist opinions and practices than nonChristians. As Whites, we are blind to the racism experienced by others and we are generally ignorant of how even our best intentions are received. From that standpoint the book left me frustrated and a bit hopeless. I interact with so few Blacks, that I wonder how I can ever grow in this area.
Why does the author capitalize Blacks and leave whites in lowercase?
October 7, 2024
recent years have seen many books published about the intersection of evangelicalism and white nationalism. "Undivided" offers a counterpoint of hope, highlighting one community that harnessed their faith and vision for a brighter future to foster real change.
I really enjoyed this—it was approachable and a quick read, but it will stick with me for a long time. I was torn between wanting it to widen its scope (as I often demand of my favorite nonfictions) and appreciating how it highlighted how small-scale efforts and people can make an impact. I also would've loved for the author to have inserted herself a little more... Hahrie Han reflects on the books journey a little bit at the beginning and end, but I'm always fascinated how authors are changed/how they experience the communities they explore.
I really enjoyed this—it was approachable and a quick read, but it will stick with me for a long time. I was torn between wanting it to widen its scope (as I often demand of my favorite nonfictions) and appreciating how it highlighted how small-scale efforts and people can make an impact. I also would've loved for the author to have inserted herself a little more... Hahrie Han reflects on the books journey a little bit at the beginning and end, but I'm always fascinated how authors are changed/how they experience the communities they explore.
December 10, 2024
Having read some about the development of the evangelical religion/church, I was fascinated to learn about some of the struggles within that community. That it involves a church that’s within two miles of my house—and having witnessed its development over the years—made it all the more interesting.
I listened to the book, and while the narrator was quite good, some of the material was rather dry. I must say that had my own experience with church been as challenging, I might have been more inclined to remain “a believer “. I only learned of the pastor of my church being involved in keeping the community segregated after I’d been gone from the church for some years.
The book is a look at the attempts of one church to wrestle with the problem of prejudice in their own community. It isn’t a fully successful effort.
I listened to the book, and while the narrator was quite good, some of the material was rather dry. I must say that had my own experience with church been as challenging, I might have been more inclined to remain “a believer “. I only learned of the pastor of my church being involved in keeping the community segregated after I’d been gone from the church for some years.
The book is a look at the attempts of one church to wrestle with the problem of prejudice in their own community. It isn’t a fully successful effort.
December 23, 2024
This is an utterly stunning and truly remarkable book. The writing is immaculate and the content is both moving and urgent.
I started this book expecting an impressive story about the power of organising done properly. The book absolutely provides that, but it’s perhaps the least important thing that I’m taking away. I reflected on myself, my values, my communities and the world I live in. I realised just how disappointed and let down I have felt by some people I love (or simply people and institutions that form important parts of my life) since 2020 (and probably before then too) but Sandra and Chuck’s stories in particular moved me to unpack some very complex emotions, and thoughts of how to move forward.
There’s so much more to say but I rarely have the words immediately after finishing a book.
Best book I’ve read this year.
A must read!
I started this book expecting an impressive story about the power of organising done properly. The book absolutely provides that, but it’s perhaps the least important thing that I’m taking away. I reflected on myself, my values, my communities and the world I live in. I realised just how disappointed and let down I have felt by some people I love (or simply people and institutions that form important parts of my life) since 2020 (and probably before then too) but Sandra and Chuck’s stories in particular moved me to unpack some very complex emotions, and thoughts of how to move forward.
There’s so much more to say but I rarely have the words immediately after finishing a book.
Best book I’ve read this year.
A must read!
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