[Dialogue] Spong on Coffin

[KroegerD@aol.com]

April 19, 2006 
R.I.P. - William Sloane  Coffin, Jr.

“Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our  
country but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human 
 life that it supports – one planet, indivisible with clean air, soil and 
water;  with liberty, justice and peace for all.”  
These words were spoken in Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of  
Manhattan in the fall of 2003 by William Sloane Coffin, Jr. The occasion was  World 
Communion Sunday. Introduced by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN,  the 
78 year old, former senior minister of this church, mounted the pulpit to  
make one of his last public appearances. Even with his words slurred by a  
stroke, it was a typical performance by an incredible human being, who lit up  the 
religious sky of 20th century America like few people have ever done before.  
Bill Coffin was always a man on a mission and in a hurry to get there. Before 
 he had even acquired his Yale undergraduate degree in Government, he had 
already  served as a captain in World War II. With degree in hand he had then 
embarked on  a career as a counter-intelligence operative with the CIA. Stationed 
in Germany  his assignment was to destabilize the Soviet Union’s government 
under Joseph  Stalin, who, Coffin said, “made Adolf Hitler look like a boy 
scout.” His life  path, however, was not to be in espionage. Another destiny 
beckoned.  
At the invitation of his uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, the dean at Union  
Theological Seminary in New York, Bill attended a conference on religious  
vocations that was addressed by Reinhold Niebuhr, Union’s best known theologian,  a 
crucial voice for the social gospel and a friend and confidant of Eleanor  
Roosevelt. Niebuhr touched Bill Coffin and he was soon a student at the Yale  
Divinity School preparing for ordination in the Presbyterian Church.  
As a newly minted pastor, Coffin’s first assignment was to be chaplain at the 
 Phillip’s Academy in Andover, a socially prominent institution that he had  
attended some years earlier. That was Bill Coffin’s world. He traced his  
ancestors to the Pilgrims. His father and mother were wealthy residents of the  
Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father was the president of the Board of the  
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite this background Bill Coffin made his 
primary  identification with the poor and the marginalized. He was critical of the  
government of the United States for its lack of racial sensitivity and its  
addiction to war as an instrument of foreign policy. He did not speak for the  
establishment nearly so often as he spoke to it.  
>From Phillip’s Academy he moved to be chaplain at Williams College before  
returning to Yale in 1958 to serve as its chaplain. It was in this position that 
 he became a national figure. Racial feelings in the nation were intense at 
that  time as the civil rights battlefield shifted from public schools to 
public  accommodations, voting and minority empowerment. Joining forces publicly 
with  civil rights leaders in the South, the Yale chaplain poured all of his 
energy  into that struggle. He was arrested three times: on a freedom ride in  
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1961; in Baltimore protesting segregation in an  
amusement park in 1963, and at a lunch counter in St. Augustine’s, Florida, in  1964. 
Those arrests caused shock waves at Yale, especially among alumni and the  
school’s administration, but they made him popular and real to a restless  
student body turned off by the soft religion that does not demand that one’s  body 
act out what one’s mouth proclaims. He had now become the best known and  most 
admired campus personality. 
The Vietnam War was also beginning to roil the nation and like Martin Luther  
King, Jr., Bill Coffin merged the struggle for racial justice with the 
struggle  for peace. In this shift both men walked into an arena where unconscious 
tribal  feelings, masquerading as patriotism were rampant. Upper class liberal 
Americans  could tolerate, as a kind of noblesse oblige, what they regarded as 
the romantic  struggle for black equality, but being critical of your nation 
in time of war  loosed real demons, and to many it felt like an act of 
treason. 
By 1967 Bill Coffin had come to the conclusion that public confrontation was  
the only viable alternative to turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. 
This  meant that he must walk the path of civil disobedience, thus raising the 
stakes  dramatically. He first publicly offered the facilities of Battell 
Chapel on the  campus of Yale as a sanctuary from arrest for those refusing to 
serve in  Vietnam. He next presided over a worship service at the Arlington 
Street Church  in Boston, where young men, objecting to the war, handed in their 
draft cards.  Coffin hand- delivered 185 of them to the Justice Department on 
October 20,  1967, the day before a peace demonstration was planned at the 
Pentagon.  
In an interview that week with James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times,  
Bill Coffin indicated that in this action it was his desire to mount a “fair 
and  dignified” legal challenge to the draft. Coffin knew that he, along with 
his  colleague pediatrician Benjamin Spock and others, were courting arrest, 
but they  believed that the war had become so immoral that they were willing to 
accept the  consequences. It was the kind of challenge that no nation could 
ignore. 
The response of the Lyndon Johnson government was not long in coming. On  
January 5, 1968, the Justice Department led by political liberal Ramsey Clark  
indicted Coffin, Spock and three others on charges of “conspiracy to counsel  
draft evasion.” Establishment forces from both the left and the right coalesced  
to protect the authority of the beleaguered government. The President of 
Yale,  Kingman Brewster, attempting to enhance his standing with Yale alumni 
announced  his disagreement with his chaplain adding that he “deplored” Dr. Coffin’
