Review: Two gripping books show how churches responded after George Floyd and Philando Castile killings

Eliza Griswold’s “Circle of Hope” is about four pastors at a Philadelphia church riven by its response to racial discrimination after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020. Hahrie Han’s “Undivided” focuses on four parishioners of a Cincinnati church having similar conversations after several police shootings of Black men.

That isn’t all the books have in common. Both show that up-close, long-term reporting can yield stories as gripping as any novel.

Combining rigorous research with relatable real-life characters whose stories are told in straightforward sentences, Griswold and Han have written insightful books about faith, race and the failures of communication that often plague us.

Reporting by Griswold, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Amity and Prosperity,” reflects the steady decline in churchgoing. In 2021, Gallup pollsters published an unprecedented finding: Fewer than half of Americans were church members. The church in her book sought to offer something different from the Protestant evangelical congregations many of its Gen X members attended as kids. But from a peak of 700, its membership tanked amid internal controversies.

Circle of Hope — the book takes its name from the church — was founded in 1996. Members believed they had a responsibility to help their community’s poor and marginalized residents. Inspired by an “anti-capitalist, anti-empire vision,” they fed unhoused people and raised money “as a form of reparations” for Black residents.

But, as Griswold demonstrates, the church’s pastors couldn’t agree on Circle of Hope’s response to Floyd’s murder. Some Black members, suggesting the mostly white church needed to fix itself first, recalled racially insensitive comments made at private gatherings, and said their contributions had been “erased” by white leadership.

The pastors hired a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant. But when he believed nobody was cooperating, the DEI guy quit. Inevitably, disagreements worsened. Wounded by the church’s only non-white pastor’s claim that his colleagues upheld white supremacy, Circle of Hope closed for good a few months ago.

Determined to capture her subjects’ conflicts, self-recrimination and body language, Griswold spent countless hours by their sides and “sat in on more than one thousand hours of Zoom meetings,” an unenviable but fruitful task.

Han was just as committed. Her reporting on Crossroads, a Protestant megachurch, produced 1,471 hours of audio and video recordings. Her book spotlights another major trend: While small churches struggle, most of the country’s 1,000-plus Protestant megachurches (defined as having 2,000 members) are growing, according to recent surveys.

Han crafts detailed depictions of Crossroads members, among them a Black pastor whose sermon about race angered some white members, and a white woman, raised in an unabashedly racist home, who gradually becomes an integral member of Undivided, Crossroads’ initiative devoted to hard discussions about race. “Philando Castile was my George Floyd,” she says, recounting how she became an outspoken anti-racist after Castile was shot to death by police in Falcon Heights in 2016.

Evangelical Protestantism, Han notes, has historically “conceptualized racism as a problem of individual sin and prejudice and ignored the way it was tied to questions of power.” The fraught conversations captured in this book depict the “blowback,” as one member put it, that can follow when churchgoers confront institutional racism.

Both authors understand that, as Griswold writes, “churches are messy places where people seek many things, among them a common understanding of something larger than they are.” These excellent books demonstrate how hard that can be to achieve.

Kevin Canfield is a regular contributor to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s books coverage.

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

By: Eliza Griswold.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $30.

Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church

By: Hahrie Han.

Publisher: Knopf, 304 pages, $29.