Dispirited Away

Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, begins her latest book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, by announcing her method as “immersion journalism.” The technique, she suggests, is “unruly,” akin to climbing into a stranger’s car and going along for the ride, wherever it takes her.

The term seems relatively new, and nobody seems to agree on examples. Some sources cite Barbara Ehrenreich, working undercover in Nickel and Dimed, or Buzz Bissinger, investigating a season’s worth of high school football for Friday Night Lights. Griswold says she relies on “multiyear observation and direct engagement with primary subjects.” The one relevant detail she shares about herself is that her father was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church during the period about twenty years ago when the institution split over the ordination of gay bishops.

In Circle of Hope she embeds herself in a small evangelical church in Philadelphia, devoted to Jesus and socially progressive. Beginning in 2019 she goes on this ride for four years, relating the story of the church’s rise and fall by spending time with its young pastors, attending more than a thousand hours of Zoom meetings (much of her reporting occurred during the pandemic) and numerous church services, baptisms, and potlucks. She interviews more than a hundred church members.

We don’t get much more of a definition for immersive journalism, although Griswold does touch on subjectivity, remarking that people behave differently “under observation.” The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has called the term “a phrase I think was made up yesterday,” and one wonders how it differs from the New Journalism practiced by Truman Capote or Joan Didion or indeed from the magazine’s decades-long practice of allowing reporters to embark on the kinds of pilgrimages that resulted in John Hersey’s 31,000-word article on Hiroshima or Robert Caro’s lengthy pursuit of Lyndon Johnson, all projects undeniably immersive.

As we make our way through Circle of Hope we wonder: What are the rules of this new journalism, if any? What will be revealed that might not be addressed by any other kind of intensive reporting? And crucially: Is the immersion worth the candle?

Circle of Hope, a church consisting of several congregations in the Philadelphia area, grew out of the Jesus movement of the late 1960s, powered by ecstatic born-again left-wing hippies. These were the souls who made the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell into transcendental hits in the 1970s. Among them were Gwen Mockler and Rodney White, two lay preachers who had met in Southern California in the mid-Seventies, “falling in love with each other and with Jesus.” When they married, she was twenty-two. He was twenty-one.

An antiwar activist in sun-bleached hair and cutoff jeans, Gwen was apparently as inspirational a preacher as her long-haired, wooden-cross-wearing husband. She quickly found herself sidelined, however, teaching at a public school in order to put Rod through Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. At the Baptist church in Riverside where Rod was serving as a youth pastor, she wasn’t allowed to preach. Outraged by the church’s insistence on the submissive role of women, she nonetheless helped Rod appeal to the youth group by cooking communal dinners they called “Love Feasts,” which were meant to be reminiscent of the meals Jesus shared with his disciples.

By 1979 the couple were seeking to break free of the Baptists to head up their own “Jesus commune” from a ranch house they bought in Riverside. Rod, now twenty-five, became its “visionary leader.” They started a family. Gwen gave birth to four sons within as many years: Jacob, Luke, and fraternal twins Joel and Ben. Rod and Gwen shared money and meals with their flock, which voted on any course of action involving expenditures.

Rod, however, was not satisfied to go it alone: he yearned to be part of a “larger collective.” In a decision that would have serious repercussions in years to come, he yoked his nascent commune to the Brethren in Christ (BIC), a denomination founded in Pennsylvania in the 1700s that numbered around 20,000 in the US. The Brethren were themselves part of the larger Anabaptist movement, which hails from the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. From their earliest days Anabaptists scorned infant baptism, believing the sacrament to be effective only when performed on those old enough to confess their faith in Christ of their own free will, a practice known as “believer’s baptism.” Thus, adults baptized as infants had to be “rebaptized.” The Anabaptists were pacifists, holding to a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount that prohibits any form of violence, including military action. They embraced nonconformity, nonresistance, nonviolence, the sharing of possessions, and love feasts. Those in the movement’s inspirationist branches indulged in ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues, aroused by the Holy Spirit. They were not averse to miracles or the idea of the resurrection of the dead.

From these beginnings the Anabaptists spawned a bewildering number of sects, including various flavors of Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites, such as the Beachy Amish, the Schwarzenau Brethren, the River Brethren, the Bruderhof communities, and multiple branches of Dunkards, who went in for foot washing, holy kisses, anointing the sick, and head covering, as well as total immersion baptism, having deemed sprinkling or pouring inadequate.

