Can We Stand Undivided? w/ Hahrie Han

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impact of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:25] This week on the show, I’m joined by Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Hahrie Han. Her 2024 book is Undivided the Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American church, and it’s a fascinating ground level chronicle of the years long efforts in a Midwestern evangelical church to reckon with their city’s history of racial segregation and police violence.

[00:00:45] But first, these headlines. Israel is escalating an already simmering regional conflict by sending missile strikes against Iran. All of this, while they’re cutting off internet access in the Gaza Strip, I’m sure that by the time that you hear this, someone’s member of Congress is gonna sign on with Trump to say something about how these strikes were somehow justified.

[00:01:03] But I struggled to understand how offensive attacks against civilian targets are self-defense so much for Trump. The peacemaker, however, the big story this week is obviously street protests in Los Angeles and beyond, and their fallout. I was chatting to a friend who expressed some amazement that last week’s interview with Brittany Ramos.

[00:01:21] Debaros happened literally a day before the mobilization of troops to la, but I really don’t think it’s a coincidence. The ramping up of the raids has been a steady drumbeat for weeks, and it comes as the budget reconciliation bill is moving through Congress, which includes provisions that would expand Trump’s ability to mobilize troops and surveil civilians.

[00:01:42] All of this is leading up to Saturday when Trump will indulge some very expensive taxpayer funded dictator cosplay. There’s a lot to say about this, including the age old media story about what is or is not violence. And I’ll say this, first and foremost, engaging this argument is not the, is exactly the terrain the administration wants us to be fighting on.

[00:02:01] It is not favorable terrain for us. There’s a gotcha around every corner out here. But the terrain that we can and should be fighting on is this ice kidnapping teenagers and the parents of toddlers who are graduating from preschool. That’s violence cuts to Medicaid. That’s violence. The escalation by the administration sending in Marines to the city is an intentional attempt to bait people into confrontation because ultimately they must be confronted.

[00:02:28] I also really wanna remind everyone that LA is far from the only place where this is happening. Even though the media spectacles around LA ICE is ramp ramping up operations and people are fighting back all across the country. And this also seems like a good moment to remind everyone because I’ve seen some well-intentioned.

[00:02:47] Troubling posts from neighbors on social media, sHahrieng rumors about ice activity, that you should be as specific as possible when sHahrieng that information. Don’t share unconfirmed rumors and do share how many officers what they’re wearing, what agency they’re from, where they’re located, and what they were doing.

[00:03:04] Panicking people is not gonna help anybody right now, but sHahrieng good verified information absolutely will. On Thursday, some progressive and left organizing groups received a letter from Senator Josh Hawley’s office and Josh Hawley is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Counter-Terrorism. It was a list of demands that they are alleged to have a role in financing and material supporting the coordinated protests and riots, specifically referring to protests against ICE in LA this past week.

[00:03:33] The letter demands that these organizations preserve almost all recorded communication since, and no coincidence here, November 5th, 2024. This includes emails, texts, messaging apps, media, even donor lists. The letter concludes that failure to comply will result in criminal investigation. First off, this framing of quote unquote funding coordinated protests and riots is a standard tactic of the authoritarian right consistently manufacturing this narrative that protests against them is never just a natural up uprising of a majority of people who are really upset by their policies, but rather it’s always made possible by paid outside agitators or instigators, which incidentally also feeds into a very old, antisemitic conspiratorial trope about the quote unquote secret money behind what happening in the news.

[00:04:23] This frame has multiple objectives. There are, of course the obvious in there is of course, the obvious intention of chilling free speech, scaring activists into silence and submission by staking out a few high profile targets and then making an example of them. It’s not a coincidence also that some organizations saw letters posted to social media before they received them directly, like this was an intentional outreach by the Senator’s office to do this.

[00:04:48] It’s also the case that these threats can mire organizations in the procedural morass of complying with subpoenas, dealing with legal challenges, and that takes their energy away from providing the vital resources and legal protection for the communities that they serve. In this case, immigrant communities.

[00:05:06] Even beyond the protest moment, one of the biggest organizations that received a letter was the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in LA or Cheerla. Cheerla does a variety of kinds of work, including advocacy for inter immigrant communities, but they’re also an anchor community organization that provides support for small businesses.

[00:05:23] Law provides low cost, legal and notary services, and also other basic quality of life stuff for immigrant families. The demand for materials is ones, it’s ridiculous, and the message to organizers is clear. Any effective opposition to the MAGA regime will now be considered a quote terrorist threat, providing them with the supposed legal authority to harass and try and dismantle their work.

[00:05:46] I know that this is an intense and scary escalation for those of us working in the block and build frame right now. We, of course, want movement organizers to simultaneously be safe while we deepen our commitments to our cause, if you’re feeling outta sorts from the intensity of these escalations. Our recent article featuring practical tips for Community Safety Planning from Vision Change Win might come in handy.

[00:06:07] Also, the organization we are California among of which Cheerla is a member, has also put together some demands as well as actions that everyday people can take to help folks respond to this moment. We’ll put links to both of these things in the show notes.

[00:06:26] My guest today is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, an author of the 2024 book, undivided the Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, Dr. Hahrie Han. What was meant to be an investigation of a six week program became a chronicle of about seven years of work at an evangelical church in Cincinnati, Ohio that was struggling with questions of racial injustice and their own intersections with the issues that arise between their faith and political organizing.

[00:06:52] Hahrie and I recorded this interview a little bit earlier. Take a listen. Ha Han, thank you so much for joining me today on Block and Build. Thanks so much for having me. To start us off, can you set the book up for us a little bit? What is the book and what inspired you to spend so much time in Cincinnati with this community?

[00:07:10] Hahrie Han: Yeah. So the book is called Undivided and it traces the story of four people who are all members of the Crossroads Church, which is the third largest evangelical mega church in America. And the four characters. A black woman, a black man, a white woman, a white man. All are people of faith who participated in a racial justice program the church had developed called Undivided, hence the title of the book.

[00:07:36] And the story traces their journeys in terms of what brought them to the program, what their experience within the program was, and then also how they began to enact the work of anti-racism in their lives afterwards. The first half of the book is called Agitation because it talks about how they get agitated to do this work and what their experience in this six week curriculum that is at the heart of Undivided.

