Latest / America's Why Project / Episode 15: Part 1 — Race, Class, and Religion in America: Spanning the Divides
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: Crossroads the Church has this one phrase that infused a lot of the culture in Undivided, which is this idea that belonging comes before belief.
- 0:17SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the America's Why Podcast.
- 0:21SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm your host, Matt Levincher.
- 0:25SPEAKER_01: For this episode, I'm very, very pleased to invite to our podcast Dr.
- 0:31SPEAKER_01: Hari Hahn.
- 0:32SPEAKER_01: Dr.
- 0:33SPEAKER_01: Hahn is the Stavros Nyarcos Foundation professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as the inaugural director of the SNF Agora Institute, which promotes inclusive civic discourse and democratic resilience.
- 0:51SPEAKER_01: Dr.
- 0:52SPEAKER_01: Hahn also directs the P3 Lab, a multidisciplinary research lab that pursues a world where people's participation in public life across race and class is possible, probable, and powerful.
- 1:10SPEAKER_01: Dr.
- 1:10SPEAKER_01: Hahn is a 2025 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grants, and the author of five books, including Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church.
- 1:25SPEAKER_01: I was so enamored of this book when I read it because it spoke so movingly to the themes of this podcast.
- 1:33SPEAKER_01: And so I'd just like to welcome Dr.
- 1:35SPEAKER_01: Hunt to our show and also to ask you how you came to the story that you tell in your book, Undivided.
- 1:46SPEAKER_01: And how does this book project build on your previous work on empowering citizens to work together?
- 1:56SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, thank you so much, first of all, for inviting me onto this podcast, and I'm really excited for the conversation.
- 2:01SPEAKER_00: So the way I got into Undivided was actually a little bit by accident.
- 2:06SPEAKER_00: I had originally gone to Cincinnati because I was studying a ballot initiative campaign in 2016 that achieved some really unusual outcomes.
- 2:17SPEAKER_00: Basically, in the 2016 election, which is the same election that Trump was first elected president, the state of Ohio had gone for Trump by like eight percentage points.
- 2:26SPEAKER_00: The residents of Cincinnati had voted in a ballot initiative that would essentially raise their own taxes in order to fund universal preschool for the poorest children in the city.
- 2:37SPEAKER_00: And so it was an in and it was, it passed by the largest margin of any new education tax in Cincinnati history.
- 2:44SPEAKER_00: And so I just looked at that as a political scientist and thought, this is really strange.
- 2:47SPEAKER_00: Like, how is it that we had such a progressive tax that was passed in the same election that we saw these other more conservative election outcomes come happen?
- 2:56SPEAKER_00: And so I went to Cincinnati to try to understand that because a lot of, you know, a lot of my work kind of asked this question of how do we pull people together to work with each other to architect a shared future.
- 3:08SPEAKER_00: And this was an instance of people doing that.
- 3:10SPEAKER_00: And when I got there, everyone kept saying, well, you know, there's this church, they sent all these volunteers.
- 3:15SPEAKER_00: And at first I was thinking, like, what is that?
- 3:17SPEAKER_00: What is this really?
- 3:18SPEAKER_00: And I was a little bit skeptical of it.
- 3:19SPEAKER_00: But then I discovered that the church was the third largest evangelical megachurch in America.
- 3:24SPEAKER_00: And it's not that they just sent five or ten volunteers, they sent hundreds of volunteers who had devoted hundreds of hours of work to this initiative.
- 3:32SPEAKER_00: And all of those volunteers, or almost all the volunteers, had been involved in this program called Undivided, which is a racial justice program that the church had started in 2015.
- 3:42SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of backed into the story almost by accident because I wasn't there looking for this program, but instead kind of saw the fruits of the program, first of all, in the way in which all these volunteers had gotten involved in this ballot initiative campaign in the city, um, and then began to kind of try to understand and uncover what was going on in the program itself.
- 4:03SPEAKER_00: And it just it just turned into a really interesting and fascinating story.
- 4:08SPEAKER_01: Well, well, thanks a lot.
