This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
In 2019, poet and reporter Eliza Griswold began reporting on Circle of Hope, a church founded in the spirit of a radical evangelicalism that motivated the likes of Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis. Her new book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, documents her experience.
The church, founded in 1996 by the couple Rod and Gwen White, had spread to four locations by 2019. Griswold saw the flourishing, growing community as an intriguing example of evangelicalism untied from the Religious Right.
Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, asked the pastors if she could follow and report on their lives and work. The four pastors — Ben White (Rod and Gwen’s son), Julie Hoke, Rachel Sensenig, and Jonny Rashid — agreed.
At the time, none of them knew that Griswold would be immersing herself in the messy, painful dissolution of the church. By early 2024, Circle of Hope disbanded entirely.
As the daughter of the late Bishop Frank Griswold, who was head of the Episcopal Church for nine years, she had seen church splits before. In 2003, her father ordained the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop. Many conservative churches that objected subsequently left to form the Anglican Church in North America. In the introduction to Circle of Hope, she recounts watching her “usually reserved dad put his head in his hands and cry over his failure to hold the church together.”
In our interview, which took place the Friday before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, we discussed the lessons she’s drawn from reporting on Circle of Hope. The book raises poignant questions about charisma and power, building community, the death of churches, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What is immersion journalism and what are some of the strengths and weaknesses?
Eliza Griswold: Immersion journalism — in the olden days we might have called it “fly-on-the-wall journalism” — it’s basically embedding oneself in the life of a person, many people, or a community for so long that they forget you’re around.
In the era that we’re in now, there are all kinds of realities related to power, and how that works in conversation, that we have to be more honest about. One of them is the idea that we don’t make any impact by being an observer. And the truth is much more complicated — by just being present, we affect how things unfold around us.
The strengths of immersion journalism are that you get super-intimate views into people’s lives, and you get to know them incredibly well. Some of the complications have to do with representation and journalism in general, but also with power, with boundaries, with the reality of the difference that your presence makes.
You talk about this in your introduction. I know there’s no counterfactual, but do you have any sense of how your presence might’ve affected the way things unfolded over the years you were observing Circle of Hope?
In some of the collective meetings where I was present, especially with the pastors, I wonder if I hadn’t been present if they would have treated one another differently. They were pretty honest; it didn’t really seem people were withholding. But there are definitely places in the course of this book’s unfolding where I encouraged people, not usually during the meeting — I can think of one occasion during a meeting — where I encouraged people to be more honest with one another. Because they were telling me more than they were telling one another.
I kept feeling as a person watching that story that if they were only more forthcoming, they might be able to solve some of the issues. But that might have been a simplistic way to see what they were going through.
I like having this conversation in light of the inauguration, because I think under a second Trump presidency there are a lot of progressive Christians who are leaning into the concept of community, and there are some questions and challenges to community that your book addresses. One of the biggest being leadership structure — or “unstructure,” as Circle of Hope wanted to think of it. What are the challenges of a place that tries to have a very flat leadership structure and limited hierarchy?
I love your preamble about talking about the book in this moment — I haven’t talked about the book in a while. I haven’t thought about it in my day-to-day. That’s an interesting line of inquiry that we might pursue, because there’s a parallel between the failure of Circle of Hope and the failure of the Christian Left to impact the times that we’re in, or to create and sustain a kind of community that becomes a visible counterpoint to attract people. So, let’s come back to that.
The flat hierarchies — this idea comes out of the Jesus freak, Jesus People movement and the utopian ideal that “living as Jesus did” is countercultural, counter-hierarchy, and doesn’t require the infrastructure and bureaucracy of a church.
The reality of the experience — of people being people — is that power is real. And to just assert that power is transcended obscures power’s reality. One of the things that happened here is that people at Circle of Hope coalesced deliberately around charisma. And that often happens in cults, but it also happens in these sorts of flat-hierarchical religious communities, especially if you’re in a Christian community where growth is inherent. Because if somebody’s charismatic, and they can grow the church, they put “butts in the seats on Sundays,” … that’s success. So, charismatic leaders are especially important.
Charisma becomes a currency. In the evangelical and evangelical-adjacent language, we get the language of “gifting,” which really makes me uneasy. Gifting, with leadership and charisma, are all wrapped up in power that doesn’t sound like power and can be sanctified almost as a gift from God.
OK, we’ll come back to the Trump-era question, but to follow up on this, in spaces where there is not an explicit power structure, hierarchy, or authority structure, whoever is most charismatic in the room ends up with the sort of currency to sway decision-making. Am I summarizing that sort of correctly?
Not just to sway decision-making, but they become the leaders. Because in Protestant churches over the past several decades there’s been this conflation with growth and capitalism. Especially in evangelical communities — like, the megachurch model — success does mean people. So, if you are charismatic, you have the ability to attract people, and that makes you more powerful and then power becomes conflated with being chosen.
Not saying that charisma is a bad thing. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, [it’s bad] if power is real, and it gets masked with different terms.
OK, coming back to thinking about the book in light of Trump.