[00:07:58] What that was like for each of them. And the second half of the book is called Backlash because all of them, once they began to enact these principles of anti-racism in their lives, experience, backlash from their families, from their workplace, from their church community, from other places. And so the kind of question the second half of the book is, what does it take for people to stay committed to this work?

[00:08:17] But the way that I came into it was really by accident. I am not from Cincinnati. I did not grow up in an evangelical community, so neither of these were things that were really familiar to me. But I was in Cincinnati because it, so in my day job, I’m a political scientist and I study social movements and organizing and was really interested in a ballot initiative that had happened in Cincinnati in 2016.

[00:08:40] Because if you remember, 2016 was the first Trump election. Trump won Ohio by eight percentage points. But in that same election Cincinnati passed a municipal ballot initiative called Issue 44 that essentially raised taxes on residents in the city in order to find universal preschool.

[00:08:56] And it was a very progressively structured measure. Cincinnati residents were essentially voting in higher taxes for themselves in order to allocate resources for the neediest communities in the city, which because of Cincinnati demographics is primarily a black community. But they also did things like, in the proposal in issue 44 also put in things like good jobs for for daycare providers, many of whom are black women that ran home daycares in their homes, and so I was really curious to and then actually the other thing I should say about issue 44 is that it passed by the largest margin of any new education tax in Cincinnati history. It passed by like 24 percentage points. And so as a political scientist, I was just like, wait what’s going on here?

[00:09:35] How was it that we had this election where even though Trump won. Sorry. Even though Clinton won Cincinnati as a city that like statewide, Trump had won, it was a red, election, but there was this ballot initiative that was very progressive that had passed in an unusual, with an unusual super majority.

[00:09:53] And so I was there trying to understand what had happened in the ballot initiative. And when I went, people kept saying there’s this church, they were sending all these volunteers. In these kind of campaigns there’s almost always a church, but it’s usually two people who made a few phone calls and they’re like volunteers.

[00:10:05] But it turns out that it was hundreds of volunteers, black and white people of faith who had all been part of Undivided. And were animated through their work in Undivided to get involved in this ballot initiative campaign. And they were part of this like Tide that built this really multiracial cross ideological, super majority coalition in the city in order to pass the ballot initiative.

[00:10:29] And so once I learned that and then learned also that all these people had that Undivided was part of this evangelical mega church, I thought, okay, what’s going on here? And so that’s how I got interested in the program and then the story just unfolded from them. 

[00:10:43] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it is a really interesting anomalous thing also because, and you do write in the book quite a bit about the investments that a lot of the sort of like mainline American Evangelicalism has in also white Christian nationalism.

[00:10:59] And so I’m really also interested in that phenomenon. ’cause I grew up in suburban Michigan, which there are a lot of things that are very similar about. Phenomena that are happening in Michigan. But I’m curious about what you found with the emergence of Undivided as a program and also what maybe makes cross the Crossroads Church special in some ways?

[00:11:21] Hahrie Han: Yeah. One thing I’ll say is, so before we started this project, I really, all I knew about non-denominational, Protestant Evangelicalism was probably like what I read in the New York Times. Yeah. And, I read the statistics then in 2016, it’s eight and 10 white evangelicals voted for Trump and.

[00:11:36] I saw a lot of these churches as being crucibles of white Christian nationalism. And I think what I learned through this project is that there’s actually a lot more heterogeneity in the evangelical community than I think is commonly understood. And so there are, there’s both, I think, political and kind of mythological reasons for that.

[00:11:53] And so as a social scientist, like one thing I’ll say is that I think the data that we have paints a skewed picture of the white evangelical community because a lot of the kind of survey data that we rely on in the public dialogue depends on people who self-identify as. Evangelical. And I think there are a lot of people who go to churches like Crossroads for example, that are deeply people of faith.

[00:12:17] They believe in a Christian God. They believe the Bible is literal, like they believe all the things that form the core of the theological core of evangelicalism. But they would not say to a pollster, I’m Evangelical because they assume that if a pollster calls me from, and says, Hey, are you even Evangel duck?

[00:12:32] What they’re really asking is, are you Maga? And they might say I’m not MAGA ing even if I go to church every Sunday and I believe the Bible is liberal, believe Christopher God, which is all the kind of theological evangelicalism. And through this project I got immersed in a lot of parts of the evangelical community.

[00:12:47] I remember talking with Walter Kim, who’s now the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and one of the things he said is that one of the things they’ve been thinking about within the NAE is that. There are people who are theological, evangelicals, but there are also people who are political evangelicals.

[00:13:05] And the political evangelicals may or may not believe in the theological tenets of Evangelicalism, but they adhere to a political identity that associated with Evangelicalism. And then there are people, then they had a couple other different categories, like people who just inherited the faith from their families, different things like that.

[00:13:20] Sure. And and crossroads is a church that is definitely, clearly evangelical, but they, part of what I was interested in is a church that holds together people who are, Democrats and Republicans, pro-Trump, anti-Trump White. They’re 80% white, 20% non-white. It’s a very ideologically and politically diverse community in a moment when we don’t have many of those in America.

[00:13:44] And I was, so I think that one of the things I really took away from this project is that there’s just so much more heterogeneity in the evangelical community because I think we don’t have great tools to measure the different ways in which people might identify with the faith tradition. And so that’s a complicated question to answer.

[00:14:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I found it so interesting too, ’cause I found myself while I was reading the book, thinking about there was a period of time that, like my mom, who like after she retired was, just like this, white suburban, middle class retiree who was like very lonely in suburban Michigan, trying to find community, found herself at Kensington Community Church in Troy, which you mentioned.

[00:14:28] Yeah, I was like one of the churches that was also interested in Undivided, but also not finding the community that she wanted there necessarily. But like these are places that are, they’re in public, they’re like civic institutions in some way that are growing in a time when there are crises around the sustainability of civic institutions.

[00:14:47] Which I think is also one of the things that makes the sort of like peeling the onion here to be particularly interesting too, that it’s like there’s something that. These kinds of institutions promise or offer people that is perhaps missing in other parts of our lives together in the United States that also feels like an important piece of the puzzle.

