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< How culture wars divided one small progressive church in Philadelphia

October 28, 202412:19 PM ET

How culture wars divided one small progressive church in Philadelphia

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Evangelical Christians have become the most influential religious tradition in the U.S., 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 right 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 the racial reckoning after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. How to run the church during COVID and address racial injustice led to conflicts within Circle of Hope. The church became so divided it dissolved in January of this year.

Griswold understands how a church can split apart. She witnessed it with her father, Bishop Frank Griswold, who presided over the American Episcopal Church from 1998 to 2006. In 2003, he consecrated the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson. At the ceremony, they both had to wear a bulletproof vest. The consecration helped precipitate the schism in the church that led many Americans to leave the Episcopal Church and join the new, more conservative Anglican Church in North America. Griswold watched her father's despair that he couldn't hold the church together.

Her new book is called "Circle Of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church." It's nominated for a National Book Award. Her previous book, "Amity And Prosperity: One Family And The Fracturing Of America," won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize. She writes for The New Yorker and directs the program in journalism at Princeton University.

Eliza Griswold, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's start with where you approach the story from. You were raised in a rectory. As we mentioned, your father was Bishop Frank Griswold. And you write, I was raised to analyze human concepts of the divine, not in order to question their veracity or validity but to understand their universal principles. So does that mean your father didn't teach you that Christ was the way?

ELIZA GRISWOLD: That's exactly right. He did not. He had a much more capacious understanding of what the divine was and really invited any kind of seeking in our house, which was really important to me.

GROSS: Were you a seeker?

GRISWOLD: I was. You know, I mean, I really did grow up to some degree on a little meditation cushion, questioning belief - not questioning whether belief was valid or not. But, you know, there's a theory of liminality, which I really believe and really helps me a lot, which says that the edges of spaces, the edges of society have value to them - to go out to the edge to encounter what's there. And I do that. I think that's why I do that as a journalist, but I think that's what I did as a child with the idea of meaning to - like, maybe ghosts are out there and spooky things and just - and also some sense of the divine.

GROSS: It broke your father's heart that he couldn't hold the church together, and you describe watching him, like, cry at the dinner table. How did the split affect you and your view of church?

GRISWOLD: You know, at the time when this happened - so 2003, after 2001 - I was just getting started as a reporter, and I found myself in Sudan with Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son.

GROSS: You didn't find yourself there. You went there.

GRISWOLD: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

GRISWOLD: OK - more accurate. Thank you for the fact-check.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GRISWOLD: Yes. So I went there to report on really, like, what did it look like - the sort of Christian-Muslim divide in Sudan? And, you know, when Franklin and I talked about my dad, he really did say, like, I was just learning what evangelicals were - that there were these people who believed there was only one way to get to heaven, and that was through Christ. And his understanding of why the Episcopal Church was under pressure was because it wasn't really Christian. And, you know, I think what I came to understand through that experience is that I was watching the culture wars come for Christianity in the 21st century, and I think I kind of had an early seat to that. So "Circle Of Hope" is a lot about that - what happens when faith and culture come into conflict?

GROSS: So Franklin Graham was basically implying your father wasn't really Christian.

GRISWOLD: Not implying. He just flat out said it. Yep. And then afterwards, he sent me a Bible with red writing in it to mark the actual words of Jesus. And he asked me to pray with him, which, you know, I had done all over the world at that point. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, I'd prayed with everybody. So I did go ahead and pray with him. So it's definitely - and he asked me to stop doing yoga because, of course, Sanskrit chants are demonic.

GROSS: It's such a sign of disrespect to say that your father, a bishop, isn't really a Christian.

GRISWOLD: It's another understanding, you know, that only if you pray the sinner's prayer, only if you give your life to Christ are you a true Christian. And I think that is one of the most problematic aspects we see among - especially among conservative evangelicals who are taking up our news headlines all the time.

GROSS: Did you stay within the Episcopal Church or any church or become more of an observer?

GRISWOLD: You know, I became more of an observer. And I...

GROSS: And a reporter.

