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Meet the religious leaders shaping the next generation of social justice activism
Rev. Dr. William Barber has long been known for his civil rights activism, including being arrested as part of nonviolent demonstrations.
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Most public policy lecture halls do not echo with call-and-response Gospel hymns. But on a recent Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen warms up a class in New Haven, Conn.
“Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus,” she sings, her voice filling the room. Quickly, the fifty or so students pick up the tune 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. The goal is to prepare the next generation of ministers to not only think deeply about the Bible, theology, and church history, but also equip them for public ministry and leadership in the wider community.
Teaching this class is one of the most well-known religious leaders in America: Rev. William Barber, whose work with the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach has been his own public ministry.
Rev. Barber rises and begins his lecture. “The forces that are perpetrating extremism are not weak,” he says as his eyes dart around the room, “and they are well-funded.”
He admonishes his students that as future church leaders, they cannot argue political positions like everyone else. He tells them their arguments and reasoning must be deeply moral positions, rooted in scripture. “Your language,” he says, “has to be different.”
Rev. Barber is the founding director of the Center, having come here after three decades of parish ministry in North Carolina.
“I always wanted to train others, even as a pastor,” he says. “If I pastored somewhere 30 years and nobody gets called to be a preacher and nobody gets trained, what kind of preaching have I done?”
Teaching the politics of moral fusion
What Barber’s 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 major tenets of religion as it relates to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany his repeats often: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How are these policies affecting people? How is it affecting their living and their dying?”
While he continues his activism around the country, he’s now helping upcoming leaders prepare for what he describes as urgent public witness.
“If you don’t stand in challenge to poverty and denial of health care in this moment, in this life, you’ve wasted part of it,” he says.
In an age of atomization over identity politics, Rev. Barber’s teaching what he calls moral fusion politics.
“When people sit down across the lines that have tended to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they figure out that the same people who are voting against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages.”
If extremists, says Rev. Barber, are working together, then his side needs to come together too.
Working beyond the classroom and pulpit
This work extends beyond the classroom, into the divinity school’s daily 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 labor alongside you and one another in the pursuit of hope, justice and peace.”
Sitting near the back is 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 field work.
Summer placements in churches focusing on voting rights and poverty are central to the work of his Center. Student Benjamin Ball spent part of his summer in Alabama.
“We were standing outside of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he says, “which is the church where Dr. King preached and worked, which is right outside of the Montgomery State Capital.”
For Ball, who’s from Tennessee, the experience was transformative.
“To stand outside of 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 image. If you walk out of church and ignore this, you’re missing something right in front of you.”
The point is that morality isn’t the sole province of religious conservatives, says ministry student Ed Ford, from Connecticut.
“The Gospel is telling us to do justice, love, mercy and walk humbly with our God. It’s saying, ‘If you’re sick, would you care for me? If I’m a stranger, would you take care of me? If you are poor and those who are really suffering in the world?” Says Ford. “Those are the things that we’re supposed to be talking about. Jesus calls us to help the least of these. Right?”
Help needs to come, says Ford, not just through traditional direct services churches often provide such as food banks, but also help through legislation and public policy.
“Poverty doesn’t know if you’re Black, White, Asian, Latino,” he says. “It knows, though, at the root of it all in our country is this: ‘Is our government going to step in and help people? Is our church going to speak up and talk about what’s right?”
Ford echoes Rev. Barber’s own language from the earlier lecture when he concludes: “Are we going to be chaplains of Empire? Are we going to be prophets of God?”
These students are learning the ways of the biblical prophets, who broach impolite topics and speak truth to power, whether within congregations or the public square.
These are lessons student Lizzie Chiravono, from South Carolina, began learning early in life. “Being from the South,” she says, “there’s no way to disconnect religion and politics because every social setting I walked into 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 who are impacted by poverty and other forms of suffering, politics or religion are never far from their minds.”
Institutionalizing the Center’s movement for civil rights
What these students are learning 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 then go and talk — that’s what this is about,” says longtime civil rights leader and labor attorney Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, who helps direct 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 institutionalizing the movement. And so it ends up in people’s hearts. It ends up in changing religious education. And it ends up in strengthening the movement we’re trying to build.”
This program goes beyond simply educating these aspiring ministers. It’s also about formation and tapping into a longing, says another of the center’s leaders, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
“Students here have a deep spiritual hunger connected to their sense that something is wrong with the way the world works,” he says. And the mission is to direct that sense of wrong into a sense of purpose.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. And God doesn’t want it to be this way,” says Wilson-Hartgrove. “And something inside of them tells them that it could be otherwise, 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. Again, singer Yara Allen is rousing the crowd.
“We shall not. We shall 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 your presence.”
Some students have followed Barber to this recording and sit in the audience. Other people, from the larger university community and the public, show up to hear him talk as well.
No matter where he appears – in class, in chapel or an off-campus podcast recording — he draws a crowd eager to take up what Barber calls the cause of the Hebrew prophets and Christian Gospels.
“If you don’t deal with public theology and you don’t deal with issues of how we treat the least of them,” he says, “you actually cut the scriptures apart.”
He says that’s what he sees Christian Nationalism doing today — using religion to divide rather than unite and harm rather than help. He calls this movement to unite religion with official government power heresy. Rather, he says the Bible teaches something different.
“‘Thy kingdom come’ is a direct announcement to Caesar that your stuff is not real, that your way of life has to pass,” Barber says. “We’re praying for another kind of kingdom to come that’s rooted in love and justice and lifting all people.”
