Chapter Four
The First Week
Sitting in the audience, Sandra felt her heartbeat quicken with anxiety for Chuck as he welcomed everyone to Undivided. The sessions each week would follow the same rhythm: there would be an opening prayer to establish the biblical foundations of their work, a reminder of the ground rules, a teaching from the main stage, an activity in the small groups to put the teaching into practice, homework for the coming week focused on putting people into relationship or action, and a closing prayer. There would be no collection plate or plea for donations. Instead, the planning team was asking people to bring their hearts to the work. That week, Chuck called on Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5:18): “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” Each week, Chuck would carefully choose a prayer that demonstrated the consistency of antiracism with Jesus’s teachings in the Bible. Lest anyone in the room doubt whether Crossroads should be tackling “political” issues like race, Chuck argued that antiracism was fundamental to their calling as Christians.
After Chuck’s prayer, an older white woman named Kathy Beechem took the stage. Because this was the first session of the program, Kathy wanted to provide an overview of the coming weeks and establish the norms they would use to work together. Kathy, a member of the Undivided planning team, had formerly been an executive vice president at U.S. Bank (where she oversaw all the bank’s local branches), and was on the executive leadership team at Crossroads. She had been named one of the Twenty-Five Most Powerful Women in Banking by U.S. Banker magazine in 2004. After she was widowed, she joined the Crossroads staff as director of all local campuses, becoming Chuck’s boss when he was the pastor of Oakley.
As in many megachurches, the ultimate governing body of Crossroads was a Spiritual Board. It decided what kinds of stances the church would take on key issues, including defining what Crossroads calls the “seven hills we die on,” the church’s statement of the values that defined its identity. To set the cultural context for the church, church leaders frequently talked about the seven hills to integrate them as seamlessly as possible into people’s experience of Crossroads. In that first session of Undivided, Kathy outlined a set of ground rules that echoed the seven hills:
Expect to be offended.
Give grace.
Take risks.
Listen for God.
Get honest (use “I” statements).
None of these phrases surprised Sandra, or others in the room. They were all common to the Crossroads vernacular. “Listen for God” reinforced one of the board’s defining seven hills, “biblical truth,” which was the heart of Crossroads’ identity. The church welcomed both believers and nonbelievers into their community but were unequivocal about their commitment to the authority of the Bible. “Expect to be offended” was how church leaders reinforced the hill they defined as “authenticity.” They wanted the church to be a place where everyone could “just be real,” “get honest,” and bring their full selves, warts and all, to the community. That meant that sometimes congregants or church leaders would say things that could offend people. “Take risks” echoed the hill of “excellence.” Crossroads always stressed the importance of bringing their “A-game” to everything they did, even if it risked failure. “Give grace” stressed the board’s emphasis on relationships. They wanted to build a community where people would “do life together,” and open themselves to one another so that everyone could “know and be known.” The work would be hard, Kathy assured everyone, but necessary. She encouraged participants to lean into the inevitable discomfort they would experience.
Kathy walked through the weekly themes of the five-week curriculum (the planning team would later add a sixth week): Redeem (an introduction to the program, each other, and the history of race in Cincinnati), Relationship (an opportunity to focus on stepping out of silos and echo chambers through storytelling), Reality (an emphasis on the intersections of racialized systems and structures that disparately shape opportunity in America), Repentance (a focus on personal transformation to move forward), and Reconciliation (an emphasis on reengagement in a different way).
Then Kathy introduced Troy Jackson, the pastor turned community organizer who had joined the planning team. Troy, who had a PhD in history, traced the development of “two Cincinnatis,” one for white people and one for Black people. He described the city’s legacy as a border town, with enslaved people trying to cross the Ohio River to gain their freedom, and the painful experiences of Black mothers and fathers seeking to protect their children from a world of violent persecution. He explained how laws instituted after the Civil War ensured that even though Black people were not enslaved, they remained systematically oppressed. He sketched the city’s history through the Jim Crow era into the contemporary period, demonstrating the deep roots of the racial disparities that were still so evident in the city. He named Black neighborhoods in Cincinnati that everyone knew—the West End, Walnut Hills, Avondale—and narrated the forces that had impoverished these communities at different points in the city’s history.
Sandra was riveted. Having grown up in California, she knew little of Cincinnati’s past. When she first arrived in the city as a nineteen-year-old, the stark segregation of Black and white communities in Ohio (and the lack of much other racial diversity) had been a shock. Cincinnati was the first place someone referred to her using the N-word. The Undivided lesson resonated with her experiences in the city, and with the stories her parents shared about how white people tried to keep Black people down.