GRISWOLD: ...And a reporter. And, you know, I - and a meditator. And there - once, I was sitting at the edge of a meditation thing in Rishikesh, India, rolling my eyes around, wondering when it would be over and I could go get a cappuccino.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GRISWOLD: And I caught myself, and I was like, hang on a second. I have paid to be here. Like, I am not 12 years old. Like, you know, I can participate in this. So I think that role of kind of being in but not of - or whatever - is very much what I still do.

GROSS: So your book is about a new generation of evangelicals who have rejected their parents' political and cultural conservatism and reinterpreted the teachings of Jesus. So why is this more radical and more leftist evangelical movement significant? I mean, is it just, like, a fringe, or does it actually have a larger movement? 'Cause the church you write about in Philly, which had four congregations - one in the Germantown section, one in Fishtown, one in South Philly and one in New Jersey - it was pretty small and had - what? - like, 700...

GRISWOLD: Totally.

GROSS: ...Members.

GRISWOLD: Totally.

GROSS: So that's not exactly, like, a huge trend (laughter).

GRISWOLD: No, not at all. OK, so first of all, numbers are impossible to come by because this kind of evangelical comes out of the 1960s, out of a Jesus freak movement. And at the time, you know, during the late '60s and early '70s, Jesus was on the cover of Time magazine. We had "Jesus Christ Superstar." Like, Jesus was cool. And there were millions of young people who - like, hippies and - who gave their lives to Christ, right? So that's kind of where they come from. And where they are now is a complicated picture. I have people coming up to me all the time saying, hey. I am exactly the kind of evangelical you write about. That said, their influence is far beyond their side because, in many ways, they are really set to reclaim the moral heart of evangelicalism, I would say, right? That's my argument because, you know, there's - among conservative evangelicals, there's all this talk about biblical authority and being, quote-unquote, "Bible-believing." And I've never understood that because if you look at the literal teachings of Jesus, you've got Jesus giving money to the poor. You know, you've got Jesus treating lepers, welcoming everyone - prostitutes. And so these Christians - when they radically live as Jesus did, these Christians follow the teachings of Jesus explicitly and in particular his moral call in the Sermon on the Mount, in which he really provides a blueprint for how humans who follow him should live.

GROSS: Give us some examples from Sermon on the Mount for those of us who haven't read it lately.

GRISWOLD: (Laughter) Sure. So this is - the Sermon on the Mount begins with the beatitudes, the, blessed are the poor in spirit, right? Blessed are the humble. So the whole idea is that Jesus is calling people to invert how power works in the world. He's saying that those among you who are the least are going to be the greatest. And it's that kind of teaching, that kind of celebration of meekness and humility and goodness that stands at the heart of what Jesus was teaching, I think.

GROSS: So how did the Circle of Hope church take those principles, those beliefs and turn them into action? Like, what were some of their real-world actions?

GRISWOLD: So their real-world actions, some of which were really inspiring, others which were zany and sort of hilarious over time. I mean, before I came around, they were going dumpster diving for dinner parties to really live as the poor did and embrace that. They had a whole teaching about throwing off the binds of the American empire, reclaiming Christianity in its earliest days and throwing off what they would say is before the Roman Empire basically took over Christianity.

So at some point, they were not showering. They were practicing something called anarcho-primitivism to throw off, like, concepts of Western hygiene. But those are kind of the funnier things. There were incredibly moving and inspiring ways in which they live among the poor. They gave their lives to service of the poor. They shared their paychecks. They didn't buy anything new. They started community gardens all around Philadelphia even when some of their neighbors did not want their kale. But they really lived in ways that I admired as I saw and felt were really worth investigating.

GROSS: The leaders who you write about, the pastors of the church during the years you were embedded with them = those are not the people you were just describing.

