Public theology confronts authoritarianism in YDS symposium

By Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R.

William Barber’s voice crackled over loudspeakers and filled the chandeliered hall of the Old Refectory at Yale Divinity School. 

“Goliath’s whole point was to keep people scared,” Barber intoned like a prophet. “Authoritarianism’s strategy is to keep people afraid and keep people divided.”

The Rev. Dr. Barber, Divinity School Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at YDS, was calling in to address the more than 100 clergy, educators, and others who attended a one-day symposium on “Public Theology in a Time of Authoritarianism,” co-sponsored by his Center for Public Theology and FASPE, the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Barber had been called away at the last minute to preach at a close family member’s funeral in North Carolina.

The November assembly was convened to “explore ethical possibilities of religion and faith” amid “rising authoritarianism globally.” If the world’s current proliferation of autocrats, dictators, and tyrants was the gathering’s backdrop, its chief focus was homegrown American despotism. 

The figure of the Biblical strongman, evoked by Barber and others throughout the day, was clearly a reference to a single individual. And while that man’s name was for the most part conspicuously avoided, his authoritarian policies and threats, from attacks on free speech, to rampant dishonesty and corruption, to arrests and deportations by masked police, were frankly addressed.

In his brief welcoming comments, YDS Dean Greg Sterling recalled a recent visit to China, where “you can speak freely on just about any matter … except the government—you cannot criticize it,” and another to Flossenbürg, Germany, where the Lutheran priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on the personal order of Adolf Hitler. “In my life,” Sterling said, “I have always thought of these events in contrast to the freedom that we have in the U.S. Now I am concerned that some of the same playbook is being used in our own country.”

This past April, Barber and members of his “Moral Mondays” coalition were arrested and zip-tied for praying in the Capitol Rotunda against Republican budget cuts. “What we have right now is a crisis of civilization, a crisis of democracy,” he told Politico after his arrest.

Panel photo by Timothy Cahill

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove posing question to panelists (l-r) Thorsten Wagner, Nancy MacLean, and John Fabian Witt / photo by Timothy Cahill

‘Theology is always political’

In tandem with the YDS administration, Barber launched the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale in 2023. He explained to the Yale Daily News at the time that the Center would be a teaching, training, and research hub “to examine the intersection of religious moral values and social justice issues.” The Center’s website states, “Theology is not an isolated practice, but must necessarily challenge the things that adversely impact people’s lives.”

The symposium was animated by that conviction and by the mission of co-host FASPE to “promote ethical leadership and responsibility among professionals.” FASPE awards travel fellowships to the sites of former death camps and conducts leadership training for professionals from lawyers and executives to journalists and clergy.

Rebecca Scott, FASPE’s Director of Programs, said that the symposium was conceived for clergy and others to consider “what it means to be a leader” in these “particularly fraught” times, helping them avoid falling prey to helplessness. The temptation, Scott said, is “to say this is a problem that’s beyond me.”

‘PUBLIC THEOLOGY IN A TIME OF AUTHORITARIANISM’: Watch the symposium videos

“We’re going to wrestle with what it means to be human in the face of authoritarianism,” declared Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, the Center’s Assistant Director for Partnerships and Fellowships, as he opened the symposium in Barber’s stead. 

“Theology is always political,” Wilson-Hartgrove observed. “It’s not always partisan,”

FASPE’s Scott noted that, despite having invited clergy from across the political spectrum to the symposium, nearly all who registered were of a similar political bent. She admitted to some disappointment that conservative churches ignored or declined her invitation. “I do think (the symposium) could stand for some more diversity of thought,” she allowed. “We didn’t want it to be an echo chamber.”

Cahill photo of Tony Lin addressing audience

Tony Tian-Ren Lin addressing audience while panelists Jon-Paul Lapeña and Larycia Hawkins look on / photo by Timothy Cahill

Political empathy

The day was organized into four 90-minute sessions. The first, “Religion’s Role in a Changing America,” was moderated by Tony Tian-Ren Lin, Associate Director of the Public Theology Center. Jon-Paul Lapeña, Yale Ph.D. candidate in New Testament and early Christianity, described studies indicating a major shift of religious identity, away from church or denomination affiliation toward ideology and political belief. He identified three “moral worlds” that define identity: “traditionalists,” who believe moral authority is chiefly rooted in scripture; “pluralists,” who derive their morality from community standards and shared sacred relationships; and the secular or “spiritual but not religious,” who regard morality as the work of conscience, empathy, and reason based largely on science. 

The distance between these conceptual “worlds” renders consensus, or even simple communication, elusive, Lapeña said. “We’re not just talking across opinions,” he said. “We’re talking across meaning systems.”

Speaking to this phenomenon, Larycia Hawkins, political science professor at Lincoln University, observed that “Americans think the problem is the other guy.” It’s easy but not productive to blame the religious right for the country’s collective woes, the professor averred, but doing so amounts to a “failure of political empathy.”

“I don’t believe in purity tests,” Hawkins said in a subsequent interview. According to standard definitions, her grandmother, for whom the Bible and her faith were the last word on moral judgments, would qualify as a Christian nationalist. Yet she was “a lover of the human soul and spirit,” Hawkins said, and it was from this woman and others like her that the professor learned virtues of kindness, mercy, and forbearance. Though Hawkins grew up in rural Oklahoma, amid people whose political ideas she opposes, she insisted that even when looking “in the eye of evil” one must remain capable of loving.

“We’re all in thrall to our lens,” Hawkins said. “I am decolonizing my mind all the time,” she allowed, adding that the task is not only to identify how others are complicit, “but how we all are culpable.”

