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.

HAHRIE HAN is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, as well as the inaugural director of SNF Agora, an institute dedicated to strengthening global democracy. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic and is the author of four scholarly books. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she lives in Baltimore.