Over the past three decades, American evangelical Christians have undergone
unexpected, progressive shifts in the area of race relations, culminating in a national movement
that advocates racial integration and equality in evangelical communities. The movement, which seeks
to build cross-racial relationships among evangelicals, has meant challenging
well-established paradigms of church growth that built many megachurch empires. While
evangelical racial change (ERC) efforts have never been easy and their reception has been mixed,
they have produced meaningful transformation in religious communities. Although the movement as a
whole encompasses a broad range of political views, many participants are interested in addressing
race-related political issues that impact their members, such as immigration, law enforcement,
and public education policy. Ambivalent Miracles traces the
rise and ongoing evolution of evangelical racial change efforts within the historical, political,
and cultural contexts that have shaped them. Nancy D. Wadsworth argues that the stunning
breakthroughs this movement has achieved, its curious political ambivalence, and its internal
tensions are products of a complex cultural politics constructed at the intersection of U.S. racial
and religious history and the meaning-making practices of conservative evangelicalism. Employing
methods from the emerging field of political ethnography, Wadsworth draws from a decade's
worth of interviews and participant observation in ERC settings, textual analysis, and survey
research, as well as a three-year case study, to provide the first exhaustive treatment of ERC
efforts in political science.