- 4:11SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to hear a little bit about what the secret sauce was of this initiative.
- 4:19SPEAKER_01: So so the church is Crossroads Church, which, as you say, is the third largest megachurch in America.
- 4:28SPEAKER_01: And people come from across the political spectrum in this church.
- 4:33SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's a multiracial church, one of the lead figures in Undivided, uh, the pastor by the name of Chuck is African American and a very charismatic leader.
- 4:46SPEAKER_01: What was the methodology for community organizing that the leaders of the Undivided Initiative developed?
- 4:54SPEAKER_01: And what made it distinctive?
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a really good question.
- 4:59SPEAKER_00: Um, and so just to put it well, provide a little bit more background.
- 5:02SPEAKER_00: So, Crossroads is an evangelical megachurch.
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: It um at the time probably had about 30,000 people a week that were showing up in person.
- 5:09SPEAKER_00: Um, now it has about, I think, 40,000 people per week that show up in person, about 50, 500,000 people that tune in online.
- 5:15SPEAKER_00: So it's got this enormous scale.
- 5:17SPEAKER_00: Um, it was at the time about 80% white, 20% non-white.
- 5:20SPEAKER_00: Um, there was this black pastor Chuck, who was one of the highest-ranking pastors in the church, but it's a white dominant church.
- 5:27SPEAKER_00: And um, Undivided essentially was a program that Chuck started after he had given a sermon in 2015 about an instance in which um the Cincinnati police had shot an unarmed black man, and it brought the controversy around policing that was going on nationally into Cincinnati's backyard.
- 5:49SPEAKER_00: And Chuck as felt like he couldn't not preach about it.
- 5:52SPEAKER_00: So he gave this one sermon.
- 5:53SPEAKER_00: He thought that was gonna be all.
- 5:55SPEAKER_00: But after the sermon, he had thousands of people from the community kind of reach out and say, if you're gonna do something, I wanna be a part of it.
- 6:01SPEAKER_00: And so he realized he needed to do something, and that's where Undivided, the program, was really built.
- 6:06SPEAKER_00: And as you intimate, Undivided, you know, in order to build undivided, he pulled together some other leaders who have who worked on you know racial diversity and racial justice issues within the church community, but also people from the children at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, um, the head of the one of the large community organizing groups in the city into this kind of team that essentially built out this program, which became essentially a six-week program that takes people through this journey around trying to understand racial injustice in its many dimensions, um, and then to engage in these small groups that are constructed through the undivided program to grapple with solutions for the problems that that they they identify.
- 6:55SPEAKER_00: And I think part of what was unusual for me was that it the actual curriculum itself is not that unusual relative to other kinds of diversity or racial justice programs that we see.
- 7:08SPEAKER_00: And I was really curious as to why this seemed to have such outsized effects relative to what we know from the data is a lot of skepticism of a lot of those programs.
- 7:17SPEAKER_00: And the thing that I realized is that I'm really careful in the book is to try to be clear that like I don't think it's that Undivided like cracked a secret code or that there's some formula to doing this work.
- 7:29SPEAKER_00: And if only everyone, you know, took part in this program or did what Crossroads did, that it would that it would solve the problem.
- 7:36SPEAKER_00: But instead, what Undivided was doing was that it was creating settings and then equipping people to become architects of their own solutions.
- 7:45SPEAKER_00: And so what that meant was that people owned the results of the change at the end in a different way from a lot of other kind of DEI type programs that we might see.
- 7:54SPEAKER_00: So the actual curriculum taught people about things like the history of structural injustice in Cincinnati, empathy, implicit racism, you know, things that are not that different from a lot of other DEI curricula that you might see.
- 8:08SPEAKER_00: But then instead of what happens, I think, in a lot of these programs is say, like, okay, now that you understand structural um racism, or now that you understand um the way you know empathy works in the human brain, here's how you should respond.