GRISWOLD: No, they were - this is kind of the next generation of leadership. Some of the four pastors who I wrote about - Jonny, Rachel, Julie and Ben - had been around in those heady days, especially Ben White, because his parents, Rod and Gwen, had founded the church. And really, Rod and Gwen White were boomers. So you have these older kind of original guard as boomers and Gen Xers, and then you have a younger group of millennials. And it was really that younger group, although many people came to question what they were doing. But it was the younger group that led those questions, and they hadn't really been around. But mostly, by the time I arrived, the church was wrestling with what to do once Rod and Gwen White, the founders, had given over the church or attempted to do so to the next generation.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Eliza Griswold. Her new book is called "Circle Of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church." It's nominated for a National Book Award. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF PAUL SIMON SONG, "ONE MAN'S CEILING IS ANOTHER MAN'S FLOOR")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Eliza Griswold. Her new book, "Circle Of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church," is about a small church that was founded in 1996 as a radical alternative to the evangelical right. But it was dissolved at the beginning of this year over divisions pertaining to how the church should deal with the COVID pandemic and how to address racial injustice and deal with accusations from within the church of white privilege and homophobia.

So the members of this church viewed themselves as revolutionary, but you say they'd fallen behind the culture. So let's start with the fact that two of the four pastors in this church were women. Were they fast? Were they quick to recognize women as pastors?

GRISWOLD: Not really. I mean, the first woman who was a pastor in the church, Gwen White - who was really what's called a teaching pastor, so she would preach from time to time - I would say she was on the earlier side. She herself had had - like, she was a Jesus freak. And she had had an awakening where she was called to Jesus. She'd grown up in a secular household, and she had a real gift for preaching. But at that time, you know, in the '80s, really, she wasn't allowed to preach. And so when she and her husband founded Circle of Hope, it was really important to them that Gwen, who was an incredibly powerful speaker, often stood up and gave the weekly talk, they called it, because they didn't use the word sermon.

And she inspired many, many young women, and two of the women she inspired were both Julie and Rachel, who had grown up in conservative churches in rural Pennsylvania - one in the Poconos, one to the west - and those churches had said women can't be pastors. So for both Julie and Rachel to choose - you know, you weren't chosen to be a pastor on your own. It was a collective decision that kind of lifted up people. But when they accepted that invitation to become pastors in Circle of Hope, it was tough because they had to confront their parents and their childhood teachings, which did not embrace women.

GROSS: And the Circle of Hope also didn't embrace LGBTQ issues. You know, they didn't support gay marriage. They didn't support, you know, LGBTQ equality. What was the biblical reasoning behind their opposition?

GRISWOLD: Yeah. On this, they were particularly behind, right? And so one of the problems is that one of the churches was located in what Philadelphia calls the Gayborhood, right? So it drew in a lot of people, a lot of queer folks who were like, what's this church? Clearly, if they're meeting on the second floor in this raw space and they don't shower and they're casting off purity culture and other aspects of evangelicalism, surely I'm welcome here. And the church had a complicated understanding of that, which I write about in the book. I call it don't ask, don't tell - right? - because it's like, sure, you can come, be who you are, but don't talk about who you are. And don't try to advocate for who you are or that we should change our ways, because with that, we're going to tell you that's worldly. And we are not going to want you around anymore.

And that tension still existed when I arrived in the church, although there were queer folks trying to change it, and they did end up changing it. And the teaching - you know, it's a curious biblical teaching that people seize onto because, like, you know, there are teachings in the Bible, obviously, we know, that are, like, you know, stone people for adultery - that's Deuteronomy - or, like, don't let your wife braid her hair, you know, or wear earrings. So what's celebrated or what's held onto in the Bible is really curious.

So yeah, strictures against homosexuality, sodomy - and it wasn't that the church so much held onto them themselves. It was that they belong to a denomination in Pennsylvania of Anabaptist called Brethren in Christ, and that denomination of some 30,000 people had for a long time opposed gay people. And that was in their principal teachings. And so Circle had signed documents and deeds for their buildings with these folks. And if they were going to embrace homosexuality, they were going to have to hand their buildings and a lot of their money back to the Brethren in Christ.

