Introduction
Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen
According to the U.S. Census, Cincinnati had gone from being 88 percent white and 12 percent Black in 1940 to 50 percent white and 40 percent Black in 2022. During that period, the scythe of deindustrialization sliced across the economic fortunes of both Black and white communities in Cincinnati. As often happens, scarcity fueled racial resentment. Many white Cincinnatians who struggled to attain the picket fences and matching living room sets they coveted blamed Black communities. Yet in 2016, 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. The initiative passed by the largest margin of any new education levy in Cincinnati history.
People kept telling me about one church that had sent a steady stream of volunteers to support the initiative. Two young women, one white and one Black, had organized large, racially diverse groups of volunteers to phonebank for the ballot initiative. The campaign manager, a hardened operative who had been part of many bitter political fights throughout the Midwest, said their ardent volunteerism was “unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The volunteers came from a Protestant evangelical megachurch called Crossroads—technically a multiracial church, but unequivocally white dominant in both numbers and culture. I had assumed the volunteers were left-leaning Unitarians willing to raise taxes on themselves to provide for the neediest children in the city, not notoriously conservative white evangelicals. Throughout the 2016 election, white evangelicals had been one of Trump’s staunchest voting blocs, staying loyal to him even after he bragged on tape about grabbing women by the pussy. I wondered how these evangelicals became so animated in their support for a policy designed to benefit the Black community.
My parents moved us to Houston, Texas, where my dad found a job. We lived in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in southwest Houston alongside immigrants from all over the world. Violent fights between competing ethnic cliques dominated the social landscape in the local public schools. Our next-door neighbor’s son and his friends once robbed our home. In a reflexive effort to shield my brother and me from this milieu, my parents sent us to a parochial school that happened to be largely white. They gamely learned to make small talk with white parents at school events to help our family fit in as much as possible. “Korean people don’t chit-chat like that,” they would chuckle.
Despite, or perhaps because of, everything he witnessed across these fractured worlds, my father maintained hope—which got me thinking about Issue 44, the Cincinnati ballot initiative. The leaders of the preschool campaign had been so optimistic before the election. After we boarded the plane, I looked up Hamilton County, Ohio, on my phone to find the election results. Even though Trump won the state by eight percentage points, Clinton beat Trump by ten percentage points in Hamilton County—a Democratic enclave within Ohio, where Cincinnati is the county seat. Yet the same voters approved Issue 44 by twenty-four percentage points! Thousands of voters who supported Trump must have also supported Issue 44. I wanted to learn more.
I discovered that the Crossroads volunteers had all been part of Undivided, a six-week program on racial justice their megachurch had developed and piloted in early 2016. Hundreds of these volunteers claimed that Undivided had propelled them to commit to Issue 44 with unusual ardor. Yet when people described Undivided to me, it sounded a lot like the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs that pervaded corporate America. Given the documented ineffectiveness of such programs, I could not understand how Undivided had the impact people claimed.
I reached out to volunteers and leaders with Undivided to understand more about the program, its history, and how it worked. Over the next seven years, I sat through multiple six-week sessions of the curriculum. I followed the trajectories of dozens of people, white and nonwhite, who had been through the program, engaging in hours of conversation with them over many years. We talked in their homes, in coffee shops and restaurants, at the church, in their workplaces, over the phone, in Zoom rooms, on social media, and in cars. I worked with a colleague to gather survey data cataloging the experience of over a thousand participants in the program. I generated reams of field notes, trying to understand what brought people to the program, how it affected them, and how it emerged and flourished in a church community often characterized by its infamous commitment to whiteness.
At each turn, the people I got to know seemed to be rewriting the script.
Here was a multiracial group of people doing more than putting up yard signs and buying tote bags in their effort to agitate for racial justice in America. The story of so many twenty-first-century social change efforts begins with outrage and ends with a whimper. The supposed racial reckoning that began after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 was no exception. Dubbed the “Great Awokening,” the movement propelled millions of Americans into the streets in the middle of a global pandemic, grasping for ways to close the yawning gap between the society we pretended to be and the society we were constantly revealed to be. Books instructing white people how to become antiracist soared to the top of bestseller lists. Public opinion polls showed that support for the Movement for Black Lives was reaching its highest point ever, increasing by almost fifteen percentage points from the start of 2020. Corporations, universities, nonprofits, churches, small businesses, and other organizations scrambled to demonstrate their commitment to rooting out racial injustice. The volume, speed, and scale of this response prompted multiple headlines asking whether this time was different. The killing of George Floyd was hardly the first (or the last) time that a Black person had been brutally murdered at the hands of the state, but the public response felt different—was white America finally prepared to reckon with its complicity in racial subjugation?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer was closer to no than yes. One year later, many of the promises that corporations and other organizations had made to take action in the summer of 2020 remained unfulfilled. Corresponding analysis of public opinion data showed that support for the Movement for Black Lives remained high among racial and ethnic minorities a year after the summer of 2020. Among white Americans, however, support for the Movement for Black Lives had plummeted below the baseline level of support prior to the killing of George Floyd. Bitter fights over the teaching of any curricula related to racial justice in schools began to emerge, and the brutal pattern of racially motivated violence against Black people continued unabated. Throughout American history, the struggle for Black freedom has been marked by patterns of progress followed by backlash, and this time was no different.
