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

by eliza griswold
farrar, straus and giroux, 352 pages, $20

Circle of Hope is a Philadelphia church that was founded by a pair of Southern Californian hippie church planters, Rod and Gwen White, in 1996. From the start the group dedicated itself to reaching parts of the community that were typically missed by many of the mainstream churches. Church members committed themselves to being part of the local community, to caring for the marginal and the dispossessed, and to being real presences in one another’s lives. Circle of Hope represented a less publicized stream of American evangelicalism: one that, in Eliza Griswold’s description, was committed to following “Jesus’s radical socialist teaching in literal ways.” It was not politically conservative, but neither was it the kind of liberal church that mostly serves leafy and affluent Democratic suburbs.

Griswold’s book follows the story from 1996 to the present day, through the lives and experiences of a handful of influential members of the community. Though at times it devolves into a tedious, almost day-by-day chronicle of meetings, conversations, phone calls, social media posts, and emails, the overall narrative is straightforward: What begins as a worthy cause espoused by sincere idealists degenerates over a quarter of a century into just one more church characterized by personal rivalries, power struggles, petty squabbles, egos, and recriminations. Circle of Hope is a microcosm of the divisions within American society, torn apart by the same rhetoric and dynamics that have caused turmoil in so many institutions and our public life.

In the early chapters, it is easy to admire the vision and commitment of the people involved. I do not share much of their theology, but the narrative makes clear their sincerity, their desire to reflect the character of Christ to the marginalized, and their ambition to do something great for the kingdom of God. These were not champagne socialists decrying the capitalist system while availing themselves of its choicest fruits. They lived their gospel, in a difficult neighborhood in a perennially troubled city. And yet the dream ended, and rather badly. Ultimately the original vision and culture proved unsustainable, for reasons that should be of interest to every church leader, progressive or conservative, today.

At first, the Anabaptist roots of the founding theology gave the community a healthy desire to avoid direct political engagement. Circle of Hope was a true community, one that welcomed outsiders to its worship services and sought to foster real connection during the week, without the partisanship that so often marks Christian churches.

But the church could not avoid politics indefinitely. We all now live in the world that the New Left built, wherein everything from the Boy Scouts to college math curricula has been politicized. A Christian ethic built upon empathy for fellow human beings certainly captures an important aspect of the truth. The Parable of the Good Samaritan encourages us to help those who are suffering, even when they belong to a hostile community. Once everything is politicized, however, empathy too must take on a political character.

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The problem Circle of Hope faced was that the idea of “marginalization” is implicitly political. One key question concerned the inclusion of the various strands of LGBTQ+ ideology. If the only moral imperative is to give priority to the marginalized, and the only ethical guide is “empathy” as that term is popularly understood, then why not? This question became a major element in the clash between the founders and Jonny Rashid, the pastor who joined the church and eventually took it over.

In 2010, the year Jonny became a pastor, one church member tried to forge links between Circle of Hope and a local LGBTQ festival. Rod White told him to refrain: “We do not want to be divided up by gay political activism.” In 2018, Rod “begrudgingly” allowed Jonny to post a rainbow flag on the church’s Instagram account. By 2022, Jonny, while still at Circle of Hope, was denouncing the church for its past sins of “homophobia.”

The other main element was race: With the rise of Black Lives Matter, it was inevitable that the rebarbative jargon of “white fragility” and the rest would find a home in Circle of Hope. As Griswold puts it, during lockdown and the controversies over police brutality, “a struggle began over privilege and power. . . . The pastors, and the church, turned in on themselves. . . . Circle of Hope, once formed of egalitarian ideals and a utopian vision, started to come apart.” After a police shooting, some of the church leadership wanted to issue an instant statement calling for the dismantling of Philadelphia’s police union. Gwen demurred, asking for more dialogue first: “Our whole community as a church has not had time to come to an agreement.” That was seen as unacceptably lukewarm.

At other times, the race question became part of internal discussions—such as a complex argument about the use of a contractor—that might otherwise have been resolved peacefully. During disputes among the leadership team, Griswold writes, “every conversation, text, email, and proverb came under investigation as to whether it perpetuated whiteness.” At one point, Ben, the son of Rod and Gwen, confessed at a meeting: “I believe in anti-racism. I believe I am a racist, white person. I’m a rare ally in the world.” Jonny, who is Egyptian-American, replied unsympathetically: “Ben, I don’t experience you as a rare ally. I experience you as a white man.”