A ‘convenient fable’

The morning’s second session offered a presentation by FASPE Principal Scholar Thorsten Wagner on the complicity of the clergy in Nazi Germany. While pastors like Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller opposed Hitler, Wagner said, the majority of Protestant clergy, as well as numerous Catholic prelates, accepted the comingling of Christian values, German nationalism, and the “Nazi imagination of a world without Jews” that defined the rogue regime.

It is a “convenient fable” that Nazism was an attack on Christianity, he said. In truth, “the most dominant reality” in German churches through the 1930s was “a hybrid faith of belief in Hitler and in Jesus.” Citing historical archives and statistics, Wagner revealed that a majority of the faithful came to view “Christian faith and Nazi genocide as compatible.” 

And while there was comparatively more resistance to Nazism among the Catholic Church, the German historian said a sizable number of bishops, priests, and parishes also searched for “symbiosis” with Hitler’s regime.

Cahill photo of audience member speaking

Audience member addressing symposium attendees / photo by Timothy Cahill

Ethical formation

It was impossible to overlook the subtext of Wagner’s presentation, the point that similar failures are alive among clergy today. That sense of moral culpability hovered over the afternoon’s opening discussion on “Faith, Morality, and Professional Ethics.” The panel, lead by Wake Forest law professor Kenneth Townsend ’12 M.A.R., ’12 J.D., included Benjamin Tolchin, Director of the Center for Clinical Ethics at Yale New Haven Health System; Karissa Thacker, from the Office of Religious Life at Columbia University; and Eugene Nam, an asylum attorney and Legal Advisor for the Interfaith Center of New York.

The session explored the question of what it means to be a professional today, when in Washington and across the country professionalism, expertise, and authoritative voices in all fields are systematically marginalized, ridiculed, and discarded.

The panel’s answer was that professionals must go beyond their highly honed skill sets to become leaders in public morality.

The present hostile climate, “is something I’ve never seen before,” noted Columbia’s Thacker, whose 2016 book The Art of Authenticity framed a vision of leadership devoted to meaning over happiness. She spoke of the necessity for “ethical formation,” an on-going process of personal and occupational development that goes “beyond professional codes and rules” to qualities of ethics, morality, and character.

“It’s very easy for virtuosity to overshadow virtue,” said Nam, amplifying the point. “The rules—the skills, the tradecraft, the credentials—are comfortable places to hide from virtue. Unless we take the time for ethical reflection, we will fall back on virtuosity.” Tolchin agreed, pointing out that while there are moments in medicine when “the emphasis is perforce on virtuosity,” the practice can easily become habitual, leaving little room for ethical reflection. 

Too often, Townsend added, “if moral formation is viewed as ancillary, it will be disregarded. It needs to be centered.” 

Archive photo of Barber speaking at MLK event January 2025

William Barber photographed at Battell Chapel while speaking at Yale’s Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration in January 2025 / photo by Dan Renzetti 

‘Born for this time’

The symposium returned from a brief break to a telephone address by Barber, whose voice palpably lifted the energy in the Old Refectory. Barber encouraged the congregation to embrace the solidarity of the day and the growing resistance against authoritarianism. In solidarity, he said, “You’re not who you are alone.” He observed that “what evil sought to tempt Jesus with in the desert” is identical to the seductions authoritarians use today—access to power for selfish gain, deceptive pictures of false courage, and the promise that “all will come to you” if you will just bow to corrupt powers.

Jesus’s rejection of evil, Barber said, is the exemplar of “prophetic imagination for why we never bow.” Barber offered an alternative vision of power, one grounded in justice and activism in service to the community. 

The day’s final panel again took lessons from the past, as Nancy MacLean, Duke Professor of History and Public Policy, and Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt ’94 B.A., ’99 J.D., ’00 Ph.D. joined moderator Wilson-Hartgrove to discuss what history teaches about authoritarianism in America. 

MacLean is author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, a definitive history of the organization she described as America’s “first Christian Nationalist movement.” The rise of the KKK in the 1920s into a national force of more than five million white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men was based on what MacLean called a “martial Christianity” that regarded Blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, and Jews as “interlopers” responsible for widespread moral degradation. Exploiting mass media, from newspapers and magazines to radio broadcasts and movies, the Klan demonized intellectuals, “elites,” Black people, and immigrants as enemies of the people. In 1923, MacLean said, the anti-KKK “Commission for International Cooperation” reported that “Protestant ministers who approved of the Klan outnumbered those who opposed it.” 

Witt recently published The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, a history of the progressive American Fund for Public Service. Established in 1922 with a $1 million endowment from Charles Garland, the liberal philanthropy supported “unpopular causes” from labor unions and racial equality to progressive publications and anti-lynching campaigns. 

One of the lessons of the fund, Witt noted, was how its organizers grappled with the challenge of organizing a national movement “at a level of tens and hundreds of millions of people.” His book is in part a chronicle of how Garland Fund leaders “found a way to create an institution that could persist during their years in the desert.”
 

“Our democracy has been here before,” Witt said of today’s abuses. “Our forebears also reclaimed democracy from authoritarian forces.”

As the discussion shifted to current events, FASPE scholar Wagner joined his fellow historians, observing that movements like the KKK were a blueprint for the Nazis. Gravely, he added that he sees “many structural similarities” between Germany in the 1930s and the U.S. today.

Contemplating current conditions, MacLean recalled the words of a 1920s civil-rights activist who declared that it is “never more important to keep the conversation going than when it feels it’s going nowhere.” Her words brought to mind the encouragement Barber had offered a couple of hours earlier.

“God needs people who will stand up” for good, Barber said to close his remarks. “Just maybe,” he concluded, “we were all born for this moment, born for this time.” 

Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. writes on religion, ethics, and the arts.