[00:15:12] Hahrie Han: Oh, a hundred percent. Let me, so let me give you a few data points on this. Yeah. So again, like I, I didn’t know, these are buried into the book, but when you put it all together, I think it paints a different picture. So Crossroads itself, when I is now a 35,000 person church, which means they get 35,000 people that show up every week.

[00:15:28] And there’s there’s no political organization in the country that can do that to get 35. Most organizations, if they got 35,000 people once in a decade, they’d be delighted. And Crossroads does it every week and they get about 500,000 people that tune in online. So they have a scale.

[00:15:44] Yeah. That is just incredible. So that’s one thing. The second thing is that, they’re the third largest mega or by, at a certain point in time, they’re the third largest mega church in America. I’m not exactly sure where the number is now, but they’re one of the largest megachurches in America.

[00:15:56] Megachurches in general are defined as being churches that are 2000 or more people. And the median mega church in America has, I think, and I don’t have the exact numbers, but something like 5,000 members and a $6 million a year annual budget, 96% of their budget comes from individual donations.

[00:16:14] So they, and the average mega church has been grew by 34% in the last period that we have data. And so church attendance in America has gotten so skewed towards these large churches that the top 9% of churches by size contain 50% of the church growing population in America. That’s wild. Yeah.

[00:16:31] Church attendance are heavily skewed towards these large churches. And so they’re growing. And they’re becoming more diverse. Yeah. And they’re, and people are contributing in big ways to them. And I think we could have a whole debate about theologically, is the mega church the right way to bring people into relationship with God?

[00:16:45] And that is a vibrant debate within lots of faith communities. But as someone who’s just interested in civic life and community life, as you were saying, you can’t deny that these churches are providing something that people are seeking, right? Because people are going to them, they are participating in them, they’re engaging more actively than they engage in a lot of our other organizations.

[00:17:05] And so for me, I was really interested in. Undivided and the ability that the program had to really animate people into this work that became issue 44. But then also as someone who studies civic life and community organizing and things like that, like I was just really interested in how does this operate at scale, in an enduring way.

[00:17:25] And we just don’t have a lot of examples of that in 21st century life. And I feel like I learned a ton from the experience and just thinking about how do you draw people off the sidelines into public life? How do you scaffold their engagement in a way to make it last? All the different kinds of questions that organizers ask.

[00:17:42] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I was struck also by the sort of like recurring questions about like, where are there bright lines around who is or who’s not in our community? That also kept coming up, especially with the black pastor in particular with Chuck, that like a lot of his experience that you describe is about negotiating what are hard boundaries, what are not hard boundaries, and how do you carve out a place for yourself within an institution?

[00:18:10] And the like small group aspect of how these huge churches organize themselves do seem to be a piece of that puzzle that that’s what made it possible for Undivided to exist in the first place. But I was curious if you could talk a little bit about Yeah. That small group model, because I think that there’s.

[00:18:30] There’s something that I’ve seen there also replicated also in some successful movement groups, right? That the Yeah, for 

[00:18:35] Hahrie Han: sure. 

[00:18:36] Cayden Mak: Autonomy and also belonging at the same time. 

[00:18:39] Hahrie Han: Yeah. Just to give a little bit of background on Chuck and then I’ll circle back to the small group. Chuck is the black pastor who started Undivided.

[00:18:46] He’s someone who grew up in the black church in Philadelphia. He moved to Cincinnati originally ’cause he was a salesperson with Procter and Gamble. He thought he was gonna have a career in business. And then he felt called into the, into ministry and then eventually became joined the pastoral team at Crossroads.

[00:19:01] And he’s in he’s a very talented preacher, was one of the most popular preachers in the church. And the head pastor at Crossroads is a white man named Brian Toman. But Chuck was the campus pastor for their largest flagship campus. And so he had a prominent leadership role.

[00:19:18] And in 2015. It was a national debate around policing was happening. There was a police was, this was not the first one, but there was another, police shooting of an unarmed black man in Cincinnati. And that was, caused an outcry. The city was threatening to drive the city apart.

[00:19:34] And Chuck stood up on the main stage at Crossroads one week and said, I feel called to be a voice of racial justice and racial healing within our city. And he thought, he knew that would, that he had not, he’d grown up in the black church and race had been at the center of his church experience and that, but that had not been something that he had preached about much if at all, at Crossroads.

[00:19:53] And so he knew that when he did that would cause some controversy. But he thought that would be it. And instead what happened was that thousands of people from the church community reached out to him and said, Hey, if you do something I wanna be a part of it. And that’s when he felt like, oh, all these people want something done.

[00:20:08] I have to do something. And that’s how Undivided was. Was born, but you’re right. Then once he built Undivided and it began to grow and have the, the success that I write about in the book, he had to wrestle constantly with questions of what did it mean to be a black leader, in a white dominant church in a very politically fraught moment.

[00:20:31] The book goes from a, the story kind of goes roughly from about 2016 to 2022. So it’s the first Trump administration, the pandemic, George Floyd, all of these things were like this foment was unfurling in American politics and he had to navigate his way through that. I think I would’ve used, I would’ve characterized Chuck’s journey a little bit differently than how you did in the sense that, I don’t know that Chuck himself would’ve said that part of what he was negotiating is trying to figure out where his hard lines were.

[00:21:00] I think that. Part of what Chuck was doing, and part of what Undivided did in general was trying to help, Chuck himself was doing this. And then this is what Undivided was trying to do for participants is help people develop like a compass that enables them to navigate the uncertainty of what it means to live in a, to, to live a life of anti-racism in a society that is very racist, right?

[00:21:29] And that has lots of racial injustice embedded into every facet of life. And I think that that’s what Chuck was trying to figure out is what is the compass that that is gonna guide him and how does he both identify and then live by those principles And, so the small group model, I think part of the reason why that was so important is so small groups is are essentially like, self-governing, self-organized, small groups of anywhere from let’s say eight to 15 people.

[00:21:57] That is a hallmark of the mega church experience in America. So the small group could be a Bible study, it could be Chuck was, had what a group that he called the dude group that was a group of men that was a group of people that he initially pulled together and then they met every Tuesday night for years and years.

