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The New Evangelists
Yale Divinity School and the revival of the
Christian left
November/December 2006
by Warren Goldstein '73, '83PhD
Warren Goldstein '73, '83PhD, author of William Sloane Coffin, Jr.:
A Holy Impatience, chairs the
American Studies department at the University of Hartford.
In 1980, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Yale’s former chaplain, famously
debated Moral Majority founder Rev. Jerry Falwell on the premier TV talkfest of
the day, the Phil Donahue Show. If any single person embodied the liberal Protestant elite at the time, it was
Coffin '49, '56BDiv, the nation’s most prominent religious peace activist.
While at Yale he had moved thousands to oppose the Vietnam War; since 1976 he
had been senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, the flagship
pulpit of mainline Protestantism and the center of U.S. anti-nuclear activism.
But the Donahue debate was not
one of Coffin’s better performances. He traded biblical quotations with
Falwell, but never took him seriously. The witty, fiery preacher who had packed
Battell Chapel every Sunday was tepid and lackluster on television. Falwell
creamed him.
I watched the show, embarrassed for Coffin, for my wife (who is a
minister), and for Yale. Years later, I asked Coffin about it. It turned out
that Donahue had been as appalled as I was. He took Coffin aside during a
commercial break and tried to find out what was wrong. Coffin admitted to a
certain boredom with the subject. Whereupon Donahue, incredulous that millions
of viewers across America weren’t enough to get Coffin to pay attention,
demanded furiously: "What the fuck would it take?”
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“The liberal church fell into a kind of complacency." |
For me, that moment crystallizes the sagging will of mainline
Protestantism in the years following the antiwar and civil rights movements—years
in which liberal Christian leaders lost direction and energy and somehow
missed, overlooked, and underestimated the fact that they were losing the
faithful, by the millions, to rival denominations or to nothing at all. Yale
Divinity School professor Serene Jones '85MDiv, '91PhD, says, with
understatement: “One of the things that happened is that the liberal church did
fall into a kind of complacency.”
What about Yale’s role in the post-sixties era? Yale and its Divinity
School helped shape mainline Protestantism, and therefore American Protestant
culture, for nearly two centuries. How do they figure in American religious
life today? What happened when the New Christian Right came to religious and
political power? Where have the graduates of Yale Divinity School been, and
where are they now, in the recent cultural and religious conflicts?
I spoke with an eclectic mix of YDS graduates and others active in
Protestant scholarship or ministry. Some I’ve known for years, some I know by
reputation, others I was referred to, and still others I picked almost at
random. What I found surprised me. First, though YDS has only recently emerged
from its own time of trial, graduates of the school continue to exert a
disproportionately powerful influence over mainline Protestant denominations.
And these YDS grads, politically liberal as ever, seem undaunted by the rise of
the evangelical right. I found leaders and grassroots pastors all over the
country who appear to be nurturing the beginnings of a revival of liberal
Protestantism—long after many political observers had declared it dead.
Along with that goes a new embrace of evangelical fervor on behalf of the
Gospel: what Sharon Watkins '84MDiv, head of the Disciples of Christ, calls “a
new way of being church.”
For generations, Yale-educated ministers and religiously educated
laypeople ran the most influential institutions in American society—institutions
at the heart of the American establishment, itself a Protestant construct.
These were the people who put the P in WASP: leaders of the largest churches,
cultural institutions, elite prep schools, colleges and universities, law
firms, banks, and corporations, as well as holders of major political offices.
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Fifty years ago, Yale Divinity School
was still a theological powerhouse. |
This state of affairs remained solidly, not to say complacently, in
force through the mid-twentieth century. Fifty years ago, Yale Divinity School
was still a theological powerhouse, not only educating the next generation of
church leaders and academics but also providing the intellectual underpinnings
of what some call the “anti-Establishment.” Coffin and theologian Harvey Cox '55BD
were eminences of the antiwar and civil rights movements.