- 8:21SPEAKER_00: Instead, what they did was they would teach people about these, and then people were organized into these small groups that were these like intimate communities across race that had anywhere from, I don't know, like six to twelve people in them, let's say, and then say, okay, now that you've learned about the history of structural inequality in Cincinnati, what does that mean for how you might interact with each other?
- 8:41SPEAKER_00: And then people would have to kind of work with each other and work in these small communities to try to design solutions for how they might act together.
- 8:49SPEAKER_00: And so what that meant was that people made a lot of mistakes along the way.
- 8:52SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, in the book, I try to tell some of the stories of some of the ways in which people navigated some really complicated conversations.
- 9:00SPEAKER_00: But by making mistakes, it's like people were getting up on the bike and falling off and getting up on the bike and falling off.
- 9:06SPEAKER_00: And because they were organized into these small groups in which they had deep social ties and relationships, they essentially were able to create a space of belonging and social risk that enable people to try different solutions until they were able to co-create a set of solutions together that people had more ownership of at the end.
- 9:27SPEAKER_00: Um, which I think is that's what's part of what is really unusual relative to a lot of other programs that we see.
- 9:33SPEAKER_01: One of the things that you talk about in your book incredibly movingly is that this work is really, really hard.
- 9:41SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 9:44SPEAKER_01: And that people need to embed this work of taking risks and saying things where they're really making themselves vulnerable within trusting relationships.
- 10:04SPEAKER_01: And so so you say that that it's not very effective to start just by imparting information, saying, here is the history you need to be aware of, here's you know, here's how to be more sensitive, and so forth and so on.
- 10:19SPEAKER_01: But instead, one of the exercises that they started with in these small groups was tell me your first experience of race.
- 10:28SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 10:29SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think you know, Crossroads of the Church has this one phrase that kind of infused a lot of the culture in Undivided, um, which is this idea that belonging comes before belief.
- 10:40SPEAKER_00: And I think when I first heard that, I was like, what does this mean?
- 10:44SPEAKER_00: You know, but then I realized, like, wow, a lot of what they're doing is they are encapsulating, you know, five decades of social science research into four words, you know, in a in a way.
- 10:54SPEAKER_00: It's the idea that, you know, when people feel like they are ensconced in relationships of authentic belonging, where they, you know, feel like they're actually in kind of true relationship with other people, then that creates a certain kind of safety that enables people to try hard things.
- 11:13SPEAKER_00: You know, like one of the things that Chuck talks about is that part of what undivided does is it creates a safe space for dangerous conversations, right?
- 11:20SPEAKER_00: And and I think that what's unusual about it is that for a variety of different reasons, we have essentially created a system of civil society and politics in America that implicitly puts belief before belonging, right?
- 11:34SPEAKER_00: First you have to show that you agree with us.
- 11:37SPEAKER_00: Once you show that you agree with us, then we're gonna invite you into a community of belonging.
- 11:41SPEAKER_00: And Undivided and Crossroads was kind of reversing that, right?
- 11:44SPEAKER_00: They were saying, look, we belong to each other.
- 11:47SPEAKER_00: We are all, in this case, right, we're all people of faith.
- 11:51SPEAKER_00: And we all belong to the same church community in Cincinnati.
- 11:54SPEAKER_00: And because we belong to each other, we're gonna build those relationships, we're gonna create spaces in which we can be vulnerable with each other.
- 12:00SPEAKER_00: That's why they started with that idea of asking people what their first experience of race was.
- 12:06SPEAKER_00: You know, when did you realize you were white?
- 12:07SPEAKER_00: When did you realize you were black?
- 12:08SPEAKER_00: You know, when did you realize that race was a dimension along which we organized our society essentially?
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 12:14SPEAKER_00: And so people talked really personally about those experiences.
- 12:17SPEAKER_00: And then it began to kind of open up a space for vulnerability that then when they were then grappling with what does it mean to contend with my own implicit racism, they had that kind of social space that was created that essentially put belonging before belief.
- 12:34SPEAKER_00: So that if you know the white people in the group and the people of color in the group had different experiences of race that they were then contending with, they could have an authentic hard conversation about it because they had created that space of belonging.