[00:22:14] And the people from the dude group were the Paul Bearers and his father’s funeral. Like they became very intimate friends with each other. So the tructure or the small group could be, people who wanna go rock climbing on Fridays, on the west side of Cincinnati or something like that, right?

[00:22:27] Yeah. They can be organized around any kind of thing. And they’re they’re these self-governing groups. But what I realized is that in some ways, they’re the secret to scale for these churches, because what they enabled were these communities of intimate connection through which people were able to negotiate difference in a very human scale way, and essentially in a world in which we, are not encouraged to do this thing, the small groups formed a crucible where people were able to rehearse a different way of being with each other. So in Chuck’s do group, it was a cross-racial group of men that were all people of faith, but they had real differences when it came to the way they understood issues of race in America and issues of politics.

[00:23:09] But they also, wanted to talk about what it meant to be a good father and how to be a good husband and, so it was a kind of holistic embrace of people as whole people. But what the reason why I think it really mattered for the church was twofold. One is it enabled scale by essentially creating a cellular structure that became the building block of growth, so it’s as I think one of the big mistakes that we make in movements a lot is that we assume that what you wanna do is have a small group of paid staff who are trying to get, build a list as big as possible, give many people involved. But that one to many structure means you have no real relationship with your base.

[00:23:45] And the small group essentially enabled a kind of honeycomb or a cellular structure that enabled people to have a deep, intimate connection. And by knitting a lot of those together, like that’s how you gotta scale. But then the second thing is that one of the things I was really struck by is that, over the course of the first Trump era and the Pandemic, and George Floyd, like of course at some point, crossroads did something that angered almost everyone in the community at one point or the other.

[00:24:09] And what a lot of people would say to me is, I’m really mad at Crossroads, but I can’t leave my small group behind. Or I remember one po, one person at one point said, the small group is my church. The idea being that like I, right now I’m angry at Crossroads, like I don’t feel like they really represent me.

[00:24:25] Like they’re not my church, but you know what my church is, it’s this group that meets every Tuesday night that, these are people I have a deep relationship with. And so what it did was that small group structure enabled the church to bend under pressure without breaking apart. And I think that says a lot about, what does it mean to be in a situation in which you can negotiate difference and you can negotiate boundaries.

[00:24:44] And someone like Chuck, who is constantly cross pressured as a black leader in a white dominant church, evangelical mega church in America, how does he. Negotiate those complexities without feeling like his only choice is to walk away. 

[00:25:00] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And that thing that you also, you talk about both in Chuck’s story, but then also Grant’s story, the white man that like this experience of, and also Jess’s story, the white woman, this yeah.

[00:25:12] These challenges around like being faced with a choice about exit and Yeah. I think that the thing that’s coming up for me here, you talk about this, is also thinking about, having mass organizations that don’t have the kind, those, these kinds of spaces for intimacy also create the problem where like exit becomes really easy.

[00:25:31] Hahrie Han: Yeah, totally. It becomes an easy 

[00:25:33] Cayden Mak: solution because like one power and like responsibility is concentrated on like probably a small cadre of people and then if you are dissatisfied with the direction, then you’re like how am I supposed to change this? I feel very alienated from the structure and I’m out.

[00:25:49] Yeah, because I think is a really familiar, probably a very familiar experience to a lot of people Yeah. Participate in, in something. Yeah. 

[00:25:56] Hahrie Han: One of the things I try to do in the, and the book is really structured as a story about these four people’s lives, but I try to sort of pepper in a little bit of social science here and there.

[00:26:03] And one of the things I talk about is this, there’s this famous book by one of my favorite political scientists named Albert Hirschman, who talks, it’s called Exit Voice and Loyalty. And his argument is exactly what you’re saying, that, market-based organizations operate on a logic of exit.

[00:26:16] So if I’m the customer and I don’t like the product that the company is making, then I just go buy a different one. So if I don’t like Cheerios anymore, then I go buy checks or whatever, right? And, but in political organizations or public organizations, they can’t operate on the logic of exit. So that if I get mad at my church, I shouldn’t just go exit and find another one.

[00:26:34] But they should use my voice in order to try to influence and change the direction that I object to. Voice depends on people having loyalty or commitment in order to be willing to do that. And to me that’s like the heart of democracy. There’s a famous political scientist, I don’t think I quote him, but who says, the promise of democracy is that we compensate for inequality of resources with equality of voice, right?

[00:27:01] So if we accept that in the world, there’s somehow always gonna be some inequity of resources. The way in which you establish a system of countervailing power in which different kind of people with different viewpoints and different backgrounds can learn how to live together is through equality of voice.

[00:27:17] And I think it’s one of the things that’s so hard about the political moment that we’re in right now is most, we don’t come outta the womb knowing how to exercise voice. It’s like those set capacities that we have to learn. 

[00:27:29] And most people don’t have the opportunity to do that.

[00:27:31] But that was one of the really unique things about a place like. 

[00:27:35] Cayden Mak: Yeah. It strikes me too, in thinking about this tension between exit and voice that you’re describing is also that like the logic of neoliberalism that has really become deeply even as the system of neoliberalism is being questioned in a lot of ways, but like cultural logic of neoliberalism has become a part of our movement organizations, of our communities, of the way that like we show up with each other and that so much of understanding or I think it, it strikes me that one of the things that’s really useful about that framework about exit is also identifying the ways in which that market-based logic has become a lot of the logic of like social identity in a lot of ways for us.

[00:28:20] Totally.

[00:28:20] Hahrie Han: Completely. Yeah. No, I think that, that. If we think of public life as just being a marketplace, then, it ends up, we end up with a lot of the problems that we have right now in your thing, right? Where identities are categorical, where people just, people exit.

[00:28:35] We can never build, we never do the hard work of negotiating difference. We can’t build coalitions, we can’t do any of the work that actually makes small p politics possible. The other thing too is, there’s a phrase that people in crossroads use a lot that like encapsulates a ton of social science research, like way better than any academic paper I’ve ever seen, which is this idea that belonging comes before belief, right?

[00:28:58] Which. I think that the logic of the market would argue that if you don’t like the policy stance of an organization, then you leave that organization, you go find an organization, and what end up is that we’re all fragment in these little micro communities that have led to the kind of social isolation and the fragmentation and all the problems that we’re facing right now in our society.