And that's ultimately what dissolved the church - was this pretty admirable decision. Like, the congregations ultimately decided they didn't want their money and buildings if it meant they had to remain in this weird stance against gay people. And so they embraced gay people and queer pastors - all of it. And they handed their money and buildings back to their denomination.

GROSS: The church, Circle of Hope, really wanted to be a diverse church. And for instance, one of the congregations was located in Germantown, which is a racially diverse and really predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. That was not reflected in the church membership, which was very predominantly white. At some point, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, people started speaking out about this. So what were the initial points that were raised about the actual lack of diversity? And I have a suggestion of a place to start, actually.

GRISWOLD: Yeah. OK.

GROSS: Yeah. So one member of the church, whose name was Bethany - and she's Black. She was saying, hey. You know, you use my photo all the time in, you know, pamphlets or whatever about the church. And I'm starting to think you're really doing that - you're using my face because I'm Black and you want to appear to be racially diverse. But the fact that you keep using me is an indication that you're really not racially diverse. You need me to be the Black face. So that's, like, part of the way this starts within the church. Can you talk about that conversation?

GRISWOLD: Yeah. So Bethany Stewart had grown up in mostly white spaces. You know, she had been a cheerleader. She was homeschooled, and she learned to read the King James version of the Bible at the kitchen table. That's how she learned to read. And her name was Bethany, which she's very funny about because she's like, look. With all the signifiers of my growing up and my name, Bethany, people think I'm white until they meet me. So she'd grown up in a culture that was, like - she often, as a Black person - she would say, although she doesn't like this anymore, but that she had been a kind of missionary to white people.

So her role in the church for a long time, as a young Black Lives Matter activist, had been doing anti-racism work. And she would do that by, like, let's all read this book. Let's have a book group. She organized these incredible, like, bail fund events where she would get people - white people, pretty much white people - to come to the church and listen to Black music and pay money for her bail fund efforts. So she did incredible work. But OK. So the question that the church begins to ask after George Floyd is, why, in a city that's 50-50 white and Black are we at least 85% white, right? And we have been doing this anti-racism work for a long time. Sure, we can draw in people of color, but why don't they stay?

And it was really Bethany who led a lot of the questions about why don't they stay. And as she did that, the church uncovered a history especially with Black women who had come and attempted to lead or influence the culture and been dismissed for different reasons. And the same was true with Black pastors - that they had not been really welcome to stay. And for everyone who had come - and there were several because they'd really tried to do this - there was some personal excuse for which they had to go, right? The culture was different. It didn't work. And what Bethany and others called for was, hey. This is not an individual issue. We're looking at a structural problem here. And that's the structure of whiteness, and that's really what we have to take on.

GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Eliza Griswold. Her new book is called "Circle Of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church." It's nominated for a National Book Award. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF NATHAN SALSBURG'S "MRS. GRISTLE'S REEL")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Eliza Griswold. Her new book, "Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church," is about a small church that was founded in 1996 as a radical alternative to the evangelical right. But it was dissolved at the beginning of this year over divisions that arose over how the church should deal with the COVID pandemic and how to address racial injustice and address accusations from within the church of white privilege and homophobia.

Griswold's new book is nominated for a National Book Award. Her previous book, "Amity And Prosperity: One Family And The Fracturing Of America," won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize. She writes for The New Yorker and directs the Program in Journalism at Princeton University. Her father, Bishop Frank Griswold, presided over the Episcopal Church from 1998 to 2006. In 2003, he consecrated the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson. That helped precipitate the schism that led to many Americans leaving the Episcopal Church and joining the new, more conservative Anglican Church in North America.

So there's a big debate about whether to hire a diversity counselor to help not only reach out to Black people and other people of color, but also to just work things out and end this kind of divisiveness within the church. So they do hire a diversity, equity and inclusion counselor. And he comes in, and after a while, he leaves. He says, I can't work here anymore. What was his problem?

GRISWOLD: His problem - and that was pretty wild because this all happened on a Zoom call that they had let me sit in on. And the diversity counselor says on the call - you know what, guys? I'm going to draw your attention to our contract. And that sort of got all over our attention. You'll notice that there's a clause that says if I think things aren't going well, either one of us has the right to leave this procedure. And I'm leaving. And the shock of, you're quitting - it was pretty inscriptional to listen to that unfold.

