The American Spectator

Eminentoes

The Coffin Legacy

By Mark Tooley on 9.22.06 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

COFFIN, THE PRODUCT OF A WEALTHY New York family, served as Yale's chaplain for 18 years starting in 1958. He admirably threw himself into the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s and then inevitably joined the anti-war movement. He offered Yale's chapel as a refuge to Vietnam draft dodgers. In 1967, he joined Dr. Benjamin Spock in a Boston "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," at which 1,000 men presented their draft cards. Coffin and Spock were convicted for abetting disobedience to the draft. Over the coming decades, Coffin would become a frequent visitor at police booking stations, as he made civil disobedience a regular feature of his political ministry.

In the 1970s, Coffin took over New York's fashionable Riverside Church, which the Rockefellers had helped found as a model pulpit for liberal Christianity. Some at even liberal Riverside criticized Coffin's constant activism. But Coffin explained: "Every minister is given two roles: the priestly and the prophetic," he said. "The prophetic role is the disturber of the peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire social order under some judgment. If one plays a prophetic role, it's going to mitigate against his priestly role. There are going to be those who will hate him."

During World II the young Coffin was a liaison officer to the French and Soviet armies. At war's end he participated in the forced return of Soviets who had fled the Soviet Union. Many attempted suicide rather than return to Stalin's Russia. Much troubled by what he witnessed, Coffin joined the Central Intelligence Agency so as to oppose Stalinism.

"I was absolutely right about the Soviet Union being evil," Coffin would recall years later. "I was a little bit too optimistic about my own country." He suggested that "when you look at the number of invasions that the United States carried on, let's say, from the end of World War II and compare it with the Soviets, we outdid them in imperialism." Coffin remembered bitterly: "Even as I was getting out of the CIA, the CIA was overthrowing Mossadegh in '53 in Iran; the next year the Arbenz government, duly elected in Guatemala, et cetera, et cetera."

In the 1950s Coffin took an interest in religion, in part because of the powerful lectures of Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where Coffin's uncle was president. Coffin was inspired to go into the ministry, with an understanding that "social justice is at the heart of the Gospel." Opposing what he perceived as U.S. interventionism around the world, and supporting those who resisted it, became a primary focus of his pastorate.

"I was getting worried that the United States was arrogating to itself a right it would never accord any other nation; namely, the right to decide who lives, who dies, and who rules in Third World countries thousands of miles away," Coffin told a documentary film maker in 1995. "The other thing I would say to the American military, look, we can't be top cop, okay? And we can't ask other people to give their troops to some international UN police force and then say but we can't do that, we're superior, we're not going to put our troops ever under the command of somebody at the UN, that's for other people."

Coffin chided the idea that "America is an exceptional country." His great faith, as with so many other post-war mainline church officials, was in the United Nations as the last, best hope of mankind.

TRAGICALLY, COFFIN'S IDEALISM, LIKE THAT of his Religious Left cohorts, degenerated from laudable civil rights causes, to opposition to a U.S. war to Vietnam, to outright support and sympathy for the North Vietnamese communists, for Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador, the Ayatollah's Iran, and for Soviet policy goals, if not directly for the Soviet Union itself. He, and they, lost their ability to distinguish between the sins of the United States and the monstrosities of his enemies. Coffin wrote in 1985:

"Were we to repent of our own self-righteousness, the existence of Soviet missiles would remind us of nothing so much as our own; Soviet threats to rebellious Poles would call to mind American threats to the Sandinistas; Afghanistan would suggest Vietnam. Soviet repression of civil liberties at home would remind us of our own complicity in the repression of these same civil rights abroad...Jesus would never be 'soft on communism' any more than he would be soft on capitalism."

Like so many clerics of his generation, Coffin lost sight of the Old Time religion and became captive to the secular fads and ideologies of his own now passing era. His original instincts were often noble. But the results of his skewed analysis ultimately became destructive.

The NCC's Bob Edgar eulogized that Coffin was a "legendary liberal." No doubt true. But like the Religious Left Coffin helped to found, his mode of liberalism ultimately became frigid and illiberal. May he rest in peace, and may his errors be forgiven.

Letter to the Editor

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