[00:29:19] And so how do you counteract that? It turns out that if you assume that belief has to come before belonging, which is what most of our political organizations do, then they’re essentially spending all their time preaching to the choir. But actually what social science research shows is that.

[00:29:38] Our beliefs flow from our social commitments to each other, right? And so what Crossroads was really effective at doing is they were saying, look, belonging comes before belief. And so they’re not gonna try to hide the ball. They’re, we’re an evangelical mega church. We believe that in a Christian God, we believe the Bible is literal, like we believe.

[00:29:53] They weren’t like lying anything that they believe. But their point was, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, like you’re welcome in our community, right? So you could be atheist, you can believe in a different God, you could believe in our God, it doesn’t matter. Like we welcome you with open arms.

[00:30:08] And they had the culture of radical medical hospitality that brought people into community. And I think that’s what people are hungry for. When you look, think about the growth in these megachurches and then. Consistent with what the research shows. As people began to feel belonging in their communities and their beliefs about God, their beliefs about whatever would begin to evolve.

[00:30:32] And similarly, that’s what happened in Undivided. Undivided was organized into small groups and people were placed into these cross-racial groups, and the first thing that they try to do is really establish a community of belonging. That within that group so that people would feel comfortable challenging each other on some of the really hard questions that come up when you confront issues of race in any community in America in 

[00:30:56] Cayden Mak: particular.

[00:30:56] Yeah. Yeah. I the talking about the actual sort of like structure and content of the Undivided program was really interesting to me because I was instantly like, oh, I know about this because when I was in college at the University of Michigan I participated in a program called the Program and Intergroup Relations.

[00:31:14] And yeah, it’s designed in a very similar way that you have two facilitators who often have like opposite or like very in some ways like opposed experiences of social oppression across on a specific axis, and then the group is divided in like pretty evenly between those two identities.

[00:31:35] And that, like you move through that a similar process around like thinking about the broader world, thinking about your place in it, talking about yourself and your experience. And it was radicalizing for me, as a 19-year-old where I had a sort of like the sort of like surface level analysis where I was like, yeah, we live in a racist society. This stuff’s fucked up. Like I have experiences as like an Asian kid who grew up in a very white place and what do these things mean? But that it was a really and a lot of the like personal relationships I formed then when I became a facilitator are relationships with people that I still have to this day.

[00:32:15] And in particular, like somebody I co-facilitated, we redesigned the gender curriculum to be like inclusive of trans identities. And like that person and I, we still are in touch. Like she is, somebody who has been a very formative person in my life. And I was like, oh, I get this, like on a really deep level because like in some ways I lived it.

[00:32:35] But in this like specific, like secular Yeah. Educational environment. So can we talk a little bit about the undivided model and yeah. Yeah. Like what, and I’m also curious like their, the development process, like how they came to this? 

[00:32:49] Hahrie Han: Yeah. So maybe I’ll say a couple things. So just give the, the audience like background.

[00:32:53] So basically, undivided is it’s, it’s started in the Crossroads Church. It now is a non, an independent nonprofit that runs through churches and workplaces and other organizations around the country. At the core is a six week program on essentially like DEI kind of stuff.

[00:33:09] It’s like a curriculum on anti-racism. And people are organized into small groups that are deliberately cross race. And every week essentially there’s like a teaching that happens. And then some like small group work and then homework in between. So that’s the heart of the program.

[00:33:25] And then after the six week journey ends, they invite people into what’s called a series of on-ramps that are structures for on, for ongoing activity for people to then think about how they live these principles out in their lives. That’s basically the structure of the program, not dissimilar to lots of other programs like the one at Michigan is, you’re not the first person I’ve heard of.

[00:33:42] Having had a formative experience in that program, which sounds like a great program. There’s a lot of us. 

[00:33:46] Cayden Mak: Yeah, totally. And it’s been going on since I think the late nineties, so there’s a lot. Yeah, 

[00:33:49] Hahrie Han: exactly. And to me, so that’s the point in a way. So part of what made me interested with Undivided is that when I first heard about it and they’re like, yeah, like I was like what happens in the six week curriculum?

[00:33:58] People were like you learn about implicit racism, you take an implicit racism test, you learn about structural inequality. And things that were really like not that different from a lot of other programs. All the research on these kind of DEI programs are that they’re actually very ineffective, right?

[00:34:11] And so I was like if they’re basically teaching the same stuff that everyone else is teaching, like what makes it, how is it that they were able to animate so many people that actually what makes it different? And I think one thing that I really came to that I think is similar to program, again, like not having been a student at Michigan, but from what I’ve heard about programs like the one at Michigan and other similar kind of programs, is that it wasn’t so much the content of what they taught, but the way that they engage people in action that allowed them to take responsibility over their own learning.

[00:34:42] And so what I mean by that, so one of the things that I was thinking a lot about is, I’m a social scientist, I just wanna put things on ticket. A two by two table is, is what is the way in which Undivided was cultivating people’s agency, right? And if you imagine what are the kind of invitations that we usually get in public life?

[00:34:59] So if you imagine a two by two table, like on one dimension, you can imagine a social dimension. That moves from, things that we’re asked to do that are totally isolated and individualistic to a, on, on the other end of the continuum are things that we’re asked to do that are, highly connected, socially embedded, like deep in communities of belonging, right?

[00:35:16] And then there’s like a learning dimension, let’s say also where you we’re asked to do some things in which you don’t learn anything. There’s no risk involved. And then another dimension in which you’re, you learn a lot from taking action and you take a lot of risk as a result because risk and learning are often correlated.

[00:35:32] The vast majority of things that we’re asked to do in public life are isolated and not no learning, right? It’s sign a petition, give me $5, come out and vote, show up for an event. Right? Where essentially what we do is we outsource strategy onto professional staff. So it’s look.

[00:35:49] Give me, gimme your time, gimme your name, gimme your money, gimme your body, whatever. But let me decide what’s gonna happen with a petition. Let me decide how we’re gonna spend your money. And so people are asked to do things that they can do alone that don’t involve any learning or any risk on their part.

