On a balmy summer evening, I approached a brownstone apartment in a leafy Chicago suburb and made a split-second decision that would change the direction of my life.
At the time I was a 20-year-old college sophomore, bursting with the zeal of a new Christian convert. I was carrying a thick leather Bible filled with underlined passages celebrating God’s love for all humanity. I had memorized a New Testament passage, which declared, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male nor female — for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
I was there because I heard an evangelical church hosted a home Bible study every Wednesday night and, being new in town, I wanted to make friends.
Then I peeked in the apartment’s front bay window and saw something that made my heart sink. My finger froze over the doorbell, and I started to edge away from the door.
“Damn,” I muttered to myself as I spied a group of casually dressed people sitting in the living room, chatting amiably with Bibles resting on their laps. “Nothing but White people.”
I had never been in the home of a White person before. I had grown up in an inner-city Baltimore neighborhood where seeing White people was like spotting Bigfoot. My mother was White, but I had no contact with her family and had only recently met her for the first time. Her relatives shunned me because my father was Black, and they thought people of different races should stay apart. I dreaded being the only Black guy in the room and assumed that the White people inside would not make me feel welcome.
But I also hated the thought of allowing fear to control me, so I rang the doorbell. A skinny, young White man with thinning blonde hair and a droopy mustache answered the door with a bright smile and a hearty “Welcome.” I walked inside and I found salvation — not in a deity or a biblical doctrine but in something else: an unexpected friendship.
The man who changed my thinking
That story, which took place in the late 1980s, may sound like it comes from a bygone era. And in many ways, it does. Many Americans no longer see church as a place for healing. They see churches as places that hurt people by demonizing outsiders and covering up abuse. And, fair or not, White evangelical Christians are viewed by many as the group that inflicts the most pain.
For many non-White Americans, immigrants and LGTBQ people, the term “White evangelical Christian” has become a synonym for intolerance. Many White evangelicals are hostile to non-White immigration and belong to denominations that condemn homosexuality. About 81% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. They are also among the most ardent supporters of White Christian nationalism, a false teaching that claims the US was explicitly founded as a Christian nation.
For more than 20 years as a journalist, I’ve written my share of critical stories about White evangelicals. But I told those stories while harboring a secret of sorts: White evangelicals helped save me and my family — not in a religious sense, but in ways I’m still digesting more than three decades after it happened.
The young man who opened the door to the Chicago brownstone was the first person to show me that other side of White evangelicals. His name was Paul, and he was an illustrator from a small Midwestern town I’ve long forgotten. When we met I was attending Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., and was in Chicago for a summer internship.
I probably would have never met him in another walk of life. But we hit it off quickly. We shared a love of comic books, and we were the same age, unlike many of the older people in the Bible study. Paul exuded gentleness and an approachability that I liked. He was not what I expected.
Of course, he tried to convert me. He belonged to an evangelical movement which believed that all other Christian denominations and other religions were illegitimate. Evangelicals are loosely defined as Christians who often share a “born-again” personal conversion, believe they’re supposed to spread their faith to others and take the Bible either literally or seriously.
I never accepted Paul’s narrow definition of faith, and he didn’t push it hard. I sometimes even wonder if he believed it. It was what happened after Bible study that converted me.
I was at an anxious time in my life. I had massive insecurities because I had grown up poor and spent much of my time in foster homes. Many of my childhood friends were headed to prison or strung out on drugs. I struggled to believe I had a future.
Paul had this uncanny ability to sense my moods, and after Bible study he’d linger to chat. We talked about our hopes, our girlfriends and our anxieties over having a career. Our conversations would often end with Paul clasping my brown hands with his pale, freckled hands and saying, “Let’s pray about it, brother.”
This was a strange new world for me. I never expected I would express my vulnerability to a White man and hold his hands in prayer. But when I heard Paul pray aloud, asking God to guide me, I could tell he cared about me.