His reason for leaving, as he said to them and later to me in an interview, is there just wasn't enough trust there. I mean, there wasn't enough trust in these, like, sessions - there were supposed to be six of them - as they unfolded online. There wasn't enough trust between the people of color and the white people to even tell one - like, to come together as one group. They really split into two different groups because they couldn't come to what they called a shared analysis. They couldn't come to a common story of how race functioned in the church.

GROSS: Well, another thing that was controversial was - I think it was Bethany who started the Black girl cell. And when I say cell - the congregations were divided into cells of around 10 people, so that was the community within the community for members of the church. And so she started a cell for, you know, Black women called the Black girl cell. Was that controversial within the church?

GRISWOLD: It was. It was controversial because, OK, so for many, many years, Circle of Hope - and this really originated with Rod White - had this understanding that, you know, we are not - this is an Anabaptist thing. We are not of the world, right? We are not implicated by the sins of the world because we're doing this radical, utopian thing, right? We're going to be the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth as Jesus calls us to be. And that means we have transcended race. We have transcended gender. Those problems of the world - we're beyond them.

And that meant that with these cells - and they had wonderful language around cells and churches, that new churches were hived off like bees. Like, the language was pretty great. But these small groups, called cells - normally, you couldn't be one identity, right? They were not supposed to be affinity groups. That is not because Jesus doesn't see the world that way, right? So when Bethany and another woman started this Black girl cell explicitly naming identity and gender, that was a problem. That was, hey, this is not the way we do things at Circle of Hope. But it was during pandemic. It was on Zoom. They liked to make, like, Moscow mules. They made their own cocktails every week. I could not go because I am a white girl.

And they would talk about what it was like being Black at Circle of Hope. And it was really through that cell and other efforts like that that people began to come together and be like, hey. I've had that weird experience, too. And it was that way that they began to go from individual, like, bumping up against culture and thinking, like, this is weird to coming together and being like, actually, this is a problem. And if you want us to stay in this church, we're going to have to change it.

GROSS: So one of the many things I find so interesting about your book is that you're basically taking issues that confront everybody in America and divide America. And you're looking at those within a very special kind of community - it's a religious community that's very devoted to the teachings of Jesus - and looking at how these worldly issues play out within this community. And they play out very similarly to how they play out in the rest of the world.

GRISWOLD: I think that is really what I would want people to take away, because this didn't just happen to a zany group of Christians hanging out in Philadelphia. This happened to all of us. And, you know, a lot of my friends who do not want anything to do with religion, have grudgingly read this book because I've written it and come back to me...

GROSS: (Laughter).

GRISWOLD: Right? And been like, oh, my goodness, this happened within my Audubon Society group. Like, this happened within my other organization. Like, progressive organizations - there's been so much focus in our culture on, like, the sins of conservative organizations. And the truth is these conflicts happen on the left, too. And this book really, I think - I didn't know I was doing that, but I think this book does explore what that looks like on the left and how it's problematic, too. So I think that is exactly what it does.

GROSS: When the book ends, there's a part of me that thinks, it's not really a tragic ending. In some ways, it's a happy ending because people are forced to change. And they kind of grow in the process. The end of the book questions whether ending something is a bad thing or not. You know, sometimes things end because they should.

GRISWOLD: That's exactly right. And also, things end because they should. And maybe togetherness is not always what we should be working for. Now, that's in no way, like, an endorsement of division and divisiveness. But what happens with these four pastors is when they're free from one another, they begin to go live their own lives, you know? And at the end of the book, part of my method is to read long sections of the book to the participants, not so that they can change it, but so that they can hear inaccuracies, and they have a sense of what's coming, because we don't share material on a page. And after hearing so much of their own story, one pastor said to me, where are you? Why aren't you in this book? And so the book ends. Like, my dad was dying as the church was dying. And so I kind of changed the end and wrote about what that was like at the same time.

