[Oe List ...] Fwd: What the left can learn from evangelical churches

Sat Oct 18 05:13:05 PDT 2025

>From a close colleague in Denver

*Sunny Walker *
*She/her/hers*
*On **Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux)
tribal land*

Certified Facilitator (Also Certified ToP Facilitator)
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sunny.sunwalker at gmail.com
303-587-3017

For diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging inquiries:
sunny at diversityinnovators.com
www.diversityinnovators.com

For virtual facilitation inquiries:
sunny at virtualfacilitationcollaborative.com
www.virtualfacilitationcollaborative.com

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kathryn Smith <kathryn.smith.560 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:43 AM
Subject: Fwd: What the left can learn from evangelical churches
To: Catherine Welch <catherine at welchbox.com>, Sunny Walker <
sunny.sunwalker at gmail.com>, Susan Craver Erickson <craversf at gmail.com>, Jim
Slotta <jslotta at earthlink.net>, Richard Wagner <drwags59 at gmail.com>

Hi!
Recommending this book, especially to you working in the gap between the
'what is and the not yet.'
Kathryn

*Undivided, The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church* by
Hahrie Han (2024)
"…social technology…small groups...spaces where people could hold multiple
truths at once…structured meetings, ongoing rituals, and planned
campaigns…experiences of vulnerability and solidarity…not alone in feeling
exposed...

People needed those friendships and groups to cultivate and sustain the
courage to act."

The lessons of Hahrie Han's Undivided
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for more
What the left can learn from evangelical churches
<https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1745679&post_id=175894338&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4sslm&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4MDYxODk4LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNzU4OTQzMzgsImlhdCI6MTc2MDM1NzM4MywiZXhwIjoxNzYyOTQ5MzgzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTc0NTY3OSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.ETMq851U0g18EX2AioklxoKyvGagP82F5w9ALiO6elU>The
lessons of Hahrie Han's Undivided

Henry Farrell <https://substack.com/@henryfarrell>
Oct 13
<https://substack.com/@henryfarrell>

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[image: Baptism, William P. Chappel (American, 1801–1878), Oil on slate
paper, American]
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[Baptism by William B. Chappel, courtesy of the Met
<https://substack.com/redirect/9e1bfa9e-218d-4823-9fa9-289438028f76?j=eyJ1IjoiNHNzbG0ifQ.IyJqpDspWaiEtQl0O4osBF4reJSKLog8ljRlL-UtP1Q>
]

A few days ago, the MacArthur Foundation announced this year’s list of
fellows
<https://substack.com/redirect/7f538aa1-ad93-40db-b69a-8f10ea699636?j=eyJ1IjoiNHNzbG0ifQ.IyJqpDspWaiEtQl0O4osBF4reJSKLog8ljRlL-UtP1Q>.
My colleague and friend, Hahrie Han, was among the winners. This is
wonderful news for many reasons, one of which is that it should draw more
attention to her ideas. Specifically, people should read her most recent
book, *Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
<https://substack.com/redirect/77255301-3145-4e5a-be5b-e27dd4bb0734?j=eyJ1IjoiNHNzbG0ifQ.IyJqpDspWaiEtQl0O4osBF4reJSKLog8ljRlL-UtP1Q>*.

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*Undivided* began with a puzzle. Cincinnati, Ohio passed a ballot
initiative with a supermajority in 2016, raising taxes to provide universal
pre-school education with particular benefits targeted at Black
communities. How could something like this happen in a racially divided
city in the throes of Trumpism? The answers that Hahrie finds are
contingent and messy, but also valuable for the left right now. In
particular, she implicitly suggests that there is a lot that the left can
learn from the evangelical movement, as well as currents within it that it
ought directly engage with. Hahrie’s intellectual background leads her to
answer different questions than most people who think about religion. She
looks at the evangelical movement not just as religion, or way of living,
but a way of organizing. There is a lot that non-evangelicals can learn
from how the evangelical movement brings these together.

NB, that the below doesn’t even try to capture the broader narrative of
Hahrie’s book, which is narrative non-fiction, not applied social science.
It’s my own extrapolation, drawing on one particular aspect of her
argument. To really get what Hahrie is saying, you should buy the book.