[00:36:05] And Undivided was essentially doing the opposite where they were locating people in deep communities of belonging through these small groups, right? But then they were asking them to take risk, and so instead of the kind of DEI programs that I take, in my workplace where they teach me about implicit racism, and then tell me.

[00:36:23] And if you confront this situation in your work here’s what you should do to make sure you don’t get sued. And you’re like, what 

[00:36:28] Cayden Mak: is, how is this useful? Yeah. 

[00:36:29] Hahrie Han: Yeah, exactly. But they, but what on the bottom is okay, like now we just taught you about structural inequality, or we taught you about whatever, and now you’re gonna be put into your small group and then figure out how you were gonna think about and negotiate and make sense of that and interact with each other.

[00:36:44] Given that you have people who, you know, who had ancestors, who were enslaved, sitting along with people whose ancestors are probably worthy ens flavors, and and that was like a real thing that came up in one of the un undivided groups. And how do you negotiate that? And there’s no script for how you negotiate that.

[00:36:59] And so what that meant was that people made mistakes. They often said things that were really offensive to each other, but they stuck with it because they had this community of belonging. And then what happened at the end was by the time you got to the end, then people owned the results of the change.

[00:37:13] And so that’s why I think they were more willing to stay more committed afterwards because the change was, they owned that change as opposed to having had it imposed on them by somebody else. And so that’s what I think is like really different about programs like Undivided relative to programs like the one at Michigan or something like that, is what is the extent to which we invite people to cultivate their own agency versus inviting them to outsource their outrage to professional staff who are gonna provide the answers for them.

[00:37:42] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it is really interesting ’cause I think that the yeah, when I think back on a lot of that experience is like, those actually were some of the first experiences I had where I was like, oh, like I actually, I am not just subject to a system of like racial or gender hierarchy.

[00:37:57] Like I am also an active participant in them in a variety of ways. Yeah, sometimes in ways that I’m, a lot of the ways that I’d never consented to, and yet. And participating in. And that yeah, I think in some ways, like the challenge of the semester system means that you have a limited time engagement.

[00:38:14] But that, like one of the opportunities of these, like small groups within the church is that then you were able to like, have this sustained engagement yeah. And grow and evolve. And I do think the other thing that I wanna lift out of what you were saying was like, this thing about trusting people to take on leadership is like such a big aspect of this, that it’s cutting through a sort of like individualist or even consumerist kind of mindset about what it means to participate in civic life.

[00:38:49] That I found to be incredibly compelling. Yeah. 

[00:38:52] Hahrie Han: It’s like trusting people to be strategists, trusting people to strategize about the change that they want in the world to, act on this sense of how do I close the gap between the worlds as it’s in the world as I think it should be.

[00:39:03] And so we’ve somehow developed a system where it feels like we don’t really invite people for the opportunity to take those kinds of actions or to do that kind of strategy. And it’s then in the end, then they end up not becoming agents and they’re instead pawns in a game that someone else is controlling.

[00:39:20] And when they don’t like the choices they’re offered, then they blow the whole thing up, 

[00:39:23] Cayden Mak: or they become conspiracy theorists, so whatever. 

[00:39:25] Hahrie Han: Yeah. One thing you wanna say though, just before I forget, is Yeah. One thing I think is, I try to emphasize this in the book, and I always think it’s important to say too, is that I’m not claiming in the book, nor do I want to claim that Undivided is a perfect program, or Crossroads is a perfect church.

[00:39:38] And so they are both flawed because they’re human institutions built by flawed humans, and we’re all human, right? But I think, what I really respected about both the work of Undivided and the work of Crossroads is that you had a set of people, a set of leaders there who were really grappling with trying to navigate some very complex injustices, inequalities questions, in public life.

[00:40:01] And their commitment to staying involved in the struggle is what I really came to respect, even if I didn’t always agree with the choices they made. And so there were times in the book when both the people who are a part of the story or the leaders of Undivided or the leaders crossroads, would make choices where I thought that’s not what I would’ve done.

[00:40:21] But that was, that didn’t matter so much. It was more because what they were trying to do is, they were developing that compass. They were taking risks. Taking risks means you take, make mistakes. If you never make mistakes, it means you’re not taking risks, and so I think one of the things that I really took away from the whole experience of working with Undivided is just that.

[00:40:38] That commitment to staying in the struggle is a really it’s a nontrivial, non trivially important thing as we, as our world gets more and more complex. Because so many of the problems that we’re trying to solve are problems that don’t have formulaic answers. And I’m really suspicious of anyone, left or right that sort of says I have the perfect solution, because I just don’t think that’s how these problems get solved. 

[00:40:59] Cayden Mak: No, and it, I, I was also struck by, towards the end where you did bring up the fact that like at some point somebody had released a basically like a sort of like memo about all the ways in which Crossroads has been really like harmful and challenging for L-G-B-T-Q congregants.

[00:41:17] And people in the community and that, like one of the things that, it was just like a sentence, and I can’t remember exactly how you phrased it, but one of the things that struck me was I was like, oh, I bet, like some of the skills that folks were building. Struggling together through these questions about racial injustice, like there’s an opportunity there to abl apply some of those skills to this new question, this new challenge that like I think in a lot of ways may be also, it is also a theological one, right? That it, it cuts to the heart of I think a lot of, for speaking for myself as a queer person being like, yeah, like this is emblematic of my experience with institutionalized religion. Especially Christianity and especially white Christianity that like this is, this is a, like another, like a new front of struggle for them to really be like grappling with. But like they have they’re approaching them with more likely, more tools than they would have before Undivided. That there’s a portability of the skillset that is maybe available that wouldn’t have been beforehand.

[00:42:23] And I’m, I’m just really curious about your reflections on that and yeah, like what does, it, does it does, did it feel to you like they were like, oh, there are resources that we have internally in terms of like practices and cultures that like 

[00:42:36] Hahrie Han: Yeah. Can help with 

[00:42:37] Cayden Mak: approach this?

[00:42:38] Hahrie Han: Yeah, for sure. These kinds of things are all very intersectional. So it’s once you begin to question the ways in which race structures injustice in our society, you can’t help but begin to question some of these other es of difference For sure.