And, yeah, I mean, look. The whole premise of Christianity is rebirth, right? So, like, Jesus dies, and then he comes back. That's the cycle. But at the same time, that's actually nature, right? Like, forget Christianity. That's just nature. Winter - look at the seasons. Look at the cycle of nature. And so in that way, I do hope that, like, the authenticity of that cycle and what it means in these guys' life is a positive thing.

GROSS: Do you feel bad that your attempt to write about a successful, radical, evangelical community, an idealistic, kind of utopian community about doing good becomes a book about political and cultural issues that break the church apart? You meant to write something really, like, you know, positive and affirming, and you end up with dissolving, with dissolution of the church. How do you feel about the outcome, which is - you know, I mean, there's growth at the end, There's change at the end, but it's not the change anybody was looking for.

GRISWOLD: I mean, when you ask me how I feel about that, I mostly think I can't answer that without thinking of Julie, Jonny, Rachel and Ben and how they feel. And they all have different feelings about the book and its life in the world. And even, Terry, as I talk to you, I think of - they listen to everything, right? So I'm like, oh, boy. And...

GROSS: You're hearing them listening to you as you speak.

GRISWOLD: Yeah.

GROSS: I kind of understand that.

GRISWOLD: I'm waiting for the phone calls. But - and I'm grateful for them because I really value that engagement. And I am so grateful that they allowed me through this complicated walk, in particular with Ben, when he's like - when Ben is about to leave the church. And I said to him, hey, Ben. You know, if you go, will you let me follow you? And he kind of huffed and was like, I guess so, you know?

And it just speaks to the depth of their integrity that they allowed me to finish this. I don't feel badly that it's not the story I meant to tell because good journalism is never the story we mean to tell. And I trust that - I think part of what's happening with the response to this maybe or the book itself is that it's alive. There's nothing tidy about this, and I say somewhere in the book, you know, churches are messy places 'cause guess - life is a messy place. And I think if the book reflects that messiness and it's more authentic, I just have to trust the basic goodness of the intention because that's definitely where we all began.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Eliza Griswold. Her new book is titled "Circle Of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, And Justice In An American Church." It's nominated for a National Book Award. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD AND BILL EVANS' "CATCH A RIDE")

As you are finishing the book, your father was dying of what might be a rare disease. I've never heard of this before, but it's a disease in which, like, you've taken the right amount of oxygen, but you don't give out the right amount of carbon dioxide. So the carbon dioxide builds in your body, and that's very toxic. And for listeners just tuning in, as a reminder, your father was Bishop Frank Griswold, who presided over the Episcopal Church from 1998 to 2006. And in 2003, he consecrated the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, which was very controversial in the church and basically lead to - helped lead to a schism in the church.

One of the things that happened to your father as he was getting sicker from this disease is that he started hallucinating and started having these vivid, very kind of strange, otherworldly dreams. And I'd like you to tell us about one or two of those dreams.

GRISWOLD: OK. So, yeah, part of having carbon dioxide buildup in your body has to do with a kind of narcosis. And in other words, these dreams were pretty trippy. And he believed that - it's classic, My dad - he was not known for patience. So he was waiting in line in heaven for his number to come up, but the whole - like, the whole thing was too slow. So he kept coming back to Earth and being like, they have to speed it up, Like, what is going on up there, which was funny and, in some ways, deeply hopeful - right? - because it's like, oh, great. OK, he's going to heaven. It's just going to take a little while.

And then he dreamt more disturbingly, or he was transported, he might say - who knows what he would say? - to a battlefield where he saw the forces of good and evil playing out. And when he said that's what he was seeing, I could only imagine and asked him if this is what it looked like - but the battle in the Bhagavad Gita, where you have Krishna and Arjuna in a chariot and they're watching basically good and evil duel it out. So those were pretty trippy. And at one point, you know, I would say a young doctor came in and pulled me aside and said, you know, is you dad on opioids? And I was like, no, he is a man of God, you know, which certainly doesn't preclude opioids. But, you know, that his register - and I think this is probably, yeah, his register of being and seeing and whatever may not have been here in these dimensions anymore.