Far from welcoming these refinements, the Roman Catholics and old-line Protestants throughout the 1500s and 1600s showed a keen interest in hunting down, torturing, and killing as many Anabaptists as they could find. Believers, by virtue of their devotion to nonviolence, would not resist when captured. Put on trial, they were subjected to all manner of torments to compel renunciation of their faith—burned with red-hot irons, whipped with birch rods, cast into freezing water, or their arms plunged into kettles of boiling water. Found guilty, they were drowned, a practice which became known as the “Third Baptism,” although hanging, drawing and quartering, beheading, and burning at the stake were popular alternatives. Anabaptist martyrs fill an entire volume known as The Bloody Theater, or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, published first in Holland in 1660, illustrated in 1685, and subsequently republished in 1745 in Pennsylvania, where many Anabaptists, Amish, and members of related sects fled. Printed in German by a monastic order known as the Ephrata Cloister, the Martyrs Mirror published on these shores was more than 1,500 pages long, the largest book of pre–Revolutionary War America. It’s said to be a popular wedding gift among Mennonites.

Rod and Gwen may appear far distant in time and temperament from such zealotry, but their beliefs were notably radical. During the 1980s Rod was convinced that Ronald Reagan was the devil and the Antichrist and that “this could literally be the end-times.” Griswold is a little fuzzy on why Rod was so determined to sign on with the Brethren in Christ, with its ties to Anabaptist tradition, and we don’t learn much about Gwen’s views on it. The author does convey a weird tale of Gwen’s anticapitalist fervor, which took the form of denouncing Easter candy as blasphemy. With her boys, then six, five, and three, she shattered chocolate bunnies with a meat tenderizer and tore the heads off of marshmallow Peeps. The children ate the remnants. Griswold calls this “wonderfully zany.”

By the 1990s Gwen was tired of preparing all those communal love feasts, and the family took itself off to central Pennsylvania, which they soon found a little too rural and conservative. At a BIC conference they responded to a call to minister to the poor in Philadelphia. On the drive there, discussing what to name their new congregation, they rejected the word “church” as likely to discourage young followers. Gwen came up with the key words, and Circle of Hope was born; its first worship meeting was held in 1996. Settling into an old Victorian in West Philadelphia, a largely Black section of the city, the Whites held to communal values by inviting another Anabaptist family to move into the house, and invited drug users as well, so long as they refrained from using on the premises. In 1997 Gwen completed a degree in “psychology and spirituality,” turning a church closet into her practice, Circle Counseling.

Rejecting the tradition of the sermon, Rod opened up meetings to the group, inviting “talkback,” questions, and dissent. He encouraged the formation of “cells,” or small groups meeting midweek in homes, dorm rooms, or skate parks. It was a growth strategy practiced in Christian churches in South Korea: when cells reached a certain number, they were divided and “hived off” around a new apprentice pastor, often chosen from within the group.

Early on Rod and Gwen emphasized the importance of charitable businesses designed to address the needs of their neighbors and lift up the poor. Among other nonprofit ventures they launched Circle Thrift, which employed people recently out of prison. In addition to selling donated secondhand clothing and kitchen and other wares, Circle Thrift ran exchanges where new parents could acquire baby clothing, strollers, breast pumps, and other necessities. Circle of Hope also continued to host seasonal love feasts, invited twelve-step programs to meet in their spaces, and supported, through their “compassion teams,” a bail fund, a debt relief campaign, and a project to help undocumented immigrants navigate the system. Circle Thrift became so profitable that it soon supplied a fifth of the church’s budget; much of the rest of its takings was donated to the Mennonite Central Committee, a nonprofit relief organization affiliated with the Brethren in Christ, among other sects. The committee’s income in the US and Canada, as of 2022, was more than $47 million.

Through outreach via its cells and popular charities, Circle of Hope grew to support several congregations in Philadelphia, including the one led by Rod in Center City, which had around 250 adherents—the largest following.Others were located in the neighborhoods of Fishtown and Germantown, a historically Quaker area founded in 1681 on land granted to William Penn, where, in a meetinghouse in 1723, the Brethren in Christ had held their first baptisms and a love feast. Another congregation formed just across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, named Marlton Pike, after the South Jersey throughway. All of these groups held services in the most modest of surroundings—Fishtown in a former dentist’s office, Marlton Pike in an old firehouse. Circle of Hope had grown from approximately a hundred congregants in its first year to top what churches term the “700 barrier” in the 2010s.

