William Sloane Coffin, RIP.(Notes & Comments: May 2006)(Obituary)

Only a few days before Muriel Spark died, we read that the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, too, had gone to his reward. What a character in a novel by Muriel Spark that icon of Left-liberal sentimentality might have been! Coffin's heyday was in the 1970s, when from his perch as chaplain at Yale, he helped transform the university into an ideological battleground. Although you won't hear it from the arbiters of bien pensant opinion, Coffin was almost entirely a malevolent influence, fond of telling his flock such things as "We must recognize that justice is a higher social goal than law and order." Like other gurus of the period (we think, for example, of Herbert Marcuse), he pretended that American society was an oppressive battleground which could only be rescued by "civil disobedience" (the phrase supplied the title for one of Coffin's books) or even "revolutionary" activity. In fact, as the legal scholar Alexander Bickel noted in 1970 (he was writing about Coffin and his colleagues), "to be a revolutionary in a society like ours, is to be a totalitarian, or not to know what one is doing."

Coffin's career illustrated one of the most profound effects of the long march of America's cultural revolution: to institutionalize the assumption of institutional illegitimacy. It was less a matter of cynicism than a rejection of established authority: as if the very fact of being established undermined the legitimacy of an idea or institution. Wrapping himself in the mantle of a religious authority that, in one way or another, he repudiated by his actions, Coffin made an enormous effort to legitimize the politics of delegitimation.

In 1970, when Bobby Seale and eight other Black Panthers were on trial for murder in New Haven and it looked for a moment as if New Haven would erupt in a riot, "justice" demanded that William Sloane Coffin publicly declare in a sermon that the Panthers should go free because their trial was "legally right but morally wrong." Concluding that the situation was "pre-Revolutionary", he urged the Yale community to engage in nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience. "To those who say 'what if this were a Klansman on trial and his fellow Klansmen were threatening destruction?'" Coffin wrote, "I can only answer that, ...