- 12:50SPEAKER_01: Well, these two sayings belonging comes before belief.
- 12:59SPEAKER_01: And create a safe space for dangerous conversations does strike me as really remarkable and really, really important at our at our current historical moment.
- 13:11SPEAKER_01: Because it seems to me that in many of our um belong belonging groups or or belief groups, there it's exactly the opposite, that somehow once we know that we share the same beliefs, then we are open to belonging.
- 13:31SPEAKER_01: But but to put yourself into a group where you may believe very, very different things is very dangerous.
- 13:39SPEAKER_01: And many of the many of the institutions of of uh social media magnify that because you're not just confessing something that you might be ashamed of to a close friend, but you're confessing it to potentially millions uh upon millions of people.
- 13:59SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think um so I completely agree.
- 14:03SPEAKER_00: It's not but I think it's not just on social media, it's even like in the a lot of the uh, you know, civil society and political organizations that we have are organized around shared belief, right?
- 14:13SPEAKER_00: We start with shared belief as a as a starting point, and then we create belonging around that belief.
- 14:20SPEAKER_00: And you know, essentially what Undivided was doing, and I think what a lot of social science research shows, is that actually people's beliefs often flow from the relationships that they have.
- 14:30SPEAKER_00: Another thing to think about is, you know, one of the questions a lot of people asked me after the book came out, and I was talking about the book, is, you know, do you think this is possible outside of a church context, right?
- 14:40SPEAKER_00: And the implication of that question was, was it because people had a common faith in God, let's say a Christian God, that it made this possible?
- 14:49SPEAKER_00: And I think it did matter that it was in a church context, but I think it mattered for reasons different than what I think most people assume.
- 14:55SPEAKER_00: It's not that the it was the common faith and a common God that made the work possible, but it was more that church communities or faith communities, I think, inherently believe in the transformability of people, right?
- 15:08SPEAKER_00: Like we are not the sum total of the beliefs that we hold now, and that I will, over the course of my life, evolve, right?
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: And evangelicalism in particular has an especially strong commitment to that idea that like people change over time, right?
- 15:22SPEAKER_00: Like that's the whole idea of being born again.
- 15:25SPEAKER_00: And so I think part of what made it really important that it happened in church context was not the idea that there was this like faith in a common God that then enabled a set of things that otherwise weren't possible, but instead it's that you had a group of people who came together who didn't believe that we are stuck in the beliefs that we hold now.
- 15:44SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 15:45SPEAKER_00: So if you and I are having a conversation and you say something that I find to be offensive or or inconsistent with my experience in some way or something like that, then I don't necessarily assume that you are forever gonna be like that, right?
- 15:58SPEAKER_00: Like I assume there's a process through which people can be transformed, but that transformation depends on us first developing this relationship of belonging.
- 16:07SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, that's another piece that I kind of thought about a lot is that, you know, in social media and some of the kind of spaces that you're describing, I think too often we assume that people's beliefs are static.
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: So if they say something incorrect, quote unquote, or something that seems offensive in some ways, then our tendency is to assume that that's that's that's that's it.
- 16:30SPEAKER_00: Like those are those are the beliefs that they have.
- 16:32SPEAKER_00: Whereas in the church context or in the undivided context, instead they would it would be like, okay, we are all on a journey, right?
- 16:38SPEAKER_00: Where are you on that journey?
- 16:40SPEAKER_00: How do I engage with you where you are?
- 16:41SPEAKER_00: Um, which is a very different way to approach um that question.
- 16:45SPEAKER_01: So according to Christian doctrine, we are all sinners.
- 16:50SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 16:50SPEAKER_01: And there is a possibility of grace and forgiveness.
- 16:56SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 16:58SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think, you know, um, you know, the concept of grace obviously is a Christian concept of, you know, unmerited favor from God, but I think that idea of how do we extend that kind of dignity and that kind of generosity to all people, whether or not um we're thinking about it in a secular or faith-based context.
- 17:19SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing about the secular world that should deny our ability to be generous to each other.