By 2015 Rod was planning to step aside while continuing as “development pastor,” a position that allowed him to supervise—or meddle, as some saw it—from behind the scenes. Instead of replacing himself, he sought to abolish the pastor system entirely in favor of an organizational vision he termed “the Amoeba of Christ.” The Amoeba, as in the single-celled organism, was illustrated by a drawing of five concentric circles and was meant to allow for leadership by various core teams. In 2020, while the church was struggling with the transition between its founder and younger pastors, the pandemic hit, along with the most significant national racial reckoning in decades. By this time, Eliza Griswold had embedded herself in the group’s amorphous, virtual circle.

While Rod White may have been proud of his seven hundred progressive followers, anyone familiar with the evolution of right-wing evangelism in the US will recognize how modest its numbers were. In 2014 the PEW Research Center published a survey showing that a quarter of Americans are evangelical Protestants, making it the nation’s largest religious group. The Public Religion Research Institute, an independent nonpartisan group, found that as of 2013, 19 percent of Americans of any faith were religious progressives. Of that number, only 4 percent were white evangelical Protestants. Thirty-eight percent of Americans were religious moderates, 28 percent were religious conservatives, and 15 percent were nonreligious. But among religious conservatives, white evangelicals filled out 43 percent of their cohort.

Conservative white evangelicals—many of them part of the “emerging church” movement, which seeks to modernize Christian worship, or the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement of the 2000s, which reintroduced Calvinist values (named for a 2008 book, Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists, by Collin Hansen)—have chalked up astounding gains. In 1996, the same year that Rod and Gwen held their first Circle of Hope meetings in Pennsylvania, the Mars Hill Church in Seattle was launched by a twenty-five-year-old conservative evangelical pastor, Mark Driscoll. It quickly grew into a multisite megachurch with a weekly attendance of over 12,000.

Reactionary evangelical practices that lay far outside any denomination won wide acceptance. A 1997 book by Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, encouraged the fad of “purity culture,” in which approximately 12 percent of young Americans pledged to abstain from premarital sex and masturbation. While faithless young people continued exploring their sexuality, evangelical youth—mainly young women—donned purity rings, signed virginity pledge cards, and attended purity balls, where their fathers promised to protect their chastity. Some refrained from kissing their betrothed until they were standing at the altar.

The wildest spectacle of evangelicalism in recent years was Hillsong, a megachurch import from Australia that rode the multiplatinum popularity of its worship music to revenues in the millions and a membership of over 150,000. By 2014 Carl Lentz, a tattooed “rock star” pastor with shaved chest and chiseled torso, had baptized Justin Bieber in the bathtub of an NBA player and was drawing seven thousand people to stand in line in Manhattan every Sunday for a chance to watch him sashay his strategically tight trousers through multiple services at Hillsong New York. Volunteers, who did most of the actual work of putting on the services, naively assumed that the enormous “Welcome Home” banners on display applied to everyone. Hillsong was widely believed to be socially progressive.

With astonishing rapidity, all of these evangelical stars waned. Lentz burned out by 2020, when the press gleefully discovered that the celebrity pastor, married with three children, had been carrying on torrid affairs with his nanny and a kimono designer while taking heroic amounts of Adderall. Not long after, the Australian pastor who founded the Pentecostal church that became Hillsong was revealed to have been a serial pedophile. Joshua Harris denounced his purity culture book, forswore the movement it inspired, and rejected Christianity. Mark Driscoll, accused of misogyny, plagiarism, and other irregularities, resigned from Mars Hill, where attendance crashed.

Those worshipping at the Whites’ Circle of Hope soon learned that it had something in common with Hillsong’s brand of evangelicalism—not its rock star proclivities but its bad faith. Circle of Hope had been promoting itself as progressive, but its association with Brethren in Christ made it anything but. With some caveats, BIC opposes abortion. It rejects homosexuality and discourages divorce. It does allow women to preach, but the biblically based belief that men should be leaders and women submissive followers died hard with Rod, who had a tendency to treat all his pastors with condescension, especially the women, sneering at their lack of seminary training.