[00:42:51] So absolutely, there’s like a portability about it. But the other thing I think that’s important to say relative to the point that you just made is one of the questions I’ve gotten a lot as I’ve talked about in the book is do you think this kind of work is possible outside the context of the church?

[00:43:03] And implicit in that question is this assumption. I think that the reason this program worked is because they all had a common faith in a common God that, which I think is actually not the reason why it was important that they worked in a church. Yes. It, the fact that they’re all part of the same kind of social community absolutely helps.

[00:43:20] The fact that the faith community that was, that social community was a faith community, I think it mattered not because they all believed in a Christian God or something like that, but I think it mattered more because what faith traditions do that I think is really different from a lot of political organiz issue based organizations is they believe in the inherent transform ability of people to transform themselves, right?

[00:43:44] So the idea of being born again is fundamentally this idea that I was a sinner and then I found God, and now I am, I am saved, right? And so to the idea that we can all save ourselves. And so the reason why that mattered is that when we went into this small group, and let’s say I’m a white person and I’m sitting next to a black person and I’m confronting the differences in the way that we understand race.

[00:44:09] I don’t look at that person and assume that whatever you think about me is what you’re gonna forever think, right? Or if I’m a black person, I see a white person, they say something offensive. I don’t assume just because you’re racist now means that you’re forever gonna be racist and you’re unsavable, in that way.

[00:44:26] So that abil that belief and the ability of people to transform themselves, I think really formed a foundation that’s consistent with the idea that belonging comes before belief that enabled people within the community to grapple not only with questions of race, but questions about sexuality, questions about, like all of these kinds of things where the answer that we have now is not necessarily fixed was the was with sort of the ethos in a way that I think is, different.

[00:44:53] A story that I tell sometimes. Like I, I go, I was doing a book talk once and with a group of organizers, like kind of lefty organizers. I had taken the train to the city where the book talk was, and I was chatting with some of the people who showed up beforehand. And some guy comes up to me and he’s oh, like how did you get here?

[00:45:08] And I was like, oh, I took the train. And he was like, oh, how did you offset your carbon? So to not offset my carbon just to me. And I thought like taking the train was a pretty reasonable way to like problem. But as soon as he said it made me feel like not good enough.

[00:45:22] Like it made me, and then when I said oh, actually, like I had off my carbon, you could tell he was Ugh, 

[00:45:27] Cayden Mak: wrong. I can’t believe her. Yeah. 

[00:45:29] Hahrie Han: And he gave me a list of resources that I could use to compensate for my feelings, and but it was just this thing where I was like, wow, that’s like totally different than like than welcoming people into a community of belonging and then trying to like, bring them along on a journey that helps them understand their carbon footprint differently.

[00:45:43] Yeah. Like immediately he made me feel excluded and not good enough because I hadn’t I hadn’t offset my carbon. And so I think, there are that sort of question of like, how much do we think people can transform themselves is a really important question to grapple with. 

[00:45:58] Cayden Mak: Yeah.

[00:45:58] I think that this was like, one of the really big things that I walked away from the book with was thinking about this sort of like radical proposition around grace. And I think that in my experience, like it, it really made me think about like movement spaces that I’ve been in and like where were the places that I felt like transformation was possible for me and for the people who were in those spaces with me.

[00:46:25] And I think that at the end of the day, like not all spaces are meant to do all things, but I do, I did think a lot about a lot of like abolitionist spaces that I’ve been in, which, especially prior to the 2020 uprisings and, like black Lives Matter and the movement for Black Lives popularizing, defund the police as a demand.

[00:46:46] Most people in the abolitionist organizing spaces that I’ve been in were like, we are not gonna assume that you all think that we should like, get rid of prisons and police tomorrow. Because in fact, there’s like a lot of disagreement within abolitionist movements about what the process is. And that those were some of the most generative movement spaces that I’ve ever been in, just because people were like, we actually have more questions than we have answers.

[00:47:12] We know that policing and prisons are part of the problem, but like how we get there is really we just don’t have a model of it. There’s always been policing basically since the founding of the United States. Like we don’t have a, we don’t have a pathway. And thinking about.

[00:47:31] What are the things that set those spaces apart? And some of it was actually like a lot more time for study that like, yeah. I, it strikes me that one of the things about Undivided is also we are creating a learning space and being really, and like being explicit about that as opposed to being like you’re gonna come to this thing and I’m gonna tell you how it’s Right.

[00:47:50] Yeah. But yeah. Instead it’s we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna talk, we’re gonna think critically about our experiences and we’re gonna learn together. And that there’s actually something really valuable about that ethos. But yeah I also wonder more generally is like, how do we create some of these spaces for people to transform themselves?

[00:48:06] ’cause another piece of that, I think again, comes out of a lot of abolitionist spaces that I’ve been in, is the knowledge that in order to truly transform society, we also have to transform ourselves. Like we have to be. Ready to change the way that we think, the way that we behave, the way that we treat others and frankly, the way that we treat ourselves.

[00:48:26] Yeah. Sometimes the worst cop is the cop in our heads, right? Yeah.

[00:48:29] Hahrie Han: Yeah. So just a couple things I wanna respond to. So I think that point about learning is so important. And like in my day job, I study social movements and organizing, right? And like one of the and like one of the epigraphs that I put at the front of the book, I think is a quote from Grace Lee Boggs, where she talks about this idea that there’s no end state, right?

[00:48:46] It’s not like we’re ever gonna get to a world in which like all injustice is eradicated and we live in a just world. And then change shall stop. The world will forever be just like, that’s just not gonna happen. It’s just not the way humans work. And so to me, that’s why the struggle that we’re in is a struggle to build a system in which.

[00:49:04] All people can have equal voice, right? In which pe different people of all kinds can exercise countervailing power. And then we can be engaged in a real learning process to try to figure out how do we create the world that we all want together. And and to me, one of the real challenges of it, of inequality or injustice is that there’s systematic differences between who has power and who does not have power.

[00:49:28] And that’s, and so the problem is not one person’s vision of the world is inherently superior to another person’s vision of the world. The problem is that we don’t have that ability to have a real robust deliberation about what the world is that we wanna co-create, about how we forge a common life together.