Many of the characters are admirable in their way. It is hard not to be impressed by the commitment and sincerity of many of the Circle of Hope community, however much one disputes their vision of Christianity as constituted by social activism. But Jonny—who has since moved on from Circle of Hope—is an unattractive figure, even as Griswold tries her best to present him without judgment. In many ways, he is a textbook case of that malaise of our time, expressive individualism. He uses his social media accounts for portentous comments about “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and abusers in the church. He wields words like “homophobic,” “trauma,” and “abuse,” while his allies monitor social media to compile evidence of the White family’s complicity in “structural racism.” His rhetoric comes to dominate the church’s culture, a development some members regard as the outcome of an old-fashioned power struggle. It is hard to disagree with them.

Later, when some members feel that Circle of Hope is no longer a home for them and depart, Jonny is satisfied: “When homophobic people leave your church it’s a good thing,” he tweets. At the climax of the story, Jonny discovers his sexuality, parts company with his wife, and comes out as “demi-bisexual,” while remaining in his pastoral position at the church. According to his fellow pastor Julie, he thereby puts “his body on the line to lead people to follow Jesus.” No mention is made of whether his wife subscribed to this interpretation. The damage done to others merits little mention. In Jonny’s telling, he is the victim of society, a courageous “pastor of color disrupting racism.” Any opposition can be disregarded as the responses of reactionary elements in the church.

Early in the book, Griswold observes that Circle of Hope’s original culture was marked by members’ marrying young. This forged a close connection between married couples and the community as a whole. Thus, the thinking followed, breaking the bonds of an individual marriage would also pose a danger to the community as a whole. It is a shame Griswold does not revisit that issue in the aftermath of Jonny’s betrayal of his marriage vows. Post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments are notoriously fallacious, but the collapse of Jonny’s marriage was a watershed for the church, after which even some of those who had acceded to his other demands seem finally to have had enough.

In an odd way, the troubled, obnoxious Jonny demonstrates the weaknesses of the whole ethical project of “empathy,” refracted through the language of Christian piety but informed by the values of contemporary progressive politics. But anyone who opposed Jonny had no real way to resist. They too were caught up in the ethics of a community in which anyone not at the cultural center could make a bid for special treatment. Rod and Gwen found out for themselves that in the world of progressivism, intersectionality is quite a multitool.

There was an obvious lacuna at the heart of Circle of Hope, as described by Griswold. There was no reference to the transcendent. The concerns and orientation of the community were exclusively toward this world, to natural rather than supernatural ends. Circle of Hope had neither Catholic high sacramentalism nor a Protestant emphasis on the preached word as prophetic utterance. The vision of a loving community that cares for the outcast and the despised is surely a beautiful one, but detached from a foundational sense of the greatness and holiness of God, it will gradually conform to those elements of the world that its leadership finds therapeutic. C. S. Lewis pointed out that only a true heavenly-mindedness can give the Christian a proper outlook upon this world—a point made in painful personal detail by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians. The earthly-mindedness of Circle of Hope left the community listing towards the pettiness of secular politics, right from the start.

Churches need three things in order to be effective. They need a core of doctrinal convictions, which form their liturgical practices and the moral shape of their everyday lives. They need a liturgy that connects heaven to earth and forms the imagination and moral intuitions of the congregation in a manner consistent with those doctrinal convictions. And they need community, wherein real people truly care for each other, seven days a week. Griswold’s account makes clear that Circle of Hope had the latter. It was sadly and fatally deficient in the first two. A statement from one of the pastors near the book’s conclusion captures this fact: Circle of Hope died because “Jonny Rashid took our church and turned it inward against itself, and in the name of inclusion, they became the most exclusive.” But a congregation with no sense of the transcendent, no vision of the God who is greater than this earth’s categories and problems, was always going to be vulnerable to such a move.

One irony of this book—probably not an irony Griswold intended—is that the story of these sincere Anabaptist-type progressives has confirmed me, a Presbyterian, in my commitment to an Augustinian anthropology and belief in the importance of Scripture as normative for doctrine and life. Calvin once declared that doctrine without zeal is like a sword in the hand of a lunatic. One of the many lessons of Circle of Hope is that the same applies to empathy when it is detached from Christian anthropology, Christian worship, and the moral imagination they cultivate.

Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Image by Nick-philly, licenced via Creative Commons. Image cropped.