Sandra’s parents had always taught her that institutional racism in America was a given. Disdainful of the idea that solutions to racial injustice existed, they saw no need to choose their church, their neighborhood, or their politics based on prospects for racial justice. “The Democrats and the Republicans both treat Black people badly,” her dad said. Republicans, Sandra’s dad thought, were at least anti-abortion and pro-marriage. So Sandra grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh with her dad as part of a small but devoted group of Black Republicans.
Even though Sandra’s parents educated her about patterns of structural oppression, she was unaccustomed to hearing someone at Crossroads discussing them. Whenever Crossroads leaders had previously talked about racism, they focused on the prejudice in people’s hearts, rather than the way race structured opportunities in American life. This first Undivided lesson seemed to mark a change in that regard. The planning team had deliberately chosen to start with history because they wanted to signal early on that their goal was to move people beyond just a simple recognition of their personal prejudices.
Man, Sandra thought. This thing might be different.
When Grant was eleven, his parents received a call from an adoption agency telling them to expect Hunt, a seven-week-old Black baby boy the next Monday. His parents had been trying to adopt for many years. They were overjoyed.
In Waynesville, however, Grant, Hunt, and their parents had very limited exposure in their everyday lives to people who were not white. Although Grant befriended his one Black classmate, almost 97 percent of the rest of the population was white. In most rooms Hunt entered as a child, he was the only nonwhite person.
Grant’s family was determined that the color of Hunt’s skin would not matter. “We can’t treat Hunt differently because he’s Black,” was like a family mantra. They educated themselves about transracial adoption, reading books on the subject, and talking to experts and other parents in similar circumstances. They worked hard to expose the boys to different kinds of communities, road-tripping around the country every summer. By the time Grant went to college, he had been to forty-four different states. When family members from Kentucky made racist comments around Hunt, Grant’s parents would confront them. Their relatives would defensively protest, “But Hunt is different because he’s family.” Even though people around Grant’s family loved Hunt, they did not love other Black people.
Grant’s parents nonetheless constructed a loving home for Hunt, full of sports on Saturday afternoons, Methodist church on Sundays, school, music lessons, homework, and sports practices during the week. A talented athlete, Hunt became an avid baseball player, traveling around the state and region with his team. Hunt was known in his small town, unlike other Black people, who were strangers to them.
Both Grant and Hunt attested to the incredibly close relationship they had as children. Grant thought his experience with a Black sibling equipped him to guide conversations about race. That was one reason why he signed up for Undivided as a facilitator—though he kept that to himself.
Another reason had to do with his politics. He had been devoted to the Republican Party for most of his life. When he attended a Baptist college in Kentucky, he became an active leader in the College Republicans, serving as both president of his campus chapter and treasurer of the statewide federation. He even interned with Fox News one summer. He didn’t remember ever choosing to become Republican. He had always assumed that Christians had to be Republican, even though, in the twenty-first century, some scholars argued that it was not that people’s churches shaped their political beliefs, but that people selected their churches to match their political beliefs.
Grant was so dedicated to the Republican Party that he had once considered tattooing the Republican mascot onto his body, but a friend convinced him not to do it. “You don’t know what the party could be in twenty years,” his friend had said. At the time, Grant couldn’t imagine ever questioning his allegiance to the Republican Party. But Grant listened to his friend. In an unwitting tribute to the intertwined relationship between conservative Christianity and the Republican Party, he decided to memorialize his relationship to God instead. He asked the tattooist to write “In God We Trust” in fancy script across the back of his neck.
The relationship of Christianity and Republicanism evolved from the efforts of Christian leaders seeking to expand their influence in American society in the twentieth century. When evangelicals first came together to form the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in the mid-twentieth century, they represented only two million of the sixty to seventy million Christians in the United States. They initially worried about their ability to grow—until the vast popularity of Billy Graham put those concerns to rest. Graham provided the celebrity appeal evangelicalism needed in the immediate post–World War II era. He could even unite some of the disparate intellectual strains of conservative theologians through his energetic preaching and his relentless focus on personal salvation as the core of evangelicalism. With the Cold War as a backdrop, Graham articulated a white Christian American alternative to the threat of godless communists from abroad. White evangelicals reveled in Graham’s popularity, and their growing success because of it.
The 1960s and the 1970s threw cold water on their bravado. Witnessing the success of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the antiwar movements, conservative evangelicals realized the magnitude of the forces they were up against in an increasingly secular, progressive society. Nothing breeds orthodoxy like threat. Some Christians concluded they needed greater societal power to realize their vision of evangelicalism.