******

Hahrie’s scholarship is all about civic action. Her first book, *Moved to
Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics, *looked
at the circumstances under which people with very few resources, those who
many political scientists would predict have no real opportunity to
mobilize, can sometimes come together to pursue their collective interests.
What she found was that people, even in the grimmest circumstances, could
build from their understanding of their common circumstances to take
action. As Elena, a farmworker whom she interviewed for the book, said, her
activism came from “perceived injustice in her life and the life of people
around her.” But it certainly helped when there some organizational frame
(a farmer’s cooperative, a political party) that people like Helena could
build around.

This led Hahrie to further work on why some organizations can change the
world around them, while others are less successful. Her second book, *How
Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the
21st Century *stressed the difference between "transactional mobilizing,”
and “transformational organizing.” Lots of organizations focus on lowering
the transaction costs of doing things - pressing a button to send an email
expressing outrage to a politician. However, it is the ones that get people
involved in deeper ways and build relationships that can forge enduring
communities. Organizations do this less often than they might, because
building such relationships is messy, difficult and hard.

Her third book (co-authored with Elizabeth McKenna) on the role of
volunteers in Obama’s 2012 campaign, not only shaped Democratic organizing,
but received the notable backhanded compliment of being assigned as required
reading
<https://substack.com/redirect/9831bdc8-9954-41dd-9279-989a5df93fc0?j=eyJ1IjoiNHNzbG0ifQ.IyJqpDspWaiEtQl0O4osBF4reJSKLog8ljRlL-UtP1Q>
for Republican National Committee organizers in 2016 and 2020. Republican
organizers reportedly not only had to read it, but to take an exam on what
it said.

All this means that Hahrie picks up on different aspects of evangelicism
than most outside observers. While *Undivided* is woven together by the
stories of the individuals who she met and talked to, it’s also a story
about how organizations win people over and provide them with opportunities
to do things.

For example, Hahrie discusses how evangelicals have changed the ways in
which they look to convert people to their churches. Once, Protestant
missionaries sought to woo individuals away from non-Christian communities
by providing them not only with a religious message, but health care,
education and other services. Then they started looking at the data:

In 1955, … Donald McGavran challenged the iconic mission stations in a book
called The Bridges of God. McGavran was a third-generation missionary who
brought a data-based approach to asking why some missions were so much
better than others at gaining adherents. After analyzing data on many
missions, McGavran concluded that the traditional mission station approach
was the wrong way to promote evangelicalism. Instead of isolating potential
converts from their communities, McGavran argued, missions should integrate
into the communities they sought to convert, drawing on preexisting social
networks.

Evangelicals in the US began to use sophisticated marketing techniques at
more or less the same time, converting drive-by movie theaters and strip
malls and other places in the middle of people’s shopping and lives into
churches, and combining religious services with lessons learned from the
entertainment industry. They wanted to bring in “seekers” - people who
wanted meaning in their life but were not already committed to God. Their
techniques to do this sometimes seemed cheesy but they often worked,
fostering enormous new churches that could take advantage of economies of
scale, just as businesses did. A lot of the initial energy of Crossroads,
the church that Hahrie looks at, seems to have come from business people at
Proctor and Gamble.

Outsiders tend to overemphasize the consumer-focused cheesiness while
paying less attention to the intricate honeycomb structures through which
big churches build and maintain community, most notably small groups
organized around particular interests.

These groups were the building blocks of evangelical megachurches, creating
venues within giant congregations for people to get to know one another and
pursue a common agenda. ... In 2020, the median megachurch reported that 45
percent of its members were involved in some kind of small group. In a
church like Crossroads, which boasted about 35,000 members in 2020, that
would be about 15,750 people organized into small groups if each person
belonged to only one. They generally ranged from six to ten people, meaning
that Crossroads could have had anywhere from 1,575 to 2,625 small groups
meeting regularly. Small groups created honeycombs of intimacy, connection,
and loyalty in those churches. As French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville
wrote, “In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother
of all other forms of knowledge.” Because people do not naturally possess
the skills and inclinations for working with one another, they need venues
for learning. Small groups taught people through concrete experience how to
act together.