Political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson argued that for too many Americans, the journey toward antiracism “started in a bookstore and ended on their couch.” Even among many white liberals who professed support for racial justice, opinion did not translate into action. As they had throughout history, Black Americans continued to lead the struggle for Black freedom, turning pain into action. In contrast, for many white Americans—even those who were racially sympathetic toward Black people and other minorities—pain became stasis. Many people were still angry, but they didn’t know what to do to effect durable change. What should liberal white people angry about racial disparities do besides march, vote every couple of years, donate money, and support companies and organizations that shared their views? Many resorted to buying swag that allowed them to emblazon their views on their clothes and tote bags. Support for the Black freedom struggle among white Americans seemed to be vapid at best, and volatile at worst.
Somehow, our politics had morphed to the point that most people, even those angered by injustice, behaved like consumers, choosing between political actions the same way they selected cereals at the grocery store. Against this backdrop, the people I got to know through Undivided distinguished themselves because of their commitment to sustained work together. They were figuring out how to fight for racial justice in ways that went beyond consumerism. They built relationships across race that spurred them to action and sustained them when it got hard. Undivided was just the spark. None of them described stories of dramatic transformation through the six-week program, but for many, going through that experience catalyzed a journey that shaped their behavior in the weeks, months, and years to come. Each of them, Black and white, struggled. None of them followed the formula that best-selling books offered about the “right” way to tackle racism in their own lives. Their journeys were each complex, unpredictable, and confounding in their own way.
Undivided also rewrote the script by focusing on structural injustice within white Christian evangelicalism. In 2016, when the program first began, focusing on racial justice beyond mere interpersonal reconciliation was unusual for any white evangelical megachurch, and it only became more so as evangelicalism went into crisis during the Trump years. For centuries, scholars argued, many (but not all) white Christian churches had provided refuge for white supremacy. Scholars like Anthea Butler and Jemar Tisby argued that white supremacy was built into evangelical theology itself. A nationally representative study of congregations across America found that in 2018–19, only 22 percent of predominantly white congregations had a “group meeting, class, or event” to “discuss race relations” in the past year. Even fewer, 9 percent, reported having one specifically regarding “race and the police,” and only 7 percent had an “organized effort, person, or committee whose goal was increasing racial or ethnic diversity.” The Baptist megachurch near my parents’ home in Texas ran a school that refused to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. When the Southern Baptist Convention developed its own program in 2018 in response to fierce debates within the organization about how their faith should address questions of race, they focused it entirely on interpersonal reconciliation, which is typical of white evangelical groups. (They called the program Undivided, prompting the head pastor of Crossroads to say, “They stole it from us. We had the name and the program first.”) By focusing on structural patterns of injustice, Undivided tried to break the mold.
Crossroads was a church that liked breaking the mold, unlike any faith institution I had ever encountered. It deliberately upended church conventions to try to draw more people into its community. In many ways, it seemed to be working. When I first started researching Undivided, Crossroads had about 22,000 people per week attending church, and the numbers were rapidly growing. Their approach to Super Bowl Sunday exemplified their philosophy. In most churches, that day saw some of the lowest church attendance of the year. To compensate, Crossroads decided to host an annual “Super Bowl of Preaching.”
Like all of Crossroads’ weekly services, it was quite a production. The church’s most popular pastors assembled teams to compete through four “quarters” of competitive preaching. Each quarter, they drew a silly phrase out of a hat and delivered a sermon that incorporated that phrase. The more smoothly they worked it into the sermon, the more points they got. The event also had its own referees, commentators (including some former National Football League players), penalty flags, and all the trappings of the real Super Bowl. They even put on a glitzy halftime show and produced their own commercials, which alternated between advertisements for Crossroads events (“Come explore your relationship with God at Woman Camp!”) and snarky spots rivaling Saturday Night Live in quality and humor. Nothing about the day’s events felt like a traditional church.
I watched one Super Bowl of Preaching with my then seven-year-old, who had been raised attending weekly Buddhist meditations. My child watched the performance intently, and when it ended, turned to me and solemnly declared, “Mommy, I think I might be Christian.”
Crossroads beat the trend of declining attendance. The Super Bowl of Preaching got so popular that by 2021, the National Football League told them they could no longer use the trademarked name “Super Bowl.” By working harder to be hip than holy, Crossroads hoped to create a church welcoming of all people. What better way to maximize growth and bring more people to God? From its earliest days, the church adopted the motto “Belonging comes before belief.” A culture of radical hospitality replaced any kind of purity test.
When I first got to know Crossroads, I was worried its leaders and congregants might be suspicious of me and unwilling to talk. I was a college professor, a member of the purported coastal elite that the media liked to pit against Midwestern evangelicals. I was neither white nor Black, but Asian, occupying a liminal category of race in America. And I was a lapsed Catholic. I had attended eleven years of Catholic school in Texas as a child. We had schoolwide mass every Wednesday and started every Friday with a prayer service in the school gym. I began to chafe against Catholicism in high school, however, when I couldn’t reconcile things my classmates and teachers said in theology class with things they did.
