Meet the religious leaders shaping the next generation of social justice activism

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.”