The St. Thomas More priests’ intervention places them among an emerging community of Yale activists called by their religious convictions to take progressive action. Organizations like the Yale Black Seminarians, the Muslim Students Association and the Chaplain’s Office are working to promote social justice in the Trump era. Though religion is often overshadowed by politics at a largely secular institution like Yale, a recent surge in faith-based political activism revealed the complex — and storied — relationship between theology and liberal activism on campus.

For Beloin, these ideas find expression through prayer: at the pulpit, in front of the courthouse and in his holding cell during his daylong stay in jail.

When the protesters arrived at the correctional facility at around 11 a.m., they were each fingerprinted and asked to turn in their possessions. Beloin handed over his wallet, phone, keys and, finally, the clerical collar from around his neck.

On the national stage, conservative religious activism has long eclipsed its liberal counterpart in American politics and media. White evangelical Christian voters have been the Republican Party’s base since President Richard Nixon’s term in office. Although there are significant political disagreements among different right-leaning Christian communities, Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican. In the 2016 presidential election, Christians voted for Trump by a margin of 15 percent, and evangelicals favored Trump by a margin of 64 percent, according to a Pew poll. Yet, as Latino Catholic and Arab Muslim communities come under threat of immigration restrictions and political vilification, the religious left is garnering grassroots support.

The Hartford rally was one of a series of progressive political actions taken by religious leaders across the country in past months. Just three weeks after Trump’s election, the Rev. William J. Barber II led an 80,000-person “Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina, mobilizing a national network of interfaith leaders and earning the title of the “strongest contender for [Martin Luther King Jr.]’s mantel” from many supporters, according to The New York Times. In protest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, faith leaders linked arms and marched silently through the city.

Just a few weeks later, on the Aug. 28 anniversary of the March on Washington, the Rev. Al Sharpton led the multifaith One Thousand Ministers March for Justice rally along the path of the 1963 march. Wearing clerical collars, yarmulkes and vestments, the demonstrators protested Trump’s racial politics in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.

Yale has seen a parallel increase in liberal religious activism in recent times, but this movement is not without precedent. Progressive icon and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 DIV ’56 leveraged his religious authority on campus to promote anti–Vietnam War and civil rights causes. Though the student body may no longer recognize his name, Coffin’s influence persists.

Coffin’s Pulpit

On Oct. 2, 1967, Coffin stepped up to the lectern at an anti-war press conference in New York City. Yale’s Battell Chapel, he announced, would be “a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.” Following the speech, nearly 300 draft resisters burned or turned in their draft cards to Coffin in an act of collective civil disobedience. A New York Times article about the announcement ran under the headline, “War Foes Are Promised Churches as Sanctuary.” A Yale Alumni Magazine article later observed that Coffin’s Oct. 2 address cemented Yale as the center of the draft resistance movement in New England.

Yale faced an onslaught of incensed calls from alumni even as Yale President Kingman Brewster ’41 denounced Coffin’s speech. Brewster reminded Coffin that Battell was under the authority of the administration, not the chaplaincy; the chapel was not his to give away.

By age 40, Coffin had been arrested three times, including one instance in which he was arrested while leading a Freedom Ride to protest segregation in Alabama. When the New Haven trial of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale brought thousands to the city, Coffin led a student–faculty committee tasked with keeping the protests nonviolent. Though he twice graced the cover of Time magazine and never faded from the national public consciousness, Coffin was most visible on campus arguing with students, as he tirelessly sought to change minds one at a time.

Coffin’s friend and former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr. ’57 laughed as he said, “I don’t know anybody to this day who thinks they are entitled to march into the president’s office and just go right in without permission or anything else, right in the middle of a meeting or whatever, but he would just go right in. He would come in and say, ‘Damn it, Kingman, you can’t let this happen!’”

Confrontation was Coffin’s style. Chauncey remembered that Coffin once walked into a fraternity house unannounced during the group’s officer elections to interrogate the students about why they weren’t electing black leaders. He leveraged his oratory to rail against the old-boy-network attitude that still pervaded campus.

“In a world in which traditions need to be reshaped and purged as much as protected to support what we already hold, O God, bless us all with uncertainty,” Coffin said at a luncheon in celebration of Brewster’s inauguration as University president. As Yale shifted from an elite white Protestant school to a more progressive, diverse and pluralistic place, Coffin was an unapologetic advocate for reform.