s style.  That was a tactic right out of the liberal handbook. “Your goals 
are admirable,”  establishment liberals have always said, “but you would get 
them achieved so  much quicker if you did not force the issue. You must depend 
on human good will  to do the right thing. Confrontation to bring change always 
backfires, hurting  the very people you seek to help.” The world has heard 
that theme a million  times. It was used to stop public pressure against 
slavery. It was said to the  women engaged in the suffragette movement. Blacks and 
their white allies heard  it in the civil rights movement. Gays heard it when 
they began to press for  equality and the end of gay bashing. There is, however, 
no evidence that things  ever move toward resolution until the price of not 
moving is made very expensive  by direct challenge. Bill Coffin knew that and 
he acted. The indictment brought  by the Justice Department argued in regard to 
Coffin: “Given your persuasive  power and your standing you have set the 
example of civil disobedience.” It was  flattering but a quite unconstitutional 
basis upon which to seek to silence  government critics. Coffin and Spock were 
nonetheless convicted but the guilty  verdicts were thrown out on appeal, which 
served to make Coffin and Spock  national heroes in the war protest movement. 
Coffin was now a far bigger  presence on the Yale Campus than Kingman 
Brewster had ever been. To his credit  years later President Brewster would praise 
Coffin and “his high purpose.”  
I first met Bill Coffin while studying at Yale in the winter of 1968. He was  
omnipresent. The air was electric with tension. Every church on the New Haven 
 Campus had signs out front offering “draft counseling.” The only political  
debate heard was whether Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy would be the best  
person to lead the anti-war movement. Feelings were so high across our nation  
that violence was all but inevitable. It came in sickening waves. Martin 
Luther  King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and then Bobby Kennedy was 
assassinated in  Los Angeles. Anti-war demonstrators were beaten by Mayor Daley’s police 
at the  Democratic National Convention in 1968 that chose Hubert Humphrey to 
lead the  party. The anti-war movement did not field a candidate while the 
nation in  reaction to the anti-war movement chose Richard Nixon as President. In 
1970,  Kent State students were killed by National Guard units in Ohio and 
later  Jackson State College students were killed by Mississippi state police. 
Finally  Nixon became convinced that continuing the war was politically 
impossible, so he  ended it in defeat. Among the students at Yale during this 
turbulent time were  George W. Bush, John F. Kerry and Joseph Lieberman. Coffin knew 
them all. Each  chose to react to the war in quite different ways. Coffin left 
Yale in 1976 to  write his memoirs and in 1978 was appointed to head 
Riverside Church in New York  where he was destined to be a strong prophetic voice for 
years.  
My second encounter with Bill Coffin came after his retirement in 2001 when  
he and I led a conference at Silver Lake, New York. He was still an enormous 
and  charismatic presence, articulate and deeply committed to what he believed. 
I was  some 16 years his junior, but we lived on the same page of history and 
 recognized our common kinship. I loved having that time with him, part of 
which  was spent on a boat on Lake George. I saw him for the last time on June 
1st,  2002, at the Washington National Cathedral when I was a co-consecrator 
and he  was the preacher at the ordination of John B. Chane, to be Bishop of 
Washington.  In his sermon Bill said: “President Bush is correct to condemn the 
Axis of Evil.  His problem,” he continued, “is that he got the wrong axis. It 
is not Iraq, Iran  and North Korea, but ignorance, poverty and war.”  
Bill Coffin regarded courage as the greatest of all virtues. Without courage, 
 he said, the other virtues never find expression. Courage is in short supply 
 today in both our political and ecclesiastical institutions. The death of  
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. has diminished that supply dramatically. I am so 
glad  that I knew this rare man. At most people like Bill Coffin seem to come 
along  only about once a generation. He will be profoundly missed. Well done, 
Bill,  well done!  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Don Ginesi, via the Internet, writes:
I have read many of your books and would like to pose a simple question. I am 
 a chemical engineer by trade and my best friend is a Russian Orthodox 
minister.  What do you think Jesus would think of Christianity, as it exists today? 
He  started the process with a tightly wound ball of ideas for living a  
counter-cultural lifestyle in a very difficult time in history. Since then those  
wonderful ideas have “snowballed” for over two thousand years and are now a 
huge  mass called the Christian Church. Some things I think Jesus would like. 
But  other things, particularly the elitism of each sect that only they have the 
true  “keys to the kingdom” would upset him. This scientist and priest would 
like to  hear your answer. Dear Don, 
Neither I nor anyone else is competent to speak for Jesus. I do believe,  
however, it is the Church’s duty to measure itself from time to time against the  
one it honors as its founder.  
His life was powerful because he gave it away. Institutional Christianity  
seems obsessed with accumulating power. His love knew no limits and rejected no  
one. Over its history the Church has discriminated against Gentiles, women,  
people of color, left handed people, mentally ill people and homosexual 
people.  
He invited all to come to him and the Church has participated in religious  
wars, crusades, inquisitions and anti-Semitism. The one redeeming reality of  
church life is that we do seem to have the power to reform ourselves from time  
to time. Reformation is what keeps us a living body. The need for reformation 
 has never been greater.  
John Shelby Spong 
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