Small groups provide a kind of social glue then, allowing people with
different interests or problems to come together, and perhaps support each
other. They explain why evangelicism has been so attractive to the
conservative movement, as a kind of social substrate to provide it with
energy and volunteers. But they also help explain why people are attracted
to these churches in the first place. Megachurches provide a community
where different people with different interests and problems can find
others like them, provided those interests are compatible with the overall
mission of the church. That broader mission isn’t set in stone, and is
sometimes contested. Arguments over what the mission of Crossroads and the
evangelical movement are what drive the main story of *Undivided*. Should
the evangelical mission include a commitment to racial justice? And if so,
how deep should that commitment go?

******

That’s the background to the puzzle that Hahrie’s book begins with.
Volunteers from Crossroads contributed enormously to winning the ballot
initiative. A grouping within the church had begun to engage with questions
of racial justice, transforming many church members’ understanding of what
their faith entailed. Church leaders created a curriculum that members
could work through in small multiracial groups.

This was unusual within evangelicism. As Hahrie notes, polling suggess that
White Christians are more likely than any other demographic group to hold
racist views, and evangelical churches have regularly struggled with racial
integration. Even churches that nominally opposed racism were regularly
unwilling to tackle the deeper issues of systemic injustice associated with
it. But even if the story of Undivided was unusual, it was not completely
unprecedented. There is a long, messy history of argument over race within
evangelicism, especially as previously nearly completely White
denominations looked to attract Black members. Some churches, such as
Crossroads, provided opportunities for pastors and church members to push
back against racism.

The multiweek racial justice curriculum that Hahrie describes was more
demanding than most such programs. It didn’t ask participants to run
through a list of DEI shibboleths (the book is scathing on the efficacy of
corporate DEI trainings, because the social science says they are more or
less useless), but to actively engage with each other on potentially
divisive racial questions. The stories that Hahrie recounts suggest that
this was difficult, painful and highly imperfect. People didn’t understand
each other at the beginning, and many came away unhappy and dissatisfied.
It’s very hard to talk about awkward questions face to face. But talking
face to face also makes it harder to be brutal or cruel to those who say
embarrassing or difficult things (here, Hahrie draws a semi-explicit
contrast with social media’s tendencies to abstracted cruelty and
pile-ons). And doing so week after week with the same small group of people
made it easier for people to take risks, to build connections, and to
figure out how to forgive each other.

There is a clear parallel between this process the civil society
organizations that Hahrie studied earlier in her career. Again, building
deep connections is messy, difficult and hard, but it allows people to
accomplish things together. The program provided many of its participants
with a “sense of community and … tools to speak out about injustice in
their own lives.” That, in turn, inspired hundreds of church members to
volunteer to pass a tax levy that was aimed at addressing structural racial
injustices in education.

Inspiration isn’t the end of the game, and it isn’t magical. Hahrie’s story
is *not* a tale of people finding common cause, and converting a megachurch
into a vehicle for social justice, so that everyone lives happily ever
after. As this campaign was coming together, Black people were being killed
by police, in Ohio and elsewhere. The push to address racial injustice
created tensions within the church. Not everyone was happy to go along at
all. A police officer involved in one of the more notorious incidents
quietly attended services at Crossroads. The people who carry the weight of
Hahrie’s story had to deal with difficulties, and personal conflicts with
families and loved ones that sometimes ended in bitter ways. The end result
of all their efforts was an ambiguous victory at best; perhaps not a
victory at all. One of the implied lessons is that we often do not know
what was victory and what was defeat until decades after.

*Undivided *most emphatically does not present a simple linear progress
towards justice.Instead, like all good non fiction, it tries to capture the
complexities of its subject matter, rather than to smooth them away.

