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Undivided
The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 24, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593948477
- File size: 235966 KB
- Duration: 08:11:35
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 29, 2024
In this perceptive account, political scientist Han (Prisms of the People) traces the evolution of a racial justice organization founded in 2016 at a Cincinnati megachurch. Sparked by the “outpouring of support” for pastor Chuck Mingo’s sermons on racial injustice, the Undivided program developed as a six-week curriculum that examined “personal prejudice” as well as systemic racism, with participants split into small, mixed-race discussion groups. Han follows three of those participants through and after the program: Jess, a white recovering heroin addict, who began working at a prison ministry and spreading antiracist messages to friends and family; Grant, a white, conservative man with a Black brother, who grappled with the disparate parts of his identity; and Sandra, a Black woman who got divorced from her white husband after he began to chafe against her participation in Undivided and eventually found his way to white nationalist communities online. In the process, the author movingly links the expected finding—that meaningful social change begins in communities in which people are rooted and interconnected—with a Christian concept of grace that, for Undivided’s participants, “manifested itself as the courage to fight for one another’s dignity.” Rigorously researched and richly nuanced, this deserves wide readership.
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