By the 1980s, the Christian Right had emerged as an interlocking set of organizations, leaders, and pastors designed to uphold conservative tenets of Christianity and, implicitly, the cultural legacy of white Christianity. With the winds of white supremacy and patriarchy at their backs, these leaders built broad public followings and developed powerful media empires. Many luminaries of the movement became household names during this time—Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson and The 700 Club, James Dobson and Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts. Viewership of Christian media quintupled from the 1960s to the 1980s. The Christian Right seized issues like reproductive rights and sex education in schools to build their base, stoking people’s fears of an encroaching anti-white, feminist, peace-loving multiculturalism that seemed on the rise after the 1960s.
The televangelists’ millions of devotees became a political weapon they could use to exert power in the public sphere. As elected officials and other politicians witnessed the rapid growth of this movement, they began to court the evangelical leaders who helped anchor the Christian Right. These leaders welcomed the attention from both political parties. As Pat Robertson argued, “God isn’t a right-winger or a left-winger.” Evangelicals were disappointed by the first evangelical president, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, actively courted their support in his campaign against Carter in 1980. Robertson adopted the Republican Party by the time he decided to run for president in 1988, trying to use his large media platform to gin up Christian votes.
Grant was a by-product of this history, growing up in environments—a devout Methodist family and a Baptist college—where it was simply assumed that he would become Republican because he was Christian. But he was starting to question his lifelong loyalty as he witnessed Donald Trump’s rise within the party he loved. At first, Grant laughed off a lot of Trump’s comments. But when evangelical leaders remained unwavering in their support for Trump even after he simultaneously announced his candidacy for president and his belief that Mexicans were “rapists,” Grant became unsure.
Grant sat opposite Sandra during Troy’s history lesson. When Troy finished, Chuck directed all the members of the small groups to introduce themselves to one another by describing their first experiences with race and reflecting on the feelings evoked by the history they just learned. The planning team’s choice to have people focus on their emotions was intentional, hoping it would move people to a place of greater vulnerability by focusing on their feelings.
The Undivided planning team had hotly debated the construction of the small groups. An advisor they brought in from Procter & Gamble argued that the racial balance didn’t matter. Many DEI programs operated on the premise that change depended on teaching people the error of their ways. These programs often treated DEI as an informational problem, as if pouring facts about bias and discrimination into people’s heads would remove their blinders and change behavior. In this formulation, the structure of the small groups didn’t matter as much as the information the instructor would relay.
Chuck and the planning team instinctively knew those underlying assumptions were wrong. In their minds, Undivided would fail if it only imparted information. Participants, Black and white, needed experiences of vulnerability and solidarity across race, however tentative. The racial composition of the small groups mattered because they would be ground zero for making or breaking such experiences. The small groups were the place where participants would create meaning out of what they were learning and formulate choices about if and how they wanted to continue. They would be the place where people would (they hoped) take their first hesitant steps toward antiracism, carefully observing the reactions of those around them. The planning team wanted to ensure everyone would be part of racially balanced groups that enabled engagement across race.
Sandra and Grant’s small group started with some nervous chuckling, because the group had four people who had originally signed up to be facilitators. They traded a few jokes about who was really in charge. Grant shared first, describing his relationship with Hunt. As he spoke, he became uncharacteristically nervous, debating with himself about how honest he should be. A natural extrovert, he had never before been apprehensive speaking about his relationship with his brother—but he realized he had never had this kind of conversation with Black people, let alone Black people he didn’t know. For Grant, hesitation was an unfamiliar form of vulnerability. He considered telling a story about his hometown, where a customer used the N-word to refer to Hunt in a restaurant where Hunt was a waiter. Grant paused, worried the story exposed his community in ways that made him uncomfortable.
Grant looked at Sandra, whom he had just met, and the other Black woman in the group. What if they judge me? he thought. Grant was not accustomed to worrying about being judged, so he hedged. He shared a different story about Hunt. His parents had come to visit him in college, and they drove to Corbin, Kentucky, to see a movie. Corbin was a small town of about seven thousand people in southeastern Kentucky that was 98 percent white. Grant was standing in the lobby of the theater with Hunt, who was six or seven years old at the time. A young white girl approached Hunt to talk with him, only to have her parents guide her away saying, “We don’t talk to people like that.” Grant did nothing.
He stopped talking and looked around. He ran his thumbs over the jagged edges of his fingernails as he waited for people to respond. He could tell he had been lacerating them with anxiety while he talked.
Sandra thought about all the times she had bowed to social pressure and ignored racist comments people made around her. She could understand why Grant might not have done anything in that moment. She nodded her head gently. Grant couldn’t bring himself to look directly at her, but he noticed her nodding.