Seeking racial solidarity at a Cincinnati megachurch

Every week, my former boss used to ask: What were your rose, bud, and thorn with your clients this week? Over a voice messaging app, my teammates and I would identify the positives (roses), name any potential areas of growth (buds), and lament the challenges (thorns) of the previous seven days. Although the exercise quickly grew stale, it was useful in the way it begged me to take a 30,000-foot view of various situations and reflect on circumstances both inside and outside my control, things that I could and could not change.

I thought of this exercise when reading Hahrie Han’s Undivided. Chronicled through the perspectives of four participants—a Black woman, a White woman, a Black man, and a White man—in a racial justice program called Undivided at an evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati, the book is equal parts political commentary and narrative nonfiction, sacred literature and cultural analysis. Along the way, Han, who is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, daringly tells a story of the positives, the potential areas of growth, and the challenges faced along the way when one church dares ask if racial solidarity might be possible in our country today.

When a “supermajority of Black and white residents passed a ballot initiative to raise their own taxes to fund universal preschool education with targeted resources for poor—mostly Black—communities” in 2016, Han was surprised to hear Cincinnatians repeatedly name one local church as the reason the initiative passed by the largest margin of any new education levy in the city’s history. Systemic change began to knead its way into the educational sector due largely to a program from Crossroads Church, a multi-site megachurch boasting more than 35,000 attendees each weekend, even as the racial justice program “emerged and flourished in a church community often characterized by its infamous commitment to whiteness.”