Circle of Hope was tied spiritually and economically to the Brethren, which had the power to seize its buildings and financial assets if it strayed from BIC’s conservative beliefs. Lentz danced around it, but Hillsong’s founding pastor was clear that the church did not believe in same-sex marriage. Circle of Hope didn’t either and was beginning to earn a local reputation as a “progressive, homophobic church.” In ways it could never have predicted, the humble Philadelphia circle was about to reckon with the consequences of its own bigotry.

Griswold organizes her tale Rashomon-style, taking up in turn the viewpoints of the four pastors, “this bright and funny band of Jesus followers,” who agree to let her shadow their daily lives and religious work. First we meet Ben, the youngest son of Rod and Gwen and an outspoken, brusque, awkward figure who’s leading the group at Marlton Pike. Generous to a fault, he’s always ready to offer church facilities or aid to those in need. On the other hand, his radical devotion to his faith is often expressed in profane and off-putting ways, such as when he describes himself as “a bitch and heir to my dad’s church.” Or when he says, “I’m not an American. I’m a Christian.” Or when he calls his father a “dickhead” or tells one of his fellow pastors to “fuck off.”

Julie Hoke, an anxious, thoughtful figure, hails from the Anabaptist stronghold of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where she was born into the well-known Bitterman family, a clan of conservative evangelical missionaries. As a child she attended the Lord’s Boot Camp, outside Orlando, Florida, learning disaster relief skills such as ditch digging and cement pouring. Subsequent missionary experiences in Ethiopia soured her on what she came to see as colonialist interference and ultimately led her to Circle of Hope. She serves as pastor to the Germantown group and occasionally has visions of Jesus speaking to her.

The third subject, raised in the Poconos in a conservative family that drew inspiration from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist behemoth that began lobbying against LGBTQ rights in the 1970s, Rachel Sensenig became a social worker, forsaking her early indoctrination to lead group therapy for transgender people and queer people of color with HIV. A former devotee of purity culture, she sought counseling, trying to separate herself from Dobson-style submissiveness while maintaining her faith. As one of Gwen White’s therapy clients, she was eventually drawn into Circle of Hope. In her early forties, she too has had visions, seeing Jesus kneeling in a corner on one occasion, “advocating” for her family. She was the group’s first female pastor, taking over Rod White’s Center City group and moving it to a former funeral home in South Philly, on Broad Street.

Jonny Rashid is the youngest of the four followers, born in the US in the mid-1980s, several years after his parents, evangelical Christians in Cairo, fled religious persecution by moving to Allentown, Pennsylvania. His father, formerly a medical doctor in Egypt, worked at McDonald’s while searching for a residency here. As a child, subjected to racism and prejudice after the September 11 attacks, Jonny feared demons and the Rapture. Excitable and intellectual, he disdained Circle of Hope at first but was won over by Rachel, becoming pastor of the Fishtown congregation in 2010. That’s the same year Rod prevailed upon Jonny to discourage a gay man in his cell from political activism. To force the man out entirely, Rod dissolved the cell.

All four pastors are married and have children, but in Philadelphia, a city almost evenly divided in population between Black and white, Jonny Rashid is the only pastor at Circle of Hope who is a person of color. A number of previous Black pastors have left, sometimes abruptly, under circumstances that suggest they were less than satisfied with the Whites’ regime. While happy to inveigh against the Iraq War, Rod White had long quashed any form of political activism that he termed divisive, going so far as to call it an “infection,” banning certain songs and dismissing Kwanzaa as “idolatrous” for its celebration of ancestors.

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white policeman, tensions over the racial makeup of Circle of Hope come to the fore, as parishioners debate whether to issue statements denouncing police brutality. Griswold introduces a fifth voice, that of Bethany Stewart, a young Black Circle of Hope member who’s drawn into the fray. A member of Rachel’s Broad Street congregation, Bethany has long been dismayed by the white power structure of the church. In the past she had admonished Rachel multiple times for sharing pictures of her online without her permission, a practice she found exploitative and triggering (she has body image issues). She is disenchanted when Jonny is enlisted to discourage her from posting Black History Month prayers on the church website. Yet she persists in organizing antiracist book groups, trainings, and other events. Angry over these kinds of activities and disgusted that his guidance is no longer welcome, Rod resigns at the end of that year.