But then mainline Protestantism entered a long, slow decline. In 1965,
membership peaked for most mainline denominations. (The mainline includes the
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, Lutherans, Methodists,
American Baptists, and Christian Church, also known as the Disciples of
Christ.) Between 1965 and 1990, the Episcopalians lost more than a quarter of
their members—almost a million souls. The Presbyterians lost 1.4 million
members, fully a third. The United Church of Christ (UCC) lost 23 percent, the
Disciples 46 percent. Even the Methodists, the largest mainline denomination
then and now, lost nearly 20 percent, or more than 2 million people.
With the decline in numbers came diminished status. William McKinney,
president of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, says
mainline Protestant churches lost their collective standing as the “magisterium."
It wasn’t obvious to them while it was happening, he adds: “If you’re the
magisterium, it’s hard to see outside.”
YDS experienced its own downturn. Until the early 1990s, the school had
no admissions director and no recruitment strategy—except, in the words
of Harry Attridge, longtime professor and current dean, an attitude of “We're
Yale, let them come.” This “smugness”—Attridge’s word—led to
plummeting selectivity: large numbers came, but in some years YDS accepted more
than three-quarters of applicants in order to fill classrooms. University
administrators thought the school was adrift, unsure of its mission. They ordered
a full-scale internal reassessment. There was, Attridge has said, “a lot of
doubt about whether the Divinity School had a future.”
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"Mainline Protestantism’s capacity for denial was enormous.” |
And then there were the buildings. Years of deferred maintenance took
their dreary toll on Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. By the mid 1990s, rotting
wood, weakened roofs, and peeling paint offered a visible metaphor for the
state of mainline Protestantism. According to a 1996 article in this magazine,
many worried that the Marquand Chapel steeple might actually fall down.
Deferred maintenance is the strategy institutions adopt when they don’t
know how to fix problems that seem too large, and put their trust in a vague
future that will somehow be better. Throughout the mainline Protestant world,
leaders waited for their numbers to rebound—in vain. It took them a long
time to act. “Mainline Protestantism’s capacity for denial was enormous,” says
McKinney. “It has been very hard for liberal Protestants to get over the fact
that we don’t run things any more.” Moreover, he adds, “some of the activism of
the 1960s had an establishmentarian quality to it: self-righteousness and an
arrogance” that didn’t lend itself to asking if they could be doing something
different.
Was YDS paying attention to the mainline decline and the conservative
upheaval? Outgoing university chaplain Frederick J. “Jerry” Streets '75MDiv
thinks not. The school had “not chosen to position itself to be in the debate,”
he told me. Instead, Yale “sat
out the culture wars and has been a victim of its own class stratification; it’s
seen the evangelical movement as a poor people’s movement. Its refusal to
engage [was] a function of perception of class, as well as of ignoring William
James”—who celebrated “the varieties of religious experience” in his 1902
book of that name.
“When I was in divinity school,” recalls Lillian Daniel '93MDiv, senior
pastor of the thousand-member First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn,
Illinois, “there was this whole huge publishing, Internet, parachurch movement,
all going on all around us; at Yale it was as if it didn’t exist.”
Krista Tippett '94MDiv, host of Public Radio International’s program Speaking
of Faith, adds “I’m sure if it was
talked about, it was dismissively.” The “religious elites,” she muses, “didn’t
take populist religion seriously enough.” Even Attridge thinks that “maybe we
weren’t doing our job as well as we could have.”
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I couldn’t find the despair I thought would be
rampant among mainline clergy. |
Yet I couldn’t find, in my interviews, the despair I thought would be
rampant among mainline clergy presiding over the era of their own decline. What
I found instead persuaded me to rethink my notions about Jim Wallis, author of God's
Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Wallis is the best-known liberal evangelical
Christian today, but I used to consider him a lonely anomaly. Now I’m not so
sure.
Jill and Rick Edens, both '78MDiv, are co-pastors of the United Church
of Chapel Hill in North Carolina. When they arrived in 1979, the church had a
membership of 170 and an average of 80 people in worship; today, it has a
membership of 800, with 400 to 500 in worship weekly. I asked Jill Edens why I
wasn’t hearing, in my interviews with YDS alumni, the grief that ought to
attend the funeral of such a large and influential institution as mainline
Protestantism. She took issue with me on two counts. “As a Christian,” she
observed, “my answer would be, 'Look how nicely they treated Jesus.' Christian
faith doesn’t tell you that because you do well, you’ll be treated nicely or
win politically.”
