William Sloane Coffin -- A Radical Christian Conscience

By Colman McCarthy

One of the irksome problems people had with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin was his manner of taking radical Christianity into the fortresses of the comfortable and conventional. Like Yale University where he served as the Protestant chaplain from 1958 to 1976. Or the stately and Waspy Riverside Church in upper Manhattan where he was the senior minister from 1978 through the mid-1980s. Or at a conference of private school headmasters in Richmond where I last spent time with him four years ago.

As on every occasion over the decades when we ran into each and gabbed a bit, Bill Coffin was personally gentle and professionally fiery. He brought to mind the calmness of Isaiah and the agitations of Amos.

At his death at 81 on April 12 in Stratford, Vt., where he lived his final years in North Country peace and solitude, Bill Coffin had a half-century record of applying the Christian gospels to the pressing social issues of the day. His applied philosophy, in which he thought like a man of action and acted like a man of thought, was basic: “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love.”

Beginning in the tumult of the 1960s, his work in civil rights, the civil disobedience of defying what he saw as unjust laws, and resisting Caesar’s ever-present calls to arms—all of that placed him in loose alliance with others in the ornery wing of the church: Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Paul Moore, Robert Drinan, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little in Bill Coffin’s gene pool hinted that he would one day swing far to the Christian Left. His lineage went back to the Pilgrims. The son of a wealthy businessman—tied to the W.& J. Sloane furniture empire—he went to private boarding schools, took a degree from Yale where was a frat brother with George Herbert Walker Bush, was an infantry officer in World War II and hitched up with the CIA for three years in the early 1950s.

Then came the 1960s, a time that forced everyone on the Left either to stand out or stand still.

Influenced by an uncle who was president the Union Theological Seminary, Bill Coffin studied at Yale Divinity School and stayed to take a chaplaincy at the university. He had a portable pulpit, carried to the South where he would be arrested for protesting segregation and then to campuses around the country, including his own at Yale, to encourage the young—as Albert Einstein did a generation before—to refuse to be drafted for the military. Athletic, he believed “it’s too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, [for] all of life is risk exercise. That’s the only way to live more freely and more interestingly.”

As with his barricade and jailbird friend Martin Luther King, Jr., Bill Coffin was mocked and scorned not only predictably from the Right but also by the salon Left. Stick to religion, he was told, in the same lectured tones that King was denounced by The New York Times and Washington for his April 4, 1967 sermon at the Riverside Church. From the same pulpit from which Coffin sermons would be boomed a decade later, King said: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

With the past two Congresses raising the military budget having by 40 percent—it currently comes to about $13,000 per second—Bill Coffin held firm to the end to keep his country from dying spiritually. After 9/11, and the reckless and vengeance-based attack on Afghanistan that took countless civilians lives, he argued that the Bush administration should have worked “to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force.”

In the 1990s, though slowed slightly by a stroke, Bill Coffin remained engaged. His work against nuclear weapons, begun when he worked for Sane/Freeze a decade before, was based on a core conviction: “When I think of the ever escalating nuclear arms race, I think of alcoholics who know that liquor is deadly, and who nevertheless can always find one more reason for one more drink.”

Should the world ever sober up, Bill Coffin will be owed as much thanks as anyone.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C. He teaches courses on nonviolence at four universities and three high schools. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”