His part in sending 2,000 of these men to certain imprisonment and possible death in the Soviet Union ”left me with a burden of guilt I am sure to carry the rest of my life,” he writes. ”Certainly it influenced my decision in 1950 to spend three years in the CIA opposing Stalin`s regime. And it made it easier for me to commit civil disobedience in 1967 in opposition to the war in Vietnam.”
As an undergraduate at Yale, he had been attracted both to the writings of existentialists and theologians. Addressing the atheism of the former, he writes, ”Convinced as I was that Camus and Sartre were asking all the right questions, still I couldn`t help thinking that their answers lacked weight. Their despair was real, but the stoicism with which they met it seemed romantic, lacking strength. The theologians seemed to be in touch with a deeper reality.”
When he heard theologian Reinhold Niebuhr speak ”of the need for church people to protest injustice in the name of God,” he made a decision to enter the seminary.
In 1958, at age 34, married to Ava Rubinstein, the pianist`s daughter, and the father of a newborn daughter, he returned to his alma mater as its chaplain; it was while at Yale that he began to receive public attention for his support of civil rights and his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Among the first of the Freedom Riders, he was arrested and spent three days in jail in 1961 in Montgomery, Ala., for challenging racial segregation at bus stations in the South. In 1968 he and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician, and two others were convicted for conspiring to counsel draft evasion, a conviction that would be overturned by a federal appeals court.
In 1972 he was a member of a delegation of antiwar activists invited to Hanoi to inspect the widespread destruction of nonmilitary targets by U.S. bombing and to accept the release of three American prisoners of war.
In 1975 he resigned from the Yale chaplaincy after 18 years, taking a year off to write his autobiography. In 1977, at age 53, he was named senior pastor at the famed Riverside Church in Manhattan, built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the `30s.
A sticking point for some church members was his divorce from his first wife after 12 years of marriage and three children. ”I told the congregation that divorce was a sin, but sins can be forgiven,” he said later. (After a divorce from his second wife, Harriet Gibney, the ex-wife of one of his brother`s friends, he would have occasion to ask forgiveness once more.)
”The understanding of sin is what first attracted me to Christianity,”
he said before the Terkel show. ”I couldn`t take the chirping idealism of so many humanists. Jews and Christians understood what human sin is all about. It`s not to make people feel bad. It`s to be realistic. The doctrine of Original Sin is one of the most optimistic doctrines ever propagated; it means we`re not supposed to be Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. What a relief!”
In 1979 he was one of three American clergymen who flew to Tehran to conduct Christmas services for the U.S. hostages, criticizing President Jimmy Carter before he left about his call for economic sanctions against Iran.
Today Rev. Coffin may be the best known of the country`s religious liberals, a group that fares poorly with its conservative counterparts when it comes to name recognition, partly because of the latter`s dominance of television evangelism and zeal for its agenda.
He certainly has been a flash point in the disagreement between those two competing wings about how a Christian can best serve his faith. Rev. Coffin represents those who emphasize the ”social gospel,” believing that religion should be concerned with social and political issues, such as racism, poverty, foreign and economic policy, and defense spending.
Conservative Christians for the most part place the emphasis on personal salvation and morality, limiting involvement in public issues chiefly to such matters as abortion, pornography and school prayer.
”Everyone needs a rich prayer life,” Rev. Coffin says. ”Your thinking may become too ideological, too political without one, but to retreat from the great issues of the day into personal piety is to deny our humanity and abandon God`s creation to the forces of evil.”
In his book he tells of an exchange between Rev. Billy Graham, the evangelist, and Rev. George MacLeod, a Scottish preacher. When Rev. MacLeod asked Rev. Graham for his answer to nuclear weapons, Rev. Graham replied,
”George, as I see it, you have first to make a commitment to Christ, then all these other things follow.”
All right, Rev. MacLeod said, after you`ve made your commitment to Christ, what`s your answer to the bomb? ”As Graham didn`t have an answer,”
Rev. Coffin writes, ”MacLeod concluded the exchange: `That`s the trouble with you, Billy, your religion never gets beyond the garden gate, and that`s why it`s a monument to irrelevance.` ”
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Some critics take aim at Rev. Coffin`s patrician background and his association with the high and mighty. In a review of ”Once to Every Man,”
author John Leggett wrote: ”Often, the critical episodes in his life read like a `Who`s Who.` When he takes piano lessons, it is with the celebrated Nadia Boulanger. When he first marries, it is to the daughter of Arthur Rubinstein. When he pioneers a Peace Corps camp in Puerto Rico, it is Buckminster Fuller who raises housing for him. When he marches, it is with the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock and Norman Mailer. When he recalls an enemy, it is William Buckley. When he needs a friend, Arthur Miller appears. When he is in trouble with the law, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg takes his case, and when he needs a
psychiatrist, Erik Erikson offers counsel.”