And on the other hand, she said, “I would argue that the worm has
turned.” Looking at the most recent national gatherings of the Presbyterians
and the Episcopalians, Edens saw victories: for moderation in the former, which
sent the hot-button issue of ordaining gay ministers back to local presbyteries;
and for openness in the latter, where the church not only refused to “buckle"
on its installation of Gene Robinson as an openly gay bishop in 2003, but also
elected its first woman denominational head. “And in my own little neck of the
woods,” the relatively conservative Southern Conference of the United Church of
Christ, an association of churches in western North Carolina resoundingly
rejected the conservative path. In fall 2005, a “hard-right evangelical group"
came within three votes of taking over the association. The group then
organized all winter and spring to unseat the conference minister, an African
American, who nevertheless won re-election overwhelmingly.
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The day after John Chane blessed Ronald Reagan’s casket, he performed a same-sex
blessing. |
In Arizona this year, Brenda Stiers '83MDiv, formerly adjunct faculty
at YDS, helped organize CrossWalk America, a walk from Phoenix to Washington,
D.C., on behalf of a manifesto of progressive Christianity known as the “Phoenix
Affirmations.” As she sought ministers around the country who could host the
walkers, hold rallies, and help broadcast their message, she found that YDS
graduates “jumped on board immediately without any reservation. Wherever I was
talking to people, they were in the middle of efforts to enliven progressive
Christianity.”
Or consider John Thomas '75MDiv, UCC President and General Minister
since 1999, whose church started the “God is still speaking” initiative, a
successful identity and membership (read: modern evangelism) campaign based on
the principles of radical inclusion and “extravagant welcome.” Or John Chane '72MDiv,
Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who, on the day after blessing President
Ronald Reagan’s casket at the National Cathedral in 2004, performed a same-sex
blessing for a local priest and his partner of 12 years.
YDS dean Attridge sees a changing climate in liberal Protestantism, “a
different face of a liberal evangelical Christianity. I tend to be an
optimistic type,” he admits, but he thinks there’s “something of a revival
going on. Certainly there’s a lot of ferment at the grassroots levels.”
Many YDS graduates say that, if YDS failed to notice the culture wars, it nevertheless gave them many of the tools they needed for engagement. John
Thomas says the school conferred “sufficient resilience to avoid simply
succumbing to the prevailing winds, and to remain to some extent a faithful
voice for progressive religion that needs to be present and heard.” He and
others speak of the school’s call to public ministry: “Part of the culture of
Yale and particularly the Divinity School is that training in theology,
training in preparation for ministry, are ultimately preparation for public
life.”
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A call to public life is something Yale students pick up in the
university culture. |
In fact, three of the top ten mainline Protestant denominations are
currently headed by YDS graduates. In addition to Thomas, they are Clifton
Kirkpatrick '62MDiv, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and Sharon
Watkins '84MDiv, President and General Minister of the Disciples. In all, the
three represent more than 5 million souls, roughly 20 percent of all mainline
Protestants in the country. Add to the list of leaders a half-dozen Episcopal
bishops, including John Chane; senior administrators of numerous colleges and
seminaries; and professors everywhere. This trend should continue, says
Attridge: “We have a lot of people in the pipeline coming up in various
denominations who will emerge into positions of leadership in the next decade
or so.”
A call to public life is something Yale students pick up in the
university culture, and it turns out that this set of expectations crosses
school and age and disciplinary boundaries. Undergraduate, graduate,
professional—I don’t think it matters. It’s an expectation of leadership:
that the world is wide, and big, and Yalies have helped run it for a very long
time, and they’re expected to keep running it. Ordained or not, therefore, the
mostly liberal YDS alumni have taken up theological arms in the culture wars.
Almost without exception, the graduates I talked with said they “loved"
their time at YDS—even those who attended in the years when, in Yale’s view,
the school had lost its way. No one even mentioned the deteriorating buildings,
the peeling paint. Graduates spoke of intellectual rigor and stimulation, of a
passionately dedicated Christian community, of a place both spiritually
centered and unafraid of ideas. One minister said her fantasy of winning the
lottery is going back to Yale.
