What the left can learn from evangelical churches

The lessons of Hahrie Han's Undivided

[Baptism by William B. Chappel, courtesy of the Met]

A few days ago, the MacArthur Foundation announced this year’s list of fellows. 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.

Undivided begins 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.

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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 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 Procter 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?

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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 suggests 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 and the experience of 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.

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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 on 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 targeting 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 that might lead them towards his own political faith. That last 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 many 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 difficult 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 acknowledging the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up 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.