In Circle of Hope (FSG, Aug.), Eliza Griswold explores the forces that caused a social justice–oriented evangelical church to shutter.
What was the genesis of this project?
I was on assignment when I ran into a group of young people standing on a street corner in Kensington, which is the Philadelphia neighborhood most stricken by the opioid crisis. I knew even by looking at them that they probably belonged to a church, and that they were doing some deeply service-oriented work. When we think about evangelicals in America, we think of conservative Christians, and that’s the overwhelming majority of the evangelicals today. But at the edge of the movement, there’s a very different understanding of what following Jesus literally means, and I was especially interested in how this group lives their lives because there were two different realities at the same time—the overwhelming growth of conservative evangelical churches right up against the death of moderate mainline protestant churches. And somewhere in the middle lay these evangelicals, who were completely driven by social justice and progressivism.
How did your vision for the book differ from how it ended up?
What I envisioned and what I think the pastors hoped for when we agreed to this project was that the church would serve as a beacon for others, not necessarily to join the church, but to live lives of service—here was a way to live more authentically according to Jesus. I think all of us thought the church would be a case study for a larger movement. And then the pandemic happened, and the community began to turn inward and pull itself apart. For me as a reporter, what’s really humbling is that the pastors continued their commitment to the project.
That’s the reality of immersion journalism—you can’t know. It’s like knocking on the car window of somebody’s life, right? Saying, hey, can I ride along with you for a while? And they’re like, yeah, we’re going to Vermont, we’ll be there in three hours—and three years later you end up in Mexico with three flat tires.
What caused the church to dissolve?
The external pressures around race, privilege, power, and hierarchy caused major ruptures during the pandemic. So on one hand you’ve got systemic forces, and on the other hand you’ve got the human dynamics of any community. What in some ways tore Circle of Hope apart is that through their utopian vision of themselves, they’d hoped to transcend the pressures of worldly forces, whether that was racism or sexism. They hoped they’d rid themselves of these things because they had loftier goals and rejected the world, only to discover that wasn’t the case. They had to undergo this reckoning whether or not they wanted to.