Over time, I stopped seeing him as a racial category. He became simply Paul, my friend, the guy I hung out with. I soon joined his church and during worship, I’d see White, Black and brown church members hug, hang out after service, and date.
I experienced something that summer that I still struggle to put into words. Paul was the first person to show me how good it felt to be proven wrong — to discover your assumptions about someone you’ve prejudged were baseless. I remember these lyrical moments in and outside of church settings, when I was singing hymns, praying and laughing with White evangelicals, that I felt a strange physical sensation. A tiny, warm glow would well up in my heart and spread through my body. It was that electric moment of human connection when you discover that someone you once saw as an enemy is now becoming your friend.
I continued to experience those sensations in subsequent years as my career took me around the country. In Washington, Los Angeles and Atlanta, I made it a point to only join multiracial congregations. I befriended more White evangelicals who defied expectation. One was Peter, a computer nerd, who refused to move his wife and young daughter out of his Atlanta neighborhood though it had gone from White to virtually all-Black. He thought racial prejudice was a sin and that abandoning his new neighbors would betray his faith.
Another friend was an evangelical pastor who grew up in the Jim Crow South believing that Black people were subhuman. But he was converted — by Black people. He joined a church ministry after high school that assigned him and a childhood buddy to an anti-poverty program in Harlem. There, he made friends with Black people for the first time.
He eventually founded a multicultural church where White and non-White members not only shared pews, but the power to make decisions about the church’s direction.
My friend told me what changed him and his friend in Harlem were not deep conversations with Black people about politics or faith. Instead it was mundane activities, such as sharing meals.
“That changed everything,” he told me. “It was just our daily life with African American people. They acted like regular people, which was shocking at first. That was the place where I crossed over.”
These weren’t “Kumbaya” relationships — we often disagreed, sometimes loudly, over politics and theology. But our friendships endured. And these friends didn’t just change me; we changed one another.
And then something else happened that I never expected: I was swept up in a religious movement that gave me even more hope.
I watched White evangelicals change America for the better
It was called the “racial reconciliation movement,” and it spread throughout the White evangelical community in the 1990s. I joined evangelical churches that participated in this movement during much of my young adulthood, and I attended rallies arranged by the “Promise Keepers,” an evangelical men’s movement designed to foster racial healing.
I still remember standing in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta next to weeping White men as they raised their hands together with Black and brown men and sang and prayed. And I remember watching in awe as C-Span televised images of at least 600,000 evangelical men filling the Washington Mall in 1997 for the “Stand in the Gap” rally.
I was a religion reporter in 1995 when I watched the nation’s largest evangelical denomination — the Southern Baptist Convention, which was formed in the mid-19th century to defend slavery — publicly apologize for its historic defense of slavery and racial segregation.
These were mountaintop moments. It seemed like the nation was finally shedding its original sin, racism. We were living up to our national creed, “Out of Many, One.” We were becoming the mythical America that the poet Langston Hughes described as “the land that never has been yet - And yet must be.”
Joining the racial reconciliation movement helped prepare me for something even more dramatic: Not long after, the White relatives who had rejected me at birth began to contact me. What followed were years of confrontations and anger. My White relatives were capable of acts of raw racism. But by now I had practice reaching across racial divides, and we somehow found a way to become a genuine family.
How that happened is complex, but it culminated with my maternal grandfather — the same man who refused to contact me when I was a child and referred to my father as “that n*gger”— apologizing to me for his racism in an astonishing act of repentance that still boggles my mind. And my mother’s sister — a person who once believed interracial marriage was bad for both White and Black people and who voted for President Trump — ended up supporting Black Lives Matter.
What made this family reconnection possible? There were many reasons, but Paul, the skinny illustrator I met in Chicago, played a pivotal role. Through those Bible studies and other experiences with White evangelicals, I had acquired the patience and the spiritual tools I needed to forge bonds with people who were different.
