Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Monday, April 24, 2006
On the death of William Sloane Coffin
Another one has died. Another of the giants.

William Sloane Coffin — Bill Coffin — has died and is being mourned by all kinds of people who never agreed with him but sure don’t want anyone to know it now. He is being called a prophet. Maybe he was. He definitely was an icon, a symbol — a model for what all activist preachers and pastors wanted to be like.

I met Bill Coffin twice. I was more impressed the second time than the first.
The second time I met him was at the Disciples Peace Fellowship meeting at a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) General Assembly. I don’t remember the city or the year, but I haven’t been to one in at least ten years, so it wasn’t any more recent than the mid-nineties, and it may have been earlier than that. Bill Coffin was the speaker at our breakfast (and I don’t do breakfasts well, but more about that later). I don’t really remember much about the breakfast. What I remember was a smaller get-together in the late evening, just a group of people and Coffin sitting around talking. He made a statement that night which I have quoted countless times since. He said that just like our children ask us, the adults of today, where we stood during the civil rights movment, the next generation, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will be asking where we stood during the gay rights movement. Bill said that, in a generation, maybe less, homophobia will have become as taboo as racism is today. Now that won’t mean it won’t exist — after all, anyone in his or her right mind knows racism is still alive and well today — but it isn’t OK. It isn’t cool. Similarly, in another generation, prejudice against and mistreatment of gays and lesbians will not be Ok. I don’t think we had gotten to the term “LGBT” quite yet — just gay and lesbian was all he mentioned. But I’m sure if I had heard him more recently he would have used a more expansive term.

Now anyone could have made the statement Bill Coffin made. But my quoting them to others during these intervening years wouldn’t have meant anything. It wouldn’t have carried any weight. It would have just been opinion, even if it was a preacher’s opinion or a teacher’s opinion. What made it different, by being Bill Coffin’s opinion, was that Bill Coffin has been for a long time widely seen as a prophet. If Bill Coffin said it was so, it was a prophecy. It carried the same weight, if in a more limited circle, as Martin King’s proclaimation that one day children of all colors would live together in harmony, and all the rest of what he said in that famous “I have a dream” speech we all have heard so many times since his death. Martin King was a prophet, a person who could read the signs of the times and project where the world was headed. And so was Bill Coffin. At least I hope he was. I long for a time when homophobia is as taboo as racism. It would mean a lot of my friends and my students would sleep a lot easier at night. And so would I.

That second time I heard Bill Coffin, I went eagerly, looking forward expectantly to what he might say. I knew he was someone who mattered. The first time I met him, I wasn’t sure anyone over 30 mattered. I had to be persuaded to come meet him. It was for breakfast early on a Sunday morning, and I didn’t do Sunday mornings early. Not for a visiting celebrity, not for anyone. Even then I was not a morning person, unless there was a very very good reason to be, plus really good free food.

The first time I met Bill Coffin was in 1968 or 1969. Probably the spring of 1969. I was in my third and final year at Vanderbilt. I was very busy organizing against the war in Vietnam, organizing Vanderbilt women to demand equal rights, serving on a host of committees and groups, and having fun, and in my spare time studying hard enough for my 7 classes (21 credit hours) to graduate Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude. Sunday mornings early, I slept. I didn’t have a lot of time to sleep, and I didn’t give it up readily.

Let me explain.

When I was a Freshman at Vanderbilt, the Chancellor decided the University needed a campus chaplain. We already had a beautiful chapel, a Divinity School, a Vanderbilt Interfaith House, and a variety of mainline denominational campus ministers, all of whom served full time. Student religious groups were extremely important on college campuses in the fifties and sixties, as the baby boomers moved from Sunday School and high school youth groups to college and university youth groups. The Student Christian Movement national conferences held every four years over Christmas break spawned a large element of the lunch counter sit-ins. Probably unless you were just in my Religion and Social Movement class this semester or you are over fifty or sixty and went to college, this sounds strange to you. What would half a dozen full time campus ministers do with themselves? And why would a private non-sectarian university think it needed an official University Chaplain as well? I’ll simply say that the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian campus ministers never seemed to have any time on their hands, and their various centers were constantly bustling with activity.

