Pdt. Dr. William Barber has long been known for his civil rights activism, including his arrest as part of a nonviolent demonstration.
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Most public policy lecture halls don’t echo call-and-response gospel songs. But on Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen warmed up the class in New Haven, Conn.
“Wake up in the morning with my mind fixed on Jesus,” she sang, her voice filling the room. Quickly, fifty or so students take the song and the words and then repeat the verse.
The class is one of the new offerings of Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy. Our goal is to prepare the next generation of ministers to not only think deeply about scripture, theology, and church history, but also to equip them for public ministry and leadership in the wider community.
Teaching this class is one of America’s most prominent religious leaders: Rev. William Barber, whose work with the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach has run his own public ministry.
Pdt. Barber got up and started his lecture. “The forces that perpetrate extremism are weak,” he said as his eyes darted around the room, “and well-funded.”
He warned his students that as a future leader of the church, he cannot argue his political position like others. He said his argument and reasoning should be a deep moral position, based on the scriptures. “Your language,” he said, “must be different.”
Reverend Barber is the founding director of the Center, coming here after thirty years of parish ministry in North Carolina.
“I’ve always wanted to train others, even as a pastor,” he said. “If I was a pastor somewhere for 30 years and no one was called to be a pastor and no one was trained, what sermons would I have preached?”
Teach the politics of moral fusion
What Barber did was one of the most important efforts to unite various groups on issues of justice, from voting rights to anti-poverty measures.
“What are the main principles of religion in relation to the public sphere?” he asked. The answer is an oft-repeated litany: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How does this policy affect people? How does it affect life and death?”
As he continues his activism around the country, he is now helping future leaders prepare for what he describes as an important public witness.
“If you don’t challenge poverty and deny health care in this moment, in this life, you’ve wasted your share of it,” he said.
In the era of atomization about identity politics, Pdt. Barber taught what he called the politics of moral fusion.
“When people sit on the lines that tend to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then honestlyββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ…
If the extremists, Reverend Barber said, are working together, then their sides must also come together.
Work beyond the classroom and the pulpit
This work goes beyond the classroom, into the daily chapel of the divinity school. A student stood up to lead the opening prayer: “God, in your grace, you have chosen to be a God who divides the work. You invite us to work with you and one another to achieve hope, justice and peace.
Sitting near the back is Rev. Barber, prays and sings with his students. He has words of encouragement for everyone. Before and after chapel students surrounded him, offering updates on projects, papers and fieldwork.
Summer placements in churches focusing on suffrage and poverty are central to the Center’s work. Student Benjamin Ball spent the summer in Alabama.
“We’re standing outside the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he said, “which is the church where Dr. King preached and worked, which is outside the State Capital in Montgomery.”
For Ball, who is from Tennessee, the experience was transformative.
“To stand outside the door of that church and see the capital of the country in front of you,” he said, “I don’t think there is a deeper picture. If you leave the church and ignore this, you will lose what is in front of you.
The bottom line is that morality is not the province of religious conservatives, said ministry student Ed Ford, of Connecticut.
“The Gospel tells us to do justice, love, mercy and walk humbly with our God. It says, ‘If you are sick, will you take care of me? If I am a stranger, will you take care of me? If you are poor and those who suffer in the world?” Said Ford. “These are the things we need to talk about. Jesus calls us to help the least of these people. Yes?”
Help must come, Ford said, not only through traditional direct services often provided by churches such as food banks, but also through legislation and public policy.
“Poverty doesn’t know if you’re black, white, Asian, Latino,” he said. “But you know, at the root of everything in our country is: ‘Is our government going to step in and help people? Is our church going to speak up and say what’s right?’
Ford voiced the language of Rev. Barber himself from a previous lecture when he concluded: “Are we going to be priests of the Empire? Are we going to be prophets of God?”
These students learn the ways of the prophets of the Bible, who address the subject of shame and speak truth to power, whether in the congregation or in the public square.
This is a lesson that student Lizzie Chiravono, from South Carolina, began to learn early in life. “Being from the South,” he said, “there was no way to separate religion and politics because every social environment I was in was politics and religion.”
As an example, Chiravono describes how the government and the church provide food for poor families.
“I grew up in poverty,” he said. “And for those affected by poverty and other forms of suffering, politics or religion will never be far from their thoughts.”
Institutionalizing the Central movement for civil rights
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.
“To be able to get the courage to go and speak – that’s what this is about,” says long civil rights leader and labor lawyer Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, who helps direct Yale’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy in New Haven.
“It’s about spreading awareness that you have it,” he said. “It institutionalizes the movement. And it ends up in people’s hearts. It ends up changing religious education. And it ends up strengthening the movement that we are trying to create.
This program goes beyond just educating the ministerial candidate. It’s also about order and tapping into longing, said another of the central leaders, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
“Students here have a deep spiritual hunger because there is something wrong with the way the world works,” he said. And the mission is to channel guilt into a sense of purpose.
“It doesn’t have to be like that. And God didn’t want it to be like this,” Wilson-Hartgrove said. “And something inside him told him that it was possible, and that he could be a part of it. They want to know ‘How does it work?'”
Talk about the “heresy” of Christian Nationalism
It’s late afternoon at the Berkeley Episcopal Center, a few blocks from the Divinity School. Again, singer Yara Allen woke up the crowd.
“We will not. We will not be moved,” he sang, while Reverend William Barber punctuated the verse with “Oh God!” in his resonant bass voice.
He came to be interviewed for a podcast called The Leader’s Way.
“Welcome everyone,” said host Brandon Nappi. “Thank you for coming.”
Several students had followed Barber to this taping and sat in the audience. Others, from the larger university community and the general public, showed up to hear him speak as well.
No matter where he appears β in the classroom, in chapel or off-campus podcast recordings β he draws crowds eager to take up what Barber calls the cause of the Hebrew prophets and the Christian gospel.
“If you don’t deal with common theology and you don’t deal with the problem of how we treat the smallest,” he said, “you really divide the Bible.”
He said he sees Christian Nationalism today – using religion to divide rather than unite and harm rather than help. He called this movement to combine religion with official government heresy. But, he said, the Bible teaches something different.
“‘Your kingdom come’ is a direct announcement to the Emperor that your things are not real, that your way of life must pass,” Barber said. “We pray that another kingdom will come that is based on love and justice and uplifts all people.”
