Hahrie Han Explores The Work of Racial Justice in an American Evangelical Community

Air Dates: January 13-19, 2025

Race, politics, and religion are three of the most challenging issues to discuss in contemporary America. But Hahrie Han explains the experience of a dedicated group of citizens at a Cincinnati mega-church who went—as the saying goes—where angels might fear to tread.

Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of five books and numerous articles published in leading scholarly outlets including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. She has also written for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation, and delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University in 2024. Her fifth book, “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church,” about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, was published with Knopf in September 2024.

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Han discusses her book “Undivided,” which traces the stories of four people who are organizing around racial justice in the context of an evangelical megachurch that is about 80% white, 20% non-white.  She said, “the book traces the stories of four people, a Black man, a white man, a white woman, and a Black woman who each went through the program where animates work on anti-racism and then had to grapple with what that meant in their lives as they took on that work.”

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