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

Most public policy lecture halls do not echo the call-and-response gospel hymns. But on a recent Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen warms up a class in New Haven, Conn.

“I woke up this morning with my thoughts stuck on Jesus,” she sings, her voice filling the room. The fifty or so students quickly pick up the tune and words and then repeat the verse.

The class is one of several new offerings from Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy. The goal is to prepare the next generation of pastors to not only think deeply about the Bible, theology and church history, but also equip them for public office and leadership in the broader community.

This class is taught by one of America’s best-known religious leaders: Rev. William Barber, whose work with the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach has been his own public ministry.

Reverend Barber stands and begins his lecture. “The forces perpetrating extremism are not weak,” he says, his eyes roaming the room, “and they are well funded.”

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

Rev. Barber is the founder and director of the Center, having come here after three decades of parish work in North Carolina.

“I have always wanted to train others, even as a pastor,” he says. “If I have been a pastor somewhere for thirty years and no one is called to be a pastor and no one is trained, what kind of preaching have I done?”

Teaching the politics of moral fusion

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

“What are the main principles of religion in relation to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany that he often repeats: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the prisoners. Look at this piece of legislation. What consequences does this policy have for people? How does this affect their lives and deaths?”

As he continues his activism across the country, he now helps aspiring leaders prepare for what he describes as urgent public testimonies.

“If you don’t address poverty and health care denial right now, in this lifetime, you’ve wasted some of it,” he says.

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

“When people cross the boundaries that tend to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then look honestly at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they find that the same people who vote against people because they are gay , they also block living wages.”

If extremists, Rev. Barber says, work together, then his side must work together, too.

Working beyond the classroom and pulpit

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

At the very back sits Rev. Barber, praying and singing with his students. He has a word of encouragement for each of them. Before and after chapel, students huddle around him, offering updates on projects, papers and fieldwork.

Summer internships at churches that focus on voting rights and poverty are central to his center’s work. Student Benjamin Ball spent part of his summer in Alabama.

“We were standing outside Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he says, “the church where Dr. King preached and worked just outside the state capital of Montgomery.”

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

“To stand outside the doors of that church and see the state capital right in front of you,” he says, “I don’t think there’s a more profound view. If you walk out of church and ignore this, you are missing something right in front of you.”

The point is, morality isn’t the sole domain of religious conservatives, says Connecticut minister student Ed Ford.

“The Gospel tells us to practice justice, love, mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It says, ‘If you are sick, would you take care of me? If I am a stranger, would you take care of me? If you are poor and those who really suffer in the world? Ford says. “Those are the things we should be talking about. Jesus calls us to help the least of these people. Right?’

Help must come, Ford says, not just 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 or Latino,” he says. “However, it knows that the root of everything in our country is this: ‘Is our government going to step in and help people? Is our church going to speak out and talk about what is right?”

Ford echoes Rev. Barber’s language from the earlier lecture when he concludes: “Are we going to be chaplains of the Empire? Are we going to be prophets of God?”

These students learn the ways of the biblical prophets, who broach rude topics and speak truth to those in power, both within congregations and in the public square.

These are lessons that South Carolina student Lizzie Chiravono began learning early in her life. “Being from the South,” she says, “it is impossible to separate religion and politics, because every social environment I entered was both political and religious.”

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

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

Institutionalizing the Center for Civil Rights Movement

What these students learn is to take these early lessons and develop them into a way of thinking, a way of living and a way of working.

“Being able to muster the courage to then start talking — that’s what this is about,” says Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, a former civil rights leader and labor lawyer who co-directs Yale’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy here in New Haven.

“It’s about spreading an understanding once you have it,” she says. “This is industrializing the movement. And so it ends up in people’s hearts. It results in a changing religious education. And it ends up strengthening the movement we’re trying to build.”

This program goes beyond just training these aspiring ministers. It’s also about education and tapping into a desire, says another center leader, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

“Students here have a deep spiritual hunger tied to their sense that there is something wrong with the way the world works,” he says. And the mission is to transform that sense of injustice into a sense of purpose.

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

‘We won’t do that. We will not be moved,” she sings, as Rev. William Barber punctuates the verse with “Oh Lord!” in his resonant bass voice.

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

“Welcome everyone,” says host Brandon Nappi. “Thank you for being here.”

Some students followed Barber to this recording and are in the audience. Other people, from the larger university community and the public, also show up to hear him talk.

Wherever he appears—in class, in chapel, or at an off-campus podcast recording—he draws a crowd eager to take up what Barber calls the case of the Hebrew prophets and the Christian gospels.

“If you don’t engage in public theology and how we treat the least of these,” he says, “you’re essentially taking the Scriptures apart.”

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 move to unite religion with official government power heresy. Instead, he says the Bible teaches something different.

“’Thy kingdom come’ is a direct announcement to Caesar that your things are not real, that your way of life must pass away,” Barber says. “We pray that a different kind of kingdom will emerge that is rooted in love and justice and that uplifts all people.”

Copyright 2024 NPR