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Man accused of plot to assassinate Trump testifies Iran pressured him, says Biden and Haley were other possible targets
The allegation sounded like the stuff of spy movies: A Pakistani businessman trying to hire hit men, even handing them $5,000 in cash, to kill a U.S. politician on behalf of Iran ‘s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
It was true, and potential targets of the 2024 scheme included now-President Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and former presidential candidate and ex-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the man told jurors at his attempted terrorism trial in New York on Wednesday. But he insisted his actions were driven by fear for loved ones in Iran, and he figured he’d be apprehended before anything came of the scheme.
“My family was under threat, and I had to do this,” the defendant, Asif Merchant, testified through an Urdu interpreter. “I was not wanting to do this so willingly.”
Merchant said he had anticipated getting arrested before anyone was killed, intended to cooperate with the U.S. government and had hoped that would help him get a green card.
U.S. authorities were, indeed, on to him – the supposed hit men he paid were actually undercover FBI agents – and he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. During a search, investigators said they found a handwritten note that contained the codewords for the various aspects of the plot, CBS News previously reported.
Merchant did sit for voluntary FBI interviews, but he ultimately ended up with a trial, not a cooperation deal.
“You traveled to the United States for the purpose of hiring Mafia members to kill a politician, correct?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta asked during her turn questioning Merchant Wednesday in a Brooklyn federal court.
“That’s right,” Merchant replied, his demeanor as matter-of-fact as his testimony was unusual.
The trial is unfolding amid the less than week-old Iran war, which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a strike that Trump summed up as “I got him before he got me.” Jurors are instructed to ignore news pertaining to the case.
The Iranian government has denied plotting to kill Trump or other U.S. officials.
Merchant, 47, had a roughly 20-year banking career in Pakistan before getting involved in an array of businesses: clothing, car sales, banana exports, insulation imports. He openly has two families, one in Pakistan and the other in Iran – where, he said, he was introduced around the end of 2022 to a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative. They initially spoke about getting involved in a hawala, an informal money transfer system, Merchant said.
Merchant testified that his periodic visits to the U.S. for his garment business piqued the interest of his Revolutionary Guard contact, who trained him on countersurveillance techniques.
The U.S. deems the Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization.” Formally called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force has been prominent in Iran under Khamenei.
Merchant said the handler told him to seek U.S. residents interested in working for Iran. Then came another assignment: Look for a criminal to arrange protests, steal things, do some money laundering, “and maybe have somebody murdered,” Merchant recalled.
“He did not tell me exactly who it is, but he told me – he named three people: Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Nikki Haley,” he added.
In 2024, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CBS News Merchant planned to assassinate current and former government officials across the political spectrum.
Merchant allegedly sketched out the plot on a napkin inside his New York hotel room, prosecutors said, and told the individual “that there would be ‘security all around’ the person” they were planning to kill.
“No other option”
After U.S. immigration agents pulled Merchant aside at the Houston airport in April 2024, searched his possessions and asked about his travels to Iran, he concluded that he was under surveillance. But still he researched Trump rally locations, sketched out a plot for a shooting at a political rally, lined up the supposed hit men and scrambled together $5,000 from a cousin to pay them a “token of appreciation.”
He even reported back to his Revolutionary Guard contact, sending observations – fake, Merchant said – tucked into a book that he shipped to Iran through a series of intermediaries.
Merchant said he “had no other option” than to play along because the handler had indicated that he knew who Merchant’s Iranian relatives were and where they lived.
In a court filing this week, prosecutors noted that Merchant didn’t seek out law enforcement to help with his purported predicament before he was arrested. He testified that he couldn’t turn to authorities because his handler had people watching him.
Prosecutors also said that in his FBI interviews, Merchant “neglected to mention any facts that could have supported” an argument that he acted under duress.
Merchant told jurors Wednesday that he didn’t think agents would believe his story, because their questions suggested “they think that I’m some type of super-spy.”
“And are you a super-spy?” defense lawyer Avraham Moskowitz asked.
“No,” Merchant said. “Absolutely not.”
The bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed some 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported, a review of commercial satellite imagery by NPR has found.
The images suggest that the school was hit on Saturday as part of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.
The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR’s analysis of the additional strike points.
The strike points “look like pretty clean detonation centroids,” said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology laboratory at Oregon State University.
“These certainly appear like detonation sites,” agreed Scher’s colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.
The images show “very precise targeting,” Lewis told NPR. “Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit.”
A satellite image of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard compound taken on March 4, several days after an airstrike destroyed a school on the edge of the compound. The image reveals that half a dozen other buildings in addition to the school were struck.
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Iranian state media said 165 people died in the bombing, which struck a girls’ school. The school was located within less than 100 yards of the perimeter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, according to satellite images and publicly available information. The clinic was also located within the base perimeter, although both facilities had been walled off from the base.
Israel has denied involvement. “We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. “I don’t know who’s responsible for the bombing.”
At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. is looking into what happened at the school. “All I know, all I can say, is that we’re investigating that,” Hegseth said. “We, of course, never target civilian targets.”
Given Minab’s location in the southeastern part of Iran, Lewis believes it’s more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. As one gets farther south and east in Iran, “a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location,” he said.
Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the strike “deliberate” and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. “To call the attack on the girls school merely a ‘war crime’ does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime,” he said.
But Lewis said it’s more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school and clinic buildings were both once part of the base. The school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024.
Lewis believes it’s possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.
“There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them,” he said. “It’s possible that the target didn’t get updated.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for additional information about the strike.
NPR’s Arezou Rezvani and NPR’s RAD team contributed to this report.
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