GROSS: And, you know, the Bible is filled with stories of, you know, good versus evil. So I guess it's not surprising that he was witnessing a battle of good versus evil. And especially - I don't know if your father believed in a literal heaven and hell.

GRISWOLD: No. I don't know. You know, I mean, he was a mystical dude. He didn't really - literal interpretations were not his thing. So I don't think - I think heaven as akin to sort of bliss state, maybe yeah, but not a literal place, certainly not where he would be, you know, on a cloud with a little golden harp.

GROSS: Do you think being a man of faith helped your father deal with death?

GRISWOLD: I don't know because I have to say - and this is hard to say. But the excruciating - his death wasn't peaceful at all. And to watch that as a person who, you know, what is the point of faith if it's not helping you, you know, make peace with the final end, right? Make peace with death. And so to see that struggle was really painful in that way. But I also think part of that struggle was letting go of parts of his life that were painful in a way that we hadn't known as his family, and that has its own repercussions.

GROSS: When you're talking about the struggle at the end, do you mean a struggle with his breath, a physical struggle, or more of an existential struggle?

GRISWOLD: I think it was a struggle with pain. And whether that was, like, physical pain or existential pain, I'm not sure. He really wanted to die. And as I said, he's not a patient guy. And he was frustrated that it wasn't going faster, and he was angry at anything he thought that was keeping him on Earth. And as his children, my sister and I being very much here on Earth, and my mom, you know, watching that desire to go was pretty painful.

GROSS: I want to quote something you write at the end of the book. You write, (reading) churches are messy places where people seek many things, among them a common understanding of something larger than they are, of God. This can be a beautiful, courageous endeavor that in its effort to do right, usually goes wrong. Maybe churches need to die, to rid themselves of their old bodies, their advanced pathologies, to make themselves new again - to be free of the weight of a past none can carry.

Can you elaborate on that thought?

GRISWOLD: Yeah. I mean, that is the cycle of nature. You know, the cycle of nature is to face death in order to - I'm not talking about human life. I have no idea, nor would I hazard to guess, about rebirth. But, like, a tree, right? Like, a tree or a flower. Like, this is how life and death works. I think it's true in relationships. I think it's true with any institution with this era that we're living in where institutions are suddenly seen as innately problematic. It is true. Institutions have to be rid of their advanced pathologies, the ways that they did things, whether that mean - whatever sickness hangs out in its traditions. I do think that's true. But to say they need to be eradicated and not continue to exist, that I think is a mistake. And it's somewhere in that middle ground, that kind of muddling through, that I hope wisdom lies.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVE HOLLAND QUINTET'S "NOT FOR NOTHIN'")

Lately in The New Yorker, you've been writing about the vote. And since you have followed religion for so many years as a journalist, and followed politics as well, I'm going to ask you a question I've asked a lot of people on the show, which is why do you think that so many conservative evangelicals follow Trump and think he should be president when so many of his actions are antithetical to Jesus' teachings?

GRISWOLD: Because it is not about Trump's actions. It's about what Trump can do for evangelicals. So when we look at the Supreme Court, when we look at the reversal of Roe, these long-held battles that conservative evangelicals have been fighting, Trump has brought solutions to those battles and beyond some of what they even hope for. That along the side of - there's a really problematic, totally mystifying strain of Christianity that's wedded to these ideas of American exceptionalism, with this white Christian nationalism that celebrates whiteness. And Trump, one of the things he's done is he's taken the religion out of the word Christian. And when Trump says Christian, he means white. And for people who are rooted in that whiteness and want a traditional America, whether he calls it Christian or not, that's I think part of what they respond to.

GROSS: So from our conversation earlier, it sounds like you don't practice a specific faith. Now, do you ever go to church just as a place of comfort, a place of reflection?