But as to why Vanderbilt needed its own chaplain? I never really asked that question, but I think the answer came to me, unbidden, as I reflected on the death of William Sloan Coffin. You see, Bill Coffin was for decades the chaplain of Yale University, another essentially secular private university with a divinity school and a chapel. I think its divinity school is affiliated with the Anglicans, or used to be, but Yale itself surely isn’t. Bill Coffin set the model for the university chaplain as prophet. He didn’t speak for the university. He had the right of completely free speech in his pulpit. He was unconstrained in his advising of campus activists. And he couldn’t be labeled and dismissed as “that crazy Methodist,” or the like. He was the Yale University Chaplain, or the (fill in the blank) University Chaplain. He was expected to be a bit outrageous. He couldn’t be ignored, he couldn’t be written off, and he couldn’t be made to shut up. But the chancellor couldn’t be blamed for what the chaplain preached. That was the beauty of the beast.

Chancellor Alexander Heard (saint Alexander in my book, let me pause to say), had a certain decorum to keep, being (I think) only the fifth or sixth chancellor in the nearly 100 year history of the university. Vanderbilt is a university that picks its chancellors very carefully and doesn’t expect them to leave until retirement. And as far as I know, none of them ever has. At Vanderbilt we love our chancellors, and they love us, and we all love our school. You won’t find a more loyal bunch of alums than the Vandy crowd, at least as far as private universities go. And the hallmark of the Vanderbilt chancellor has always been the freedom the Trustees give him to be a bit ahead of his time, within reason. I think that Chancellor Heard knew Vanderbilt needed a more challenging voice in 1966 than he could give it. He needed someone with some clout to push him, so he could go to the trustees with ideas he already supported, but explain that the students, faculty, and University Chaplain were pushing him to make this request. Everyone recognized that’s what University Chaplains were doing all over the country, why not Vanderbilt?

And that’s how, in my Freshman year, 1966-67, at mid-term break, we got a University Chaplain and in January weekly Sunday morning services of worship began to be held in Benton Chapel, possibly for the first time ever. I intend to write elsewhere about my involvement in what came to be known as the Benton Chapel faith community. Here the relevance is that the University Chaplain (who I personally wasn’t wild about but who filled his role well) occasionally brought speakers to campus to preach as guests in Benton Chapel.

And so, in the spring of 1969, or maybe late fall of 1968, Vanderbilt brought William Sloane Coffin as a guest preacher. It’s always customary to have a meal for any guest speaker with a group of people you want to show off to him or her, and this occasion was certainly no exception.

A breakfast was planned for Rev. Coffin, at some ridiculous hour like 8 a.m., or maybe even it was 7:30 a.m. In this particular case, the people Vanderbilt wanted to show off were the campus radicals — the anti-war activists, especially any who happened to also be religious, outstanding students, and reasonably able to function in polite society (in other words, students who “cleaned up well”). Without a doubt, I was at the top of that list, along with my boy friend, Rich Rosen, who was President of a fraternity at the same time he was President of S.D.S., and it was a Jewish fraternity to boot. I can’t remember who else was invited — I think probably classics professor Susan Wiltshire (although maybe it was too early for her to have been known as a radical) and probably some left wing Philosophy professors, and the denominational ministers most likely. I just know that Rich and I both got phone calls one day from the chancellors secretary, or someone like that, saying our presence was requested at a breakfast Sunday morning for William Sloane Coffin, who would be visiting from Yale. I’m sure we responded something to the effect of “you must be kidding. We don’t do Sundays at 8 a.m.” I don’t remember how fast we got the next call, but I know that pretty quickly we got a call from someone else, more persuasive, maybe even Chancellor Heard himself, explaining that our presence was not just requested but was needed, and that he promised we would be glad we had come. So, as a favor to Chancellor Heard (and for no other reason, as I recall), I had breakfast with Bill Coffin when he wasn’t yet very famous. I think the food was good. I think he had a good sense of humor. But I don’t really remember what he said.

But I’m glad I went. I’m glad he became what he became. I’m very sorry he is gone. I dearly hope someone is rising to replace him as the prophetic voice. I think it is Jim Wallis. I guess time will tell.

And I have to confess that I wonder who is about to die that I will blog about next week. This is getting a little creepy.

Please share your experiences of any of these people with me, and if you want to share them with others, please leave a comment below.

Give ‘em hell in heaven, Bill and Ann and Foy and Phil and all the rest of you crazy prophets. God will thank you for it.

9:41 pm cdt