Over the following months, with the membership still roiled by bitter arguments on police brutality and other issues, the four pastors and other church leaders decide to hire a professional racial justice and equity consultant, a former pastor with a long history of working with faith groups. Meeting by Zoom, the whites—and the Whites—disgrace themselves in ways that seem almost comically inept. Ben White repeatedly describes himself as a “so-called white,” undermining his investment in the proceedings. Rod and Gwen stir the pot by sending divisive e-mails, and Julie fails to brief the consultant on Bethany’s extensive antiracism work, an omission that infuriates Bethany, deepening her conviction that her efforts have not made a difference. The consultant himself is puzzled, “worried about what he experienced as ‘a flatness’” among the white members and struck, Griswold writes, by “the lack of trust among people who shared cells and houses and lives. Didn’t they share the same values?” After weeks of dispirited discussion, convinced that Circle of Hope is, well, hopeless, the consultant quits.

That’s the beginning of the end of what Griswold early in the book calls a “vibrant and visionary” cohort, an opinion that is not borne out by the ensuing narrative of dissension and estrangement. As the pastors prepare to open the Circle to LGBTQ members, thereby drawing the wrath of the Brethren, Jonny comes out as queer, something that doesn’t surprise Rachel, who’d attended his wedding (he wept in distress throughout). Rod and Gwen are banished (Gwen calls it the work of “the devil”), and Ben quits as pastor. By January 1, 2024, Circle of Hope is no more.

This tale of hurt feelings and accusations reads at times like a religious soap opera. Griswold’s immersion is both impressively detailed and claustrophobic, our perspective trained relentlessly on the pastors’ personalities in what feels like a weary exercise in self-effacement. Her own voice is muted. She falls into the cozy jargon of church speak, with frequent references to “pastoring,” “community,” and “Spirit.” One practical question that never gets answered is how much access she had to Rod and Gwen White, the founders. How far did their participation go, and shouldn’t the reader be told?

Despite a brief note about “Methods and Sources,” we’re never given a clear sense of immersion journalism’s rules of engagement. Judging by the lack of skeptical thinking and standard reportorial follow-up—essential features of New Journalism—we’re left to conclude that Griswold has put off her judgment with her immersion, abdicating the responsibility to probe, to analyze, and even to distinguish between reality and fantasy with regard to the pastors’ visions. She maintains a baffling neutrality, and thus we learn in a remarkably offhand fashion that Circle of Hope practices shunning, if not “officially.” We’re told it’s an old Anabaptist “tradition.” When Luke White and his wife, Sarah, divorce, she is shunned by other church members and instructed not to attend church services or cell meetings or to socialize with longtime church friends. Shunning is a cruel practice, a form of rejection so severe that it has been termed a “social death penalty.” How does Gwen White, a therapist, justify that behavior? We never learn the answer, although Rachel eventually apologizes to Sarah for her participation in it.

Generally, Griswold casts the women in the book as a modern-day Martyrs Mirror writ small, long-suffering Marthas who readily accept misogyny while protesting against racism. They appear more sympathetic than the men, and one wonders whether they’re simply more accommodating to Griswold, readily sharing their feelings, or whether Griswold identifies with their resentment of the men’s ingrained prejudice. Jonny comes off as a self-aggrandizing blowhard who listens to women reluctantly if at all. Ben is a loose cannon, although it remains unclear why he’s so angry. Was it smashing chocolate bunnies as a kid? Was it Rod, who readers may, with his son, be excused for seeing as a bit of a dickhead? As it is, the men leave the women to do much of the emotional and physical work of the church but never really come into focus.

And yet, among the book’s final images, we’re left with Ben, hospice chaplain in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit, as he holds a terminally ill infant after the machines have been turned off, during the many prolonged minutes of the child’s dying. It’s one of the few moving—and redemptive—passages in the book.

Griswold’s sentimental identification with the “vibrant collective” of Circle of Hope, her loyal attendance at its love feasts and baptisms in inflatable birthing tubs, may have softened her view of its strife and inhumanity, introducing a bias unbecoming to the embedded. The question that remains at the end of this meticulously reported, sensitively written, and often frustrating book concerns the meaning of “progressive” within an evangelical Christian church. Can so-called Bible-based Christianity—steeped in millennia of Adam-and-Eve misogyny and the assumption that Jesus had a penis so only men can lead—ever really be reformed? Judging by Circle of Hope, the answer is no.