The cultural context of Coffin’s time at Yale makes his faith-based activism even more striking. The 1970s were a time of decreasing religious engagement on college campuses. Amid an anti-authority cultural revolution, religion had fallen by the wayside. The deep and seemingly inalterable connection between tradition and religion would create a tension that generations of progressives before and after Coffin struggled to reconcile.

Yet Coffin was an uncompromising revolutionary. Drawing on the Protestant Reformation as a parallel to the civil rights movement, he liked to quote Martin Luther: “My conscience is captive to the word of God. … To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other,” Coffin repeated. “God help me.”

The Chaplain’s Office has weathered its own turbulent political moments over recent years. In October 2015, University Chaplain Sharon Kugler found herself at the center of a national controversy. Kugler, acting as a member of the Intercultural Affairs Council, co-signed an email to the Yale student body about cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes, asking students to “avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”

The directors of the Afro-American Cultural Center, Native American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural, Asian American Cultural Center and Slifka Center co-signed the letter. Within a week, Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis sent out a response challenging the basis for labeling costumes appropriative and affirming “freedom of speech.” As protests escalated, reporters from national news outlets descended on campus.

“That semester set us on a course of trying to figure out how to listen to each other better,” Kugler reflected. She said she did not regret sending out the email. But she emphasized the importance of dialogue amid political controversy, perhaps directing her comment at the alienation and pain many on campus felt during the semester-long period of protests. “It’s an office that attempts very delicately to keep people talking and to feel accessible to everyone. The prophetic voice that  is found in accompaniment and radical hospitality and a kind of endurance.”

Kugler and Saltiel, in some ways, are the new, pluralistic continuation of Coffin’s legacy. The chaplaincy, when it was first created in 1927, was intended for one person, the campus pastor. When Coffin was appointed in 1958, the Chaplain’s Office had hardly changed — his voice was the prophetic one. Over time, the staff expanded, adding a Jewish associate chaplain in the ’80s as well as Muslim and Hindu staff members in the mid-2000s.

Today’s chaplaincy comprises Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chaplains as well as Muslim and Hindu directors of student life. With this new pluralism, its voice is diffused among many chaplains.

As outspoken as Coffin was, the chaplaincy today takes a much more subtle tone on social justice. “It’s no longer the case that the chaplain assumes the role of standing at the pulpit and having the prophetic voice be that one voice,” Kugler said. “I think if Coffin were alive today, he would probably be among us.”

Liberal Divinity

Coffin spent three years on the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, where his legacy persists in the Divinity School’s activist student body. Much like the College, the Divinity School has a slew of liberal-minded student organizations: the LGBTQ group DivOut; FERNS, an environmentally focused group; and Peace, Action and Justice, a race-focused social action group. The organizations tackle social issues both in preparation for ministry and advocacy work at large.

Attending the Divinity School is often just as much about social history as it is about theology. Qadry Harris DIV ’18, a member of the Yale Black Seminary, grew up going to a black Baptist church in the Bronx. His studies center on radical scholarship in religious academia.

“Black religion in the Americas begins with antebellum chattel slavery,” Harris explained. “It’s not a secret that white slave masters were using Christianity to justify slavery.”

Harris sees a racial divide in American religion. On one side stands the slave master’s religion of oppression and, on the other, the religion of liberation and resistance developed by slaves to subvert slave-master Christianity. Harris explains today’s Christianity in terms of its past: Enslaved people “started appropriating Christian symbols to say, ‘God wants me to be free.’” Social justice, for Harris, is the inevitable consequence of faith in something larger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement — these protestors and activists are responding to the Trayvon Martins of the world,” Harris said. “There are those that would assert that Black Lives Matter has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the church. I’m of the opposite opinion. It is a manifestation of the church because it is people of the church fighting to protect our personhood.”

When asked how he reconciles his Christianity with the religion of oppression from which he believes it is descended, he said, “I don’t know if reconciliation is the right way to put it.” Harris acknowledged that his faith is not unimpeachable and that even the black Baptist tradition has internalized elements of dominance and suppression, though those influences are difficult to identify. His black liberation politics bears the marks of a religion that was once an instrument of oppression, and that does not sit easily with him.

The culture of the Divinity School lends itself to radical action. In fall 2017, Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling introduced “Religion and Ecology” and “Latinx and Latin American Christianity” as new concentrations of study. Earlier this year, the school also announced plans to construct the “regenerative village,” a highly energy-efficient residential complex designed to dramatically reduce waste.