- 17:26SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it it may be that there are certain instincts that come out of certain faith communities that make that more or less likely, but I don't think that there's any reason why that can't be true in our politics as well.
- 17:35SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So generosity and openness of spirit is possible even without the faith in a group of Yeah, and and just belief in the transformability of people, right?
- 17:44SPEAKER_00: Like I don't have the same beliefs now that I did when at 20 years ago or 20 years before that, and I'm sure that's true for almost everybody.
- 17:51SPEAKER_01: But the it's not just that at the theoretical level that theoretically we are transformable, theoretically we we can be given grace, um, we can be uh the beneficiaries of generosity.
- 18:06SPEAKER_01: But it's also the structure of the initiative, the the way it was organized, uh promoted that.
- 18:13SPEAKER_01: Because my understanding, according to your book, is that the undivided program started out as a six-week workshop.
- 18:20SPEAKER_01: And then at the end of those six weeks, they said, you know, this was great, but it's not going to go anywhere unless we find ways of staying together, keeping these small groups of what, six to twelve people together and doing something with shared purpose.
- 18:37SPEAKER_01: And so that's how this support for issue 44, the universal preschool initiative in Cincinnati, came about.
- 18:45SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 18:46SPEAKER_01: And and not only did they say, okay, we're gonna work to support this preschool initiative, but we will also meet up on a regular basis just socially.
- 18:57SPEAKER_01: And so people are meeting at diners or they're meeting at each other's houses.
- 19:01SPEAKER_01: And so that you talk about the importance of strengthening a lattice work of relationships that motivated attendees to take repeated social risks.
- 19:12SPEAKER_01: Say more about that.
- 19:13SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that um, you know, I think I learned a lot from um studying Undivided is the idea that you know, there's no six-week program in the world that's gonna transform people from not thinking about race, let's say, to all of a sudden being warriors for racial justice, right?
- 19:29SPEAKER_00: It's just not how things work.
- 19:31SPEAKER_00: Um, and instead, it's it's all about understanding that there's a journey, but along that journey, we have to think about how do we scaffold the support that people need to be able to do this work.
- 19:42SPEAKER_00: And I think what happened in Undivided is that they started with the six-week program that they had carefully constructed in all the ways that we talked about.
- 19:49SPEAKER_00: And at the end, they realized, as you said, like we can't just drop people off and say, well, that was fun, like see ya, right?
- 19:55SPEAKER_00: But we have to give people a way to channel the energy that has been generated from this.
- 19:59SPEAKER_00: And so they created this series of what they call on-ramps or invitations to ongoing action.
- 20:04SPEAKER_00: So it ranged from being involved in things like issue 44 to getting involved with prison ministry to getting involved with um all these other kinds of programs.
- 20:14SPEAKER_00: And what that did was that essentially created um you know, smaller, different, you know, ongoing social communities that gave people the support they needed to continue doing this work.
- 20:28SPEAKER_00: And so the way the book is divided, the first half of the book is called agitation, the second half of the book is called backlash.
- 20:33SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that is that, you know, the if the six-week program was really kind of agitating people to begin to open their eyes and see and understand and experience the world in a different way, then the the next part of the journey was then figuring out, okay, now that my I've begun to understand things differently and I start to move through the world differently, thinking about race and racial injustice in different ways, how do I navigate all the pushback that I'm going to inevitably get?
- 21:01SPEAKER_00: And all the core characters in the book, you know, experienced pretty profound backlash from, you know, in their families, in their work lives, in their church communities, in their social communities.
- 21:12SPEAKER_00: And the question is, what kind of support did they need in order to be able to navigate and sustain their commitment to a set of values through that backlash?
- 21:20SPEAKER_00: And that's where these on-ramps and the communities that were created through them became really important.
- 21:27SPEAKER_01: Well, this is such interesting uh material because you're you're laying out uh the structure of the book, which is also the structure of these two episodes that we're doing together.
- 21:41SPEAKER_01: We we only have a few minutes left uh today, but fortunately, we're going to be coming back for next week's episode and talk, delve into this material in more depth.