GRISWOLD: Yeah, I go to church. I go to church, you know, with my little dress shoes on.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GRISWOLD: Right? Like, I do the whole jam, like, I mean, for holidays, right? But a weird thing has happened. So when you grow up in a church, a weird thing happens from the get go, which is you're at home in churches. So when you travel or when you're wherever, suddenly, you know, Notre Dame feels familiar, which is quite a weird gift. Since my dad has died, I have found not so much him in churches. That's not my experience. But I have found the familiarity and the poetry, you know, of the hymns and the liturgy and some of the prayers that he wrote that are in the prayer book. I found a deep sense of, like, solace and belonging there.

GROSS: You grew up in a rectory. What was that like?

GRISWOLD: Demonic. No, growing up in a rectory is really tough. And curiously enough, I was talking to a group of pastors yesterday, and one of them said to me, as a pastor's kid, what is your lesson to us as pastors to protect our kids? And I said, keep people out of the rectory, 'cause the weird thing about growing up in a rectory is that the church owns your house. And that means if you're talking in the language of boundaries, forget it. Your house is totally porous to whoever's in need. And for me, that was pretty hard.

And the other thing that I said to him was, you know, if - whatever taxes you, like, whatever is too much for you, realize that your kids are picking it up. And that's not just true of being a pastor's kid. I think of that in my own life. Like, if I'm too stressed, where's that stress going? It spills over. So that's something to think about, I guess.

GROSS: What was hard about having strangers in need in the rectory while you were living there? Did it feel dangerous to you or just, like, not private?

GRISWOLD: Oh, it was dangerous. I mean, there was a woman - an alcoholic who used to come to our house loaded, and she would knock on the screen door. And one of my earliest memories was, like, clinging to my mom's, like, jean skirt. She was wearing Dr. Scholl's, and her toenails were painted. And this woman on the other side of the screen door was calling my mother a harlot because she had painted toenails. And that was - that stuck. When the phone rang, you know, it would ring with disasters. and that was a lot. And once we came home to our Philadelphia suburban house and found - I think he was a robber in our house because our doors were unlocked. But my mother was so polite. She just kindly ushered him out and then went to check and he hadn't taken anything. But that kind of porousness will do a job on a kid, I think.

GROSS: So your mother just quietly ushered him out.

GRISWOLD: Yes. She just ushered him out. That was it. Yeah. I mean, when people turn to a pastor, they are in existential crisis. So it's your kid - for me, it was like living amidst the existential crisis of others.

GROSS: That's what you're doing now.

GRISWOLD: I know, right? That is the very screwed-up thing.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GRISWOLD: I know. I know.

GROSS: You do immersive journalism. That's so much living through the crisis of others.

GRISWOLD: Oh, yeah. You've hit it in a way that's uncomfortably accurate. Yep.

GROSS: Does that feel comfortable to you?

GRISWOLD: Crisis feels comfortable to me, and I thrive in it. And it's one reason why I'm pretty good in conflict zones.

GROSS: Where you've been.

GRISWOLD: Yeah, where I've done a lot of work. And now, you know, I started working in America because a wonderful old Granta editor many years ago, said, why is it Americans are always looking at everybody else's ills? So that pretty much sent me back to look at the ills of America. And, you know, I find a lot of meaning in the edges of things, and I think there is a real gift of being able to - it's a gift when people allow you to watch the decisions they make in the times that are the most meaningful in their lives. It's a real privilege. It's very tender.

GROSS: Eliza Griswold, it's really been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the book and the book's nomination for a National Book Award.

GRISWOLD: Thank you so much for having me.

GROSS: Eliza Griswold is the author of the new book "Circle Of Hope." It's nominated for a National Book Award. Tomorrow, our guest will be Alex Van Halen. He'll talk about being the drummer and cofounder of the iconic rock band Van Halen and about his younger brother, Eddie, who is the band's guitarist and main songwriter and was considered one of rock's greatest guitarists. Eddie Van Halen died of cancer in 2020. Alex has written a new memoir called "Brothers." I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @NPRFreshAir.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF GRATEFUL DEAD SONG, "UNBROKEN CHAIN")

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