Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eliza Griswold says complaints about homophobia, white privilege and diversity are splintering progressive organizations — including one particular church in Philadelphia. Her book is Circle of Hope. It's a finalist for the National Book Award. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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Evangelical Christians have become the most influential religious tradition in the US including in conservative politics.
My guest Eliza Griswold says that evangelicals also reflect a larger crisis facing American Christians.
She writes, over the past 25 years, some 40 million Americans have stopped attending church.
Scandals over power, money, sex and abuse have called into question the basic goodness of church leaders and institutions.
But the exodus from the church is often misunderstood as evidence of the rise of secularization.
However, when people leave their churches, they don't always leave their faith.
Griswold's new book looks at one example of a church that grew in reaction against the religious rite and became a place for children of conservative evangelicals who rejected their parents interpretations of the Bible but wanted to follow what they saw as Jesus radically socialist teachings.
Griswold spent four years starting in 2019 following a small, idealistic evangelical church in Philadelphia called Circle of Hope, a collective of about 700 people founded in 1996 by Rod and Gwen White.
When they stepped back from their leadership, their son Ben became the leader.
There were three other pastors, two women and an Egyptian American young man who eventually came out as queer.
During the years Griswold embedded in the community, the church faced the COVID pandemic and and the racial reckoning after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer.