Meet the faith leaders shaping the next generation of civil rights activism

Call-and-response gospel hymns do not echo in most public policy classrooms. But on a recent Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen is warming up the classes in New Haven, Connecticut.

“I woke up this morning thinking about Jesus,” she sings, her voice filling the room. About fifty students quickly pick up the melody and lyrics and then repeat the verse.

The classes are one of the new offerings of the Yale Divinity School Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. The goal is to prepare the next generation of clergy not only to think deeply about the Bible, theology, and church history, but also to equip them for public ministry and leadership in the broader community.

The teacher of this class is one of the most famous religious leaders in America: the Reverend William Barber, whose work with the Poor People’s Campaign and the Breachers was his own public service.

Reverend Barber stands up and begins his lecture. “The forces that commit extremism are not weak,” he says, his eyes darting around the room, “and they are well funded.”

He admonishes his students that as future church leaders, they cannot discuss political positions like everyone else. He tells them that their arguments and reasoning must be deeply moral, rooted in Scripture. “Your language,” he says, “must be different.”

The founder and director of the Center is Reverend Barber, who came here after thirty years of parish ministry in North Carolina.

“I always wanted to train others, even as a pastor,” he says. “If I worked somewhere for 30 years and no one was called to be a preacher and no one was trained, what kind of preaching did I do?”

Teaching the politics of moral fusion

What Barber’s has done is lead one of the most outstanding efforts to unite diverse groups around issues of justice, from voting rights to anti-poverty measures.

“What are the main assumptions of religion in relation to public space?” he asks. His answer is a litany that he often repeats: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of them, the poor, the sick, the prisoners. Look at this piece of legislation. How do these policies affect people? How does this affect them as they live and die?”

As he continues his work across the country, he now helps future leaders prepare for what he calls urgent public witness.

“If you don’t take a stand against poverty and the denial of health care right now, in this life, you’ve wasted some of it,” he says.

In an age of atomized identity politics, Reverend Barber teaches what he calls the politics of moral fusion.

“When people sit across the lines that usually divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they conclude that the same people who vote against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages.”

If extremists, Reverend Barber says, cooperate, then his side must also come together.

Working outside the lecture hall and pulpit

This work extends beyond the classroom into the daily chapel of the theology school. The student stands to lead the opening prayer: “God, in your grace you have chosen to be a God who shares the work. You invite us to work with you and with each other in the pursuit of hope, justice and peace.”

Sitting at the back is Fr. Barber, praying and singing with his disciples. He has a word of encouragement for each of them. Before and after the chapel, students gather around him, informing him about current projects, documents and field work.

Summer internships in churches, focusing on voting rights and poverty, are a central part of his Center’s work. Student Benjamin Ball spent part of the summer in Alabama.

“We stood in front of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he says, “which is the church where Dr. King preached and worked, located just outside the state capitol of Montgomery.”

For Ball, who is from Tennessee, the experience was transformative.

“To stand outside the door of this church and see the state capitol right in front of you,” he says, “I don’t think there’s a deeper picture. If you walk out of the church and ignore it, you will miss something right in front of you.

The point is that morality is not the exclusive domain of religious conservatives, says ministry student Ed Ford of Connecticut.

“The Gospel tells us to do justice, love, mercy and walk humbly with our God. He says, “If you are sick, would you take care of me?” If I were a stranger, would you take care of me? If you are the poor and those who are really suffering in the world?” This is Ford. “These are things we should be talking about. Jesus calls us to help the least. True?”

Help must come, Ford argues, not only through the traditional, direct services that churches often provide, such as food banks, but also through legislation and public policy.

“Poverty doesn’t know if you’re black, white, Asian, Latino,” he says. “But he knows that at the heart of all of this in our country is this: ‘Will our government step in and help people? Is our church going to speak up and speak out for what is right?”

Ford echoes Reverend Barber’s language from an earlier lecture, concluding: “Will we be the chaplains of the Empire? Will we be prophets of God?”

These students learn the ways of biblical prophets who broach dirty topics and speak truth to power, whether in congregations or in public places.

These are the lessons that student Lizzie Chiravono from South Carolina began learning at an early age. “Because I’m from the South,” she says, “there’s no way to separate religion from politics, because every setting I found myself in was both political and religious.”

As an example, Chiravono describes how both the government and churches provide food to poor families.

“I grew up poor,” she says. “And for people affected by poverty and other forms of suffering, politics and religion are never far from their minds.”

Institutionalizing the Center’s Civil Rights Movement

These students learn how to take these early lessons and turn them into a way of thinking, a way of living and a way of working.

“To have the courage to then go and talk — that’s what it’s all about,” says longtime civil rights activist and labor attorney Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, who helps direct the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy in New Haven.

“It’s about spreading understanding once you have it,” he says. “This is the institutionalization of the movement. And so it reaches people’s hearts. This will end with a change in religious teaching. And it ends up strengthening the movement that we are trying to build.”

This program goes beyond the mere education of aspiring clergy. It is also about the formation and use of longing, says another of the center’s leaders, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

“Students here feel a deep spiritual hunger related to the feeling that something is wrong with the way the world works,” he says. The mission is to channel that sense of evil into a sense of purpose.

“It doesn’t have to be this way. And God doesn’t want it to be that way,” Wilson-Hartgrove says. “And something inside them tells them that things could be different and they can be a part of it. They want to know: ‘How does it work?’

Speaking out against the “heresy” of Christian nationalism

It’s late afternoon at the Berkeley Episcopal Center, a few blocks from the Divinity School. Once again, singer Yara Allen captivates the audience.

“We won’t do it. We will not be moved,” he sings, as the Reverend William Barber punctuates the verse with “O Lord!” with its sonorous bass.

He came here to be interviewed for The Leader’s Way podcast.

“Hello everyone,” says host Brandon Nappi. “Thank you for your presence.”

Some students followed Barber to the recording and sat in the audience. Other people, from the broader university community and the general public, also show up to hear him speak.

No matter where he appears – in class, in chapel, or at an off-campus podcast recording – he attracts crowds eager to take up what Barber calls the cause of the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Gospels.

“If you’re not doing public theology and dealing with issues of how we treat the least of these,” he says, “you’re actually cutting across the scriptures.”

He says this is what he sees Christian nationalism doing today – using religion to divide rather than unite and to harm rather than help. He calls this movement aimed at uniting religion with the heresy of official government power. Rather, he claims that the Bible teaches something different.

“‘Thy kingdom come’ is a direct signal to Caesar that what you are doing is not true and that your way of life must pass,” Barber says. “We pray for a different kind of kingdom to come, one rooted in love and justice that will uplift all people.”