At breakfast before the Terkel show, Rev. Coffin is asked to discuss the hazards of elitism. ”You can try to transcend your class, but you`d better not try to deny it,” he says. ”How do you transcend it? By having experiences that show the viewpoint of the ruling class is not always the most enlightened. I was in Birmingham in 1963, and I saw the fire hoses and the dogs used against black children and adults. I was in jail in the South, which gives you a very different point of view.
”When you go to North Vietnam and see how our bombers flattened businesses, homes and hospitals while President Nixon told us we were hitting only military targets, you realize our government can lie through its teeth.
”I`ve been to Africa and Nicaragua, which are born-again experiences. When you visit the Third World and see how our country has caused and worsened problems there, you get a different point of view.”
Two years ago, he says, he and Randy went to a speech on human rights by a pillar of the establishment, a member of America`s ruling class who had attended Yale and served in the Cabinet of a Democratic administration. ”He`s a decent, intelligent man, but he failed to mention the most pressing issues of social justice in this country or others. It was a safe, conventional recitation of platitudes, and as we walked out, Randy turned to me and said,
`Coffin, it`s a miracle you escaped your environment.` ”
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At each gathering during his three days here, he would speak of his reasons for joining SANE/FREEZE. ”I think we`re coming to a crucial moment in history, a possible turning point. With Mikhail Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet Union, we have a rare opportunity to reduce the level of nuclear and conventional weapons. Gorbachev seems to be a genuine reformer, and if you look at Russian history, reformers don`t come along very often or last very long.”
The U.S.-Soviet treaty on intermediate-range nuclear weapons is an important first step, he says, and should be followed by the 50 percent reduction in strategic nuclear weapons that has been proposed and eventually by a test-ban treaty.
There`s a growing awareness by the public of the devastating costs of our defense establishment, he insists, and he may be right. Newsweek and New Republic magazines have proclaimed that Paul Kennedy`s ”The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (Random House) could be this year`s most influential book. Kennedy, a Yale professor of history, examines the decline of former world superpowers such as Spain, France, Germany and Great Britain, finding parallels to their fate and what is happening now in the United States.
Powerful empires, he finds, inevitably choose to spend disproportionately on their military to meet their overextended global obligations, thus weakening their domestic economy and in the end leaving them as second-rate nations.
”I believe that geoeconomics has replaced geopolitics,” Rev. Coffin says. ”Japan is the chief creditor nation in the world without ever having tested a nuclear bomb, baring a bayonet or dropping its paratroopers on some small Caribbean island.
”And we`re the chief debtor nation in the world because of our massive military spending. The business community knows this, and business leaders should begin speaking out about this.
”Nuclear weapons are immoral, counterproductive and nonproductive. You can`t plow fields or build buildings with them. They don`t create jobs. We`re paying tax dollars for expensive, sophisticated machines that make weapons we hope we never have to use.”
SANE/FREEZE is the unification of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which was founded 30 years ago by writer Norman Cousins, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, a grass-roots movement that began to sweep across the country in 1981.
FREEZE, which called for a halt of testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union, drew 1 million people to a 1982 demonstration in New York City; more than 400 town meetings and 40 city councils (including Chicago`s) supported the proposal, as did Congress (in a nonbinding resolution).
The new organization, which will lobby for legislation and endorse candidates, claims 180,000 dues-paying members in 1,600 chapters and 24 state affiliates. Most are middle-class whites, and Rev. Coffin`s national reputation and his ability to extend the organization`s reach are the reasons he was chosen.
An appearance before Operation PUSH was part of the strategy to broaden the base of SANE/FREEZE. ”Martin Luther King understood that peace wasn`t simply the absence of conflict but also the presence of justice. I`ve lived in New York for the last 10 years, and Manhattan has become a playground for the rich and a jungle for almost everyone else. I have never seen this country turn its back on the poor the way it has in these last years.”
He names Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon as his choices among presidential candidates; Illinois FREEZE Voters, a political action committee, has endorsed Simon.
Although he was preaching to the converted, the crowds were sizable and enthusiastic. And at each stop, he stressed the links between social and economic problems and armaments. ”There`s a connection between military spending and domestic policy,” he says. ”Money for weapons and conventional forces takes money away from our greatest needs, such as building industry and creating jobs, building homes and helping those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
”We`ve been at the movies for the last seven years, but the show`s over and we`re out in the street, blinking in the sunlight of reality.”