[00:49:46] And so I think that point about learning is so important because that’s at the heart of. Of so much of this work. But then the other thing that you said, I just also wanna pick up on is I think part of what I really learned a lot about in, in Undivided is about that relationship between personal transformation and social transformation.

[00:50:04] And I think part of what Undivided was able to do is bring people on a journey that helped them. Again begin to question and develop this compass for who they wanted to be in the world. And then think about how, what does that mean for what I must do because of what I now understand?

[00:50:22] And that relationship between the answer to what do I now understand and then what must I do is that relationship between personal and social transformation. And then because they’re in the teach church, they’re able to scale it through this like cellular structure that we talked about and, all those kind of things.

[00:50:37] And so yeah, it was this I thought about it like kinda like a fractal where, the pattern that you see and the individual has to get replicated in the small groups, which gets replicated in the bigger, and so on and so forth, until you create a different, positive, different kind of way of being.

[00:50:49] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. No it’s very interesting and it’s like interesting to see it play out in some ways, like observing it in an unfamiliar context. It’s actually really helpful, right? 

[00:50:58] Hahrie Han: Yeah, for sure. 

[00:51:00] Cayden Mak: One of the things that I was thinking about also, to bring it a little bit back to the present is so much of this was happening in the context of the sort of like spiciest years of Black Lives Matter culminating in some ways with the 2020 uprisings.

[00:51:16] And I, I think a lot of people are looking back, now that we’re five years on from the 2020 uprisings in the June of that year there’s, there is this tension between riding what can be an unpredictable wave of somewhat spontaneous action. This sort of like punctuated moments and movement history and then this long slow work of building a like durable political vehicle that can support people, that can develop them to be in the practice of democracy.

[00:51:41] And I thought that one of the things that was interesting about the book is that you were engaging in the storytelling about how individuals and groups navigated both that like super spicy moment in the June of, in June of 2020. And before that also. There are these punctuated moments that kind of shape the narrative in a lot of ways.

[00:51:59] And also trying to build something like authentic and durable and really like multifaceted and meaningful that are not just the sort of like moment when the mainstream media is we care about this suddenly ’cause everybody’s talking about it and there’s 20 million people in the streets or whatever.

[00:52:16] But I’m curious if you think that there are some lessons in here for us as we’re thinking about this tension, because I think we’re in the moment of tension right now too, where like escalations from the Trump administration, especially against immigrant communities are compelling a lot more people into action who maybe previously were a little quiescent, let’s say a little dormant politically.

[00:52:41] And groups are navigating this phenomenon again, where like we have to think about. Some people talk about it as absorption, but I also think there’s like a deeper thing here when we’re talking about the learning and personal transformation piece that’s like, how are we making space for that in this moment?

[00:52:58] And like how do we walk that delicate line, right? That there’s a lot of competing concerns and I think that, when I think back to 20 20, 1 of the challenges that our movements did face was about like how to sustain this kind of action. Yeah, I don’t know. 

[00:53:17] Hahrie Han: Yeah. 

[00:53:17] Cayden Mak: So the question makes sense.

[00:53:18] Hahrie Han: Yeah. Yeah. A couple things. I think that, if I look at all the research on organizing and movement building and social movements and stuff like that, then one of the key lessons that come out comes out of it is. How we engage each other shapes what we’re able to achieve together, right?

[00:53:34] And so one of the big mistakes I think the media makes and how it reports on social movements or protests, is that it treats all forms of collective action the same, right? You got a thousand people out, a thousand people here, a thousand people there, that it’s all the same no matter how you did it.

[00:53:46] That’s just not true, right? Like the research is pretty clear that how we engage people in turning them out, how we, what experience they have there, like all that kind of stuff really shapes the durability of their participation, their willingness to be flexible when policy goals change, their willingness to stick with leaders when, the political moment changes, whatever.

[00:54:07] All these kind of things really matter in the ability of a movement to achieve its long-term goals around political power. And so I think that. As we think about the question, the point that you’re making, it’s really important to understand not just like what we’re asking people to do, but how we ask them to do it.

[00:54:28] And then the other thing I would say is that I think it really gets back to this question in this political moment is people are getting, are feeling all this outrage. The question is, how do we turn that outrage into the power to make change? And I think the misunderstanding that we have a lot of times is that if we just get, if we just put all those people into motion, they will stay in motion like by themselves.

[00:54:49] Like they’re a windup toy or something. Yeah. And that’s just not true, right? We know that the history of social movements in 21st century are these like huge spikes of activity when you see outrage and then huge declines. And sometimes even backlash, which is what we saw after George Floyd, right?

[00:55:02] As that outrage declines and or turns on the movement, and the way you beat that, that back is through an infrastructure of deliberate distributed leadership of the kind of cellular structure. So that as people, as that moment of public outrage begins, decline, the sort of relational connections that maintain people’s dur durable commitments is a kick into action.

[00:55:26] And if you don’t have that infrastructure that you’re just relying on constant outrage to, to get people engaged. 

[00:55:34] Cayden Mak: Yeah. No, that makes a great deal of sense to me. And I think that there’s a lot of stuff that there can learn from and iterate on from like that that period. I’m glad that people are taking a moment now even though the political conditions seem wildly different to really reflect on where there are opportunities to not make some of the same mistakes of that time. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Hahrie ha, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and thank you so much for making the time to chat about the book and about how we do the very difficult work of personal and social transformation.

[00:56:11] Hahrie Han: Thank you for reading the book and for inviting me onto the podcast. It was super fun. I really appreciate it. 

[00:56:15] Cayden Mak: Awesome. Thank you so much. My thanks again to Hahrie Han for joining us today. Her book, undivided is available now from Penguin Random House. We’ll include links to find it in the show notes.

[00:56:25] This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for Radical Insights. I’m Kaden Mak, and our producer is Josh Stro. Kimmy David designed our cover art and Logan Gross is our intern. If you have something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running an upcoming mailbag episode at [email protected].

[00:56:44] I’m also excited to announce our 2025 Summer Fun Drive. Every summer we have a focused effort to raise money to sustain our publishing, and this year we’ve set an ambitious goal of a hundred thousand dollars for movement media. Anyone who starts an annual or monthly subscription gives $25 or more, or upgrades their subscription, we receive special thank you gift.

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