Most public policy conference rooms do not echo with call-and-response gospel hymns. But on a recent Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen was warming up for a lesson in New Haven, Conn.

“When I woke up this morning, my mind was on Jesus,” she sings, her voice filling the room. About fifty students quickly pick up the melody and words and repeat the verse.

The lecture is one of the new offerings of the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. The goal is to prepare the next generation of clergy not only to think deeply about the Bible, theology, and church history, but also to equip them for public service and leadership in the broader community.

This lesson is taught by one of America’s best-known religious leaders: the Rev. William Barber, who has his own public ministry through his work with the Poor People’s Campaign and the Repairers of the Breach.

Pastor Barber stands up and begins his lesson. “The forces of extremism are not weak,” he says, his eyes darting around the room, “and they are well-financed.”

He warns his students that, as future church leaders, they cannot debate political positions like everyone else. He tells them that their arguments and reasoning must be deep moral positions based on scripture. “Your language,” he says, “must be different.”

Rev. Barber is the Center’s founding director, having come here after three decades of church ministry in North Carolina.

“Even as a pastor, I always wanted to educate others,” he says. “If I pastor somewhere for 30 years and no one is called to preach and no one is trained, what kind of preaching will I be preaching?”

Teaching the politics of moral inclusion

What Barber did was spearhead one of the most significant efforts to unite diverse groups around justice issues, from voting rights to anti-poverty measures.

“What are the fundamental principles of religion in relation to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a prayer he often repeats: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the prisoners. Look at this legislation. How do these policies affect people? How does this affect their living and dying?”

As he continues his activism across the country, he is now helping future leaders prepare for what he describes as urgent public testimony.

“If you don’t challenge poverty and lack of healthcare right now, in this life, you’ve wasted some of it,” he says.

In an age of atomized identity politics, Reverend Barber teaches what he calls the politics of moral fusion.

“When people sit down and take an honest look at extremist policies across the lines of race, geography, sexuality that tend to divide us,” he says, “they realize that those are the same people voting against the people.” Because they are gay, they are also denied living wages.”

Pastor Barber says if extremists are working together, his side needs to come together, too.

Working beyond the classroom and the podium

This work extends beyond the classroom into the daily chapel of the seminary. A student stands to offer the opening prayer: “God, by your grace you have chosen to be a God of sharing. “You invite us to work with you and each other in the pursuit of hope, justice and peace.”

Pastor Barber, sitting in the back, prays and sings with his students. There is a word of encouragement for each. Before and after chapel, students gather around him and offer updates on projects, papers, and field work.

Summer placements in churches focusing on voting rights and poverty are central to the Center’s work. Student Benjamin Ball spent part of the summer in Alabama.

“We were standing outside the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he says, “the church where Dr. King preached and practiced, just outside the Montgomery State Capitol.”

For Ball, a Tennessee native, the experience was transformative.

“Standing in front of that church door and seeing the state capitol in front of you,” he says, “I don’t think there is a more profound view. If you leave church and ignore that, you are missing out on something right in front of you.”

The issue is that morality is not just the province of religious conservatives, says Ed Ford, a ministry student from Connecticut.

“The Bible tells us to practice justice, love, mercy, and walk humbly with our God. ‘Will you take care of me if I’m sick?’ he says. If I were a stranger, would you take care of me? If you are poor and truly suffering in the world?” Ford says. “These are the things we need to talk about. Jesus calls us to help with the least of these. Right?”

Aid should be provided not only through traditional direct services that churches provide, such as food banks, but also through legislation and public policy, Ford says.

“Poverty doesn’t know if you’re Black, White, Asian, Latino,” he says. “But at the core of everything in our country, he knows: ‘Will our government step in and help people? Will our church raise its voice and speak out about what is right?”

Echoing Father Barber’s own language from his earlier speech, Ford concludes: “Are we to be priests of the empire? Will we be God’s prophets?

These students are learning the ways of the biblical prophets, who raised blunt issues and spoke truth to power, whether in congregations or in the public square.

These are the lessons that South Carolina student Lizzie Chiravono began learning at an early age. “Being from the South, there was no way to disconnect religion and politics because every social environment I entered 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,” he says. “And for people affected by poverty and other suffering, politics or religion are never far from their minds.”

Institutionalization of the center’s civil rights movement

What these students learn is to take these initial lessons and turn them into a way of thinking, a way of living, and a way of working.

“Having the courage to go and speak out — that’s what it’s about,” says Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, a longtime civil rights leader and labor lawyer who helps direct Yale’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy in New Haven.

“It’s about spreading the understanding you once have,” he says. “This institutionalizes the movement. And thus it finds a place in people’s hearts. This results in changing religious education. And this results in strengthening the movement we are trying to build.”

This program goes beyond training these aspiring ministers. It’s also about establishing and tapping into an aspiration, says Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, one of the centre’s leaders.

“Students here have a deep spiritual hunger tied to the sense that something is wrong with the way the world works,” he says. And the mission is to redirect 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 that way,” says Wilson-Hartgrove. “And something inside them tells them it could be different and they could be a part of it. They want to know ‘how this works.'”

Speaking out against the “heresy” of Christian Nationalism

It’s late afternoon at the Berkeley Episcopal Center, a few blocks from the Divinity School. Singer Yara Allen gets the crowd excited again.

“We won’t. Reverend William Barber wrote the verse “Oh my God!” with resounding bass.

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 followed Barber to this taping and sat in the audience. Other people from the university community and the public also come to hear him speak.

Wherever he appears (in the classroom, chapel, or at an off-campus podcast recording), he attracts a crowd eager to take up what Barber calls the cause of the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Bibles.

“If you’re not interested in public theology and not the least of which is how we handle it,” he says, “you’re essentially tearing apart the scriptures.”

He says he sees what Christian Nationalism is doing today: using religion to divide rather than unite, and to harm rather than help. He calls this movement to combine religion with the heresy of official power. Rather, he says the Bible teaches something different.

“‘Thy kingdom come’ is a direct announcement to Caesar that his deeds are not real and his way of life must pass,” says Barber. “We pray for another kind of kingdom to come, one that is rooted in love, justice, and uplifts all people.”

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