My White relatives were, despite their blind spot on race, devout Roman Catholics. We shared the same language of grace and quoted the same scripture about forgiveness: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Our mutual faith became a bridge to one another, not a barrier.
Only now do I realize there was another vital factor that led to my conversion on both race and faith. And it had nothing to do with religion. It’s called a “third space.”
Finding salvation in a ‘third space’
A third space is a location where people spend time together in community away from their first and second places: home and work. The term was coined by the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe those areas where we forge relationships with people unlike ourselves.
My third space was a church, but the same dynamics could happen in a mosque, synagogue or in other third-space communities, such as a 12-step program, a jazz band or a softball league.
Third spaces furnish the connective tissue that hold a multifaith and multiethnic democracy together, Oldenburg said.
“There must be places in which people can find and sort one another out across the barriers of social difference,” he said. “There must be places akin to the colonial tavern visited by Alexander Hamilton, which offered, as he recorded, ‘a genuine social solvent with a very mixed company of different nations and religions.’”
But third spaces, like the colonial tavern, are disappearing from America. Churches are emptying out across the country, despite an uptick in membership in recent years. On Sunday mornings I often drive by grand churches with nearly empty parking lots. My congregation is full of gray-haired members (including me), and I want to do a cartwheel whenever I see a young person visit.
This retreat from church mirrors a larger retrenching. Americans are isolating themselves into digital cocoons. Participation in civic groups has plummeted; movie theaters are closing; people increasingly shop online instead of going to stores. Many of us interact more with smartphones and social media than we do with other human beings.
When I walk through my neighborhood at night I see deserted streets, empty front porches and blue glows from televisions flickering on bedroom walls. We can now curate our daily lives like our streaming video queues — we only expose ourselves to ideas and people we’re comfortable with.
The painful question I face today
Something else is disappearing: the hopefulness I felt in many of the White evangelical churches I attended as a young man. The racial reconciliation movement has been obliterated. Promise Keepers collapsed and has been rebooted as a partisan battering ram. Many non-White people abandoned White evangelical churches after the George Floyd racial reckoning.
The most toxic phrase one can use today when talking about racial justice is not critical race theory, DEI or reparations. Its “racial reconciliation” — a term dismissed by both the left and the right as an absurd fantasy. I once had a White editor tell me after reading an essay I wrote about reconnecting with my White relatives, “This story isn’t angry enough.”
The reasons behind why so many White evangelicals abandoned racial reconciliation is complex, but my quick take is this: Some were terrified of becoming a racial and a religious minority in a rapidly changing nation, so they acted out of fear instead of faith.
I’ve seen this shift up close. When Black membership at a White evangelical church I attended in Atlanta passed the 50% threshold, White members fled the church so quickly that they practically left skid marks in the pews. The church became all-Black within about five years, save for the White senior pastor and his family.
This shift has forced me to ask a painful question: Was I a fool for trusting White evangelicals? Did all the public prayers, the bro-hugs and the hymns we sang together mean nothing? Do most evangelicals worship Whiteness instead of Jesus?
Did I walk through a door in Chicago that summer that’s now closed?
I’d ask Paul these questions today if I could find him. The evangelical church in Chicago I joined is still going strong. I recently checked its website, and its membership and leadership appear even more diverse today. But I lost contact with Paul after we both graduated from college. It took me years to appreciate his friendship and what it did for me, and I didn’t have the words to tell him that at the time. I didn’t even bother to get his last name.
I sometimes wonder where Paul is now. Is he still opening doors to the stranger?
I’m also left with some other difficult questions. Will I ever experience the “warm, tiny glow” I first felt in that Chicago Bible study and at those Promise Keepers rallies? Will I ever feel that hopeful again?
And as I read today’s headlines, which warn of a potential civil war as American soldiers and masked ICE officers sweep through American cities, I also wonder this:
Will any of us ever feel that way again?
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John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”