We’re on the verge of this new and frightening time, and [we need] to not live in alarmism, but also not be a frog in [boiling] water.
It’s too early, in some ways, to assess — we saw this spate of essays about “why Democrats failed, blah, blah,” right? — And there is a corollary to that in Christian communities, why are progressive, left-leaning, or just not-conservative communities losing members? Why are they not attractive to people?
Some of the infighting that really harmed Circle of Hope and helped take the church apart was based on divisions within the Left that we saw arise in secular communities as well. Those were really unfortunate because they really weakened — they lost the thread of what was important.
The response to the book that I didn’t really anticipate was that it has a lot to tell us about the mistakes that we’ve made that have led us to such a fractured place that there is no coherent pushback against the Christian Right that really matters.
That’s interesting to me that you didn’t anticipate it. That was the frame from which I read the book, “What is this failure that is happening in these movements that are meant to be — maybe not explicitly — but in some way an alternative to the Religious Right?”
I did not set out to write a book about failure. And maybe that’s because I didn’t see the writing on the wall clearly enough, but I really thought that this was going to be a spunky, edgy subculture of the evangelical Left that nobody knew about and that was growing and attracting new people. I didn’t see the collapse of Circle of Hope, nor did I see that collapse necessarily feed into the larger narrative we’re all familiar with.
This was one of my other questions about doing immersion journalism — you could stay and watch things unfold forever. When did it become clear to you that it was a story about failure?
It became clear around the time that Bethany Stewart, who’s one of the main protagonists in the book — she’s the fifth figure. The book doesn’t say this, but it’s supposed to be a funny and poignant take on “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” that it’s “Jonny, Rachel, Julie, Ben — and Bethany.” She breaks the frame in many ways. About a year before the church decided that it couldn’t stay together, Bethany had this prophetic moment where she foresaw the church needing to come apart.
When she told me what she foresaw, it just made sense that actually, maybe it was a better thing for the church. As the child of a pastor — a presiding bishop who spent his life trying to hold a church together that ultimately split — this ultimate value of togetherness is something that I just was raised to believe in as an inherent good. And there was a moment at Circle where it started to be clear that maybe being together wasn’t good.
I started to see, “Wait, we’re all rooting for them to stay together and maybe not anymore. They’re hurting one another terribly, in the name of what exactly?”
Could Circle of Hope have recognized sooner that they needed to come apart and hurt each other less?
No way. The stakes were — for so many people at Circle, they had already been through a process of either rejecting their family and their childhood community or being rejected. Circle of Hope wasn’t just their church; it was their found family.
This is a trickier aspect of evangelicalism on the Left — and I can hear voices of people who would push back against this — but this idea of salvation as this personal salvation. It’s just too baked in.
Even as the rules they followed or the morals they were guided by changed and evolved in their new iterations, there still was this idea of “better than” and “worse than.” It was difficult to see that chosen family and those chosen ideas fall short and fail.
Could people have left earlier, who was hurt and in what ways, and how that could have changed? That’s not something I can begin to weigh in on. But I think life is going to teach you humility if you don’t accept it from the beginning.
I’m ripping off Chesterton here, but Christianity is a good religion because it has a savior that knew his way out of a grave. Church needs to die; everything needs to die. And the idea that it doesn’t, that it needs to be preserved, is going to lead to problems.
Tell me if I’m misreading you, but I saw a skepticism in the book of a growth mindset for churches and other Christian organizations. Is that fair?
Exactly. Absolutely. It can’t be the goal, because it’s too laden with other American drives that come with other stuff. If you look at the history of the church growth movement, it’s pretty effed up. It comes out of explicitly racist missionary activity in India where the main takeaway was, “Don’t try to bring people from different castes to one church. You’re not going to be successful. Try to evangelize a coalesced social group, because you’re going to have more success if everybody looks like one another coming to church.”
What were some of your hopes for the book?
I thought about helping people find this nascent movement. I thought it would reflect this movement, which would help bring people not to Circle of Hope necessarily, but to communities of its kind.
Do you still hold that hope, even with this story of failure?
I hold the hope that the authenticity of Circle of Hope’s experience and the beauty with which they live — not all beauty, some of the most painful experiences of their lives — have lessons for readers that are so far beyond what I could gin up.
How do you gain trust as a reporter, to the point where a group of pastors is letting you sit in on their private meetings?
It’s different with everybody. In this case, I would say it’s more a testimony to the pastors, their integrity, and their willingness to be all-in on what they’d agreed to do.
I had the benefit that I liked them, and I think, in varying degrees and at various times, they liked me, and that’s a kind of currency like charisma. I was authentically myself with them, and then they were in a crisis, and there I was in its midst. Often I was the only outsider and that allowed them to process things with me that they needed to process.
In retrospect, there are lots of immersion projects I’ve done where I leave feeling that I enlarged the lives of those I was with and that the book was a positive for them and their lives. In this case it’s different, because they don’t look great at all times. It’s pretty intimate. The church fell apart, and the book is all wrapped up with their experience of this painful time.
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