- 21:53SPEAKER_01: And in particular, I want to move in next week's episode to this issue.
- 22:00SPEAKER_01: Backlash and how the initiative succeeded.
- 22:07SPEAKER_01: So you talked about this issue 44, which raised taxes, not never a popular thing to do, and and um not a popular thing to do in uh conservative regions of the country uh in particular, um, but raise taxes to subsidize preschool education for poor children who were majority um African American students.
- 22:35SPEAKER_01: And yet this huge success, as you said, was met by backlash.
- 22:43SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to get just a little bit of a teaser from you that we can talk more about next week of this, if you will, tragic dimension of the undivided initiative in that it brought people together around shared action, but also ended up creating division and the backlash ended up creating uh challenges within the broader crossroads community and challenges for the undivided um project.
- 23:18SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 23:18SPEAKER_00: Um, okay.
- 23:19SPEAKER_00: So a couple things that I would just say.
- 23:21SPEAKER_00: Um I said this before, but just to reiterate, you know, I'm not I'm not in the book trying to argue that undivided has some perfect formula or that crossroads is some perfect church, right?
- 23:31SPEAKER_00: You know, both the um the program undivided and the church, you know, kind of tacked back and forth in trying to navigate and understand how they how they contend with this thicket of complexity when it it when that that that inevitably emerges when you deal with really hard questions of structural injustice.
- 23:53SPEAKER_00: And it's because of that inevitable thicket that there was this backlash that people experienced in their personal lives, but then also, you know, was was experienced more broadly within the crossroads community.
- 24:03SPEAKER_00: And I say that to say that the backlash absolutely is and was real.
- 24:10SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know that I would call it tragic.
- 24:12SPEAKER_00: Um and I think the the reason for that is, you know, part of what the story I think of what I learned in Undivided is that, you know, change is hard.
- 24:24SPEAKER_00: And injustice exists in our society not because it's an accident, but because there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo.
- 24:32SPEAKER_00: And so when you're trying to upend the status quo and extend this ethos of dignity and justice to all people, then inevitably there's friction.
- 24:42SPEAKER_00: And that's what makes change so hard.
- 24:44SPEAKER_00: That's what makes, you know, the kind of injustice that we see so sticky throughout American history.
- 24:51SPEAKER_00: And what I really came to respect about the people in Undivided, the program of Undivided, and then the people and the per and the church community crossroads was even if they didn't always make the choices that I personally would have made, let's say, they were committed to the struggle, right?
- 25:08SPEAKER_00: They were committed to staying in the struggle of trying to figure out what it means to create a world in which all humans have dignity, period.
- 25:16SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 25:17SPEAKER_00: And so were they tacking back and forth?
- 25:19SPEAKER_00: Did they make decisions that sometimes I agree with and sometimes they didn't that I disagreed with?
- 25:22SPEAKER_00: 100%.
- 25:24SPEAKER_00: Were they perfect?
- 25:24SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
- 25:26SPEAKER_00: But did I come to really respect that they were willing to stay in the struggle?
- 25:29SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
- 25:30SPEAKER_00: And I think in some ways, I don't know that I would call it a tragedy that's a that it's a struggle.
- 25:35SPEAKER_00: I think that's just the way the world is.
- 25:37SPEAKER_00: And what more can we ask than that people commit to grappling with and staying in the struggle with each other?
- 25:48SPEAKER_01: Hari Han, thank you so much for your time.
- 25:50SPEAKER_01: It's uh such a such an honor to uh talk with you.
- 25:54SPEAKER_01: And I very much look forward to continuing this conversation in next week's episode of the America's Why Podcast.
- 26:01SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
- 26:02SPEAKER_00: I'm really enjoying the conversation.
- 26:06SPEAKER_02: You're listening to the America's Why Podcast.
- 26:09SPEAKER_02: Our music is by James Fernando.
- 26:11SPEAKER_02: For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project.com.
- 26:17SPEAKER_02: See you next week.