Crossroads, however, welcomed people not in spite of their flaws, their differences, their ignorance, or their odious pasts, but because of them. True to their culture, the people I met approached me with warmth and welcomed me into their experiences with kindness and generosity. When I first got to know them at the start of the Trump era, it was a church that seemed to hold people with opposing viewpoints together, even in a polarized nation. Instead of the politically conservative, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping older white men who dominated public images of evangelicalism, Crossroads had a younger and more racially, ideologically, and socially diverse congregation.
The Crossroads congregants who participated in Undivided represented a group of people who did not have a social home in America—too conservative for many left-leaning groups and too liberal for many right-leaning groups. They agitated for their sense of justice, even as the home they found for their work kept changing. Sometimes Crossroads embraced them and their work, and at other times it actively pushed them away. The church tried to straddle the two sides.
When Chuck Mingo, the Black pastor in Crossroads who cofounded Undivided, first preached about his need to act on racial injustice in early 2015, the church defended him. Brian Tome, the white head pastor, used his sermon the next week to make explicit his commitment to Chuck.
“I love what Chuck had to say last week,” Brian said. How could a Black man living in Cincinnati not want to confront the issue of race? he asked. He acknowledged the pushback he and Chuck had received the past week, and the “storm” that would come with speaking more about race. “I know there are Black people in our midst that are like, ‘Why don’t y’all talk more about this?’ And there are whites in our midst who are saying, ‘Whoa, wait, is he implying…is he saying…whoa.’ ” Brian comically mimicked the expressions of concern that could come from either side, drawing laughter from the crowd. But then he dismissed people’s concerns.
“I’m getting emails. He’s getting emails. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ ‘You don’t support our police.’ ‘I’m leaving Crossroads.’ ” Brian sputtered in mock disbelief. Then he was unequivocal. “But if you think talking about the way things really are is difficult, you got to leave.” Brian paused in the middle of the stage and looked directly into the camera. He waved one hand. “Bye, bye,” he said, exaggerating his enunciation of each syllable. He drew applause. “See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya.” Brian paused for effect, then concluded in one definitive breath. “When Chuck speaks, he speaks for me. He speaks for me and he’s my friend, and he’s got a calling from God.”
Some people in the congregation clapped and whooped in affirmation. Others sat on their hands. The divided reaction in the cavernous auditorium of the Crossroads Church that week exemplified the church’s constant attempt to sit at the confluence of competing currents in evangelicalism—among those who wanted their church to focus on converting more souls instead of changing society, those interested in building Christian political power in America, or those concerned with realizing Jesus’s quest for justice. Crossroads sometimes seemed unsure about how to balance the tension between leading their community versus merely acting as a mirror for people’s existing views.
When Brian later reflected on the church’s handling of issues of race, he was very clear: “You can never win. No matter what we do, we hear it from both sides.”
A few years later, one white woman who had become inspired by Undivided to advocate for racial justice met with one of the campus pastors at Crossroads to ask him what he was going to do as the epidemic of police brutality toward Black Americans continued unabated. The pastor shrugged.
“It’s just not something we’re going to focus on,” he told her bluntly. Crossroads enabled Undivided but did not necessarily share its goals.
This confounding relationship between Undivided and Crossroads was not unlike the confounding journey that many people within Undivided had to take.
This book traces those stories. Their quests were audacious, uncertain, filled with tension—and unfinished. Each of the characters I’ve chosen to focus on—one white woman (Jess), one Black woman (Sandra), one white man (Grant), and one Black man (Chuck)—participated in Undivided and began to see old things with new eyes. They formed new friendships and broke off old ones. They switched jobs, confronted racism in their personal relationships, got discouraged by the work, and renewed their courage to act, again and again. None of their journeys formed a straight line from complicity to justice. But none of them were sitting on their couches, either.
Their stories do not reveal that Undivided has cracked a secret code or developed a perfect model that everyone else lacks. Undivided is one program in a vast landscape of both faith-based and secular programs dedicated to antiracism. Critics argue that it’s too corporate or too superficial; that it grew out of a white-dominant community, ignoring the long legacy of Black churches and Black faith leaders who have been doing the work for much longer; that it’s too biblical; that it’s not biblical enough; that, given the demographics of Crossroads, it focuses too much on the Black-white divide, ignoring other communities of color. These debates are real, and necessary. They push a field of leaders, programs, and organizations working on antiracism to be better. But to most of the thousands of participants taking one night a week out of their busy lives to give Undivided a try, those debates felt remote. Undivided was not perfect, and the experiences participants had were hardly uniform. But it had the great advantage of being available to people who were craving something from their church: it gave them a chance to struggle in concrete ways with the question of what it meant to respect and fight for the dignity of all, to enact in concrete ways their belief that everyone is a child of God.
All of the participants in Undivided were taking a risk, and the work remains incomplete. Only by taking these risks did these four people begin to pursue a different possible world emerging at the seams of the existing one. In a moment when the nation is struggling to realize a vision of a multiracial America, this story offers glimmers of the enormity of what real change might demand.