Again and again, they said YDS had nurtured their religious fervor. Louise Higginbotham '83MDiv, now retired, was senior minister at New Haven's
UCC Church on the Green for 14 years. “YDS trained me to take back religious
language,” she says. “In 1993 I preached a sermon, for this very liberal
congregation, called ‘The J-word’”—that is, Jesus. “I have responded to
the radical right by trying to reclaim that which I believe is ours as well.”
“Yale was unashamedly Christian,” agrees Jill Edens. Clifton
Kirkpatrick, head of the Presbyterians, says YDS’s forthright and ecumenical
approach transformed his life: it “opened up the broader Christian community
and gave me a liberating sense of the power of the gospel, both in the personal
lives of people but also to transform the world.”
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"Americans like liberalism but they don’t like
liberal religion.” |
Nearly everyone has a theory about what caused the mainline decline; it’s
the $64,000 question in the sociology of modern Protestantism. One theory
emphasizes the mainline’s discomfort with emotion in worship, a focus on social
issues, and consequent neglect of personal faith. McKinney, of the Pacific
School of Religion, cites sociologist Robert Booth Fowler in arguing that
however much Americans may like liberalism, they find it “too cerebral” and “spiritually
unsatisfying.” (Anyone recognize a couple of recent Yale-educated Democratic
presidential candidates?) “Americans like liberalism but they don’t like
liberal religion,” he says. “They want it hot, passionate; they want to feel
it.”
“For a long time among the Disciples,” says Watkins, “we’ve been afraid
to be too emotional, too charismatic, too evangelistic, even too prayerful, for
fear of being confused with aggressively evangelical people.” Today, “we're
becoming more willing not only to witness to our experience of a living God in
our lives personally, but also to invite others into that same experience, to
reach out with evidence of an abundant living God.” Five years ago, the
Disciples set a 20-year goal of growing the denomination by 1,000 churches.
They have already added 400 new churches since then, almost half of the total
target.
At YDS, Watkins found preparation for her current mission in a “very
nearly unique” interweaving of academia and church. Many other graduates
agreed. They said that whereas some divinity schools seem to hone the intellect
at the expense of faith (Harvard and Chicago came up often), Yale was committed
to both. Jill Edens recalls, “My Old Testament professor, Brevard Childs,
always prayed before his lectures—standing room only—that God would
be present in the teaching. This in some ways was my clearest image of what a
Yale faculty member was, bringing the best scholarship through a faithful
heart.”
YDS, too, is regrouping. After the “navel-gazing in the late eighties
and early nineties, with a lot of focus on internal issues,” says Attridge, the
school emerged with a new affirmation “to engage in major ways in the life of
the churches.” As evidence, he offers the new Center for Faith and Culture,
which works with Christians inside and outside academia to help people practice
their faith in all spheres of life. Another new program, on pastoral
excellence, is charged with helping ministers to model, teach, and preach their
faith “as a life-integrating and life-transforming reality.”
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The admission rate is now a far more selective 50 percent. |
The building program is complete, the steeple is in sound shape, and
the admission rate is now a far more selective 50 percent. As for the school's
mission, the official version is recorded on its website: “To foster the
knowledge and love of God through critical engagement with the traditions of
the Christian churches in the context of the contemporary world.” Attridge
expresses what that mission entails: “To be preaching the gospel: God sent his
only son because he wanted the world to be redeemed, and we need to be
instruments of that reconciliation.”
Are evangelical stirrings among mainline Protestant leaders and
pastors, many of them trained at YDS, perhaps resurrecting a spirit not widely
felt since the 1960s? I don’t know whether I’m describing a full-blown trend.
(As a historian, I can only predict parts of the future.) What I do know is
that Yale Divinity School graduates are going to be in the thick of what comes
next.
Let a North Carolina pastor have the last word, interpreting the past
for the present. “When I heard Coffin speak,” Jill Edens says, “my description
was, this is a liberal revival preacher. And that’s what I learned to do at
Yale. To preach the gospel with all my guts and intelligence, with that
passionate commitment, using every intellectual tool that I could find—no
holds barred. That, to me, was Yale.” 
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