******

Still, I took away some lessons from it (these are my own notions after
having read the book; they may or may not reflect Hahrie’s guiding
intuitions). The first and simplest lesson is that evangelicism - even in
White dominated churches - is not a monolith. Like all human institutions,
it contains variety and disagreement, and evangelicism perhaps even more so
than most, since it emphasizes the personal relationship to God, and
accommodates new churches being founded around particular interpretations
of that relationship. One of the most surprising aspects of evangelicism to
me - as someone who grew up Catholic - was how individuals moved backwards
or forwards across different churches to find one that fit their personal
approach and values.

Given all of this, it is not as surprising as it might initially seem that
a big evangelical church could commit for a while to a campaign centered on
racial justice. Hahrie quotes a sociologist who estimates that roughly a
third of evangelicals are “other” evangelicals who accept the theological
tenets of evangelicism but implicitly or explicitly reject the particular
brand of right wing politics that often go along with them.

But there are more subtle lessons too. One of the reasons that evangelical
churches have succeeded in their own terms is that they don’t simply
welcome converts, but build their organizational structures and practice
around identifying seekers and bringing them into the fold. That can become
a political style too. The late Charlie Kirk created a political
organization that was notable for ruthlessly targeted perceived enemies. He
was not interested in debate in the ways that liberals, who are open to
changing their own minds, at least in principle, are. However, Kirk used
debate not simply to demolish opponents, but to try to win converts to the
cause, exploring what swayable people believed and wanted, and trying to
blaze a path for them towards his own political faith. That is something
that the left could learn from: treating people who don’t agree as seekers,
and trying to figure out how to bring them on board.

So too, people on the left should note how evangelical churches provide a
honeycomb of variegated spaces for people to find community with others.
The breakdown of other forms of organized social life have created a vacuum
of meaning in American society. There are a *lot* of seekers, who are not
just looking for God, but for community connections. A large, rather loose
structure intended to provide general coherence, form and identity,
combined with a multitude of opportunities to construct smaller
cross-cutting groups can be a singularly attractive proposition.

Furthermore, as should already be clear, evangelical churches like
Crossroads are more apt to transformational organizing than the
transactional mobilizing that more traditional political organizations
prioritize on both the left and right. People who get deeply involved in
church life are transformed by their relationships. They are also likely to
be able to apply the organizational lessons they have acquired in other
contexts too. Again, large swathes of American liberalism and the left are
structurally bad at offering those kinds of opportunities, because they
have doubled down on shallower transactional forms of organizing.

But the most fundamental lesson that I took from Hahrie’s book is that
creating justice is extraordinarily hard and demanding. It requires hard
work, courage and grace. We live in a technocratic society, which often
substitutes ritual for labor. We put up signs in our yards as signals of
welcome, and sometimes imagine that this is sufficient on its own. We work
in organizations that require diversity training, through online videos and
multiple choice questions that substitute legalistic box checking for
sustained thought and practice. We yell about how bad things are on social
media, but don’t always do much to try to make things better.

The reason is not that we are bad people, but that it is *really hard* to
try to change things, rather than going through the motions of saying they
ought be changed. There aren’t clear and obvious paths. Even when people of
good will agree that something ought be done, they may ferociously disagree
over how to do it. We don’t know how to succeed, or if we will succeed. And
getting politically involved seems frightening and contentious.

Making it less hard and frightening involves forgiveness and acceptance.
Hard work, courage and grace: of these three, grace is often the hardest.
It’s what Francis Spufford, an Anglican, is talking about when he describes
the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up
<https://substack.com/redirect/6a89a6d3-bb9b-4014-a61e-4c1788d6b31b?j=eyJ1IjoiNHNzbG0ifQ.IyJqpDspWaiEtQl0O4osBF4reJSKLog8ljRlL-UtP1Q>
as a starting point for living a Christian life. We are all wretches,
undeserving of what we have, but from that can come both the hope that we
can do better, and forgiveness of those who, like us ourselves, are
entangled in their faults.

Again, this is something worth learning. Hahrie’s book describes how the
notion of grace can be weaponized to excuse the gross abuse of power. But
she also explains how it may be the beginning point too of our struggles
against injustice, as imperfect human beings, trying to make things a
little better.
Pledge your support
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Restack
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[image: Get the app]
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