The Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy held a three-day conference in New Haven from April 12-14, under the title: “What are the Moral and Spiritual Issues of the 2026 Elections?”
The stated goal of the conference was to create a space where “clergy and faith leaders who understand the importance of this moral moment can be equipped with a moral analysis of the landscape, a strategic assessment of the moral issues at stake and moral action they can take with others in their communities to push the nation toward higher ground.”
The Center’s founding director, Bishop William Barber, who also serves as co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign, held a press conference on the last day of the conference responding to the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran and President Trump’s social media posts threatening to annihilate Iran’s civilization and attacking Pope Leo, a critic of the war. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus was there and brings us this excerpt of Bishop Barber’s comments.
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER: Right. It’s sinful. It’s idolatrous. And even though this morning he’s trying to walk it back and say it was a doctor, that’s still problematic. What doctor would come in your room and say, “I’m here to heal you.” And the images floating around him would be bombs and missiles and fire. But this is exposing this strange madness that we’ve seen not just in pictures, but in policy.
We have this Constitution that says we have believed that certain rights are inalienable. They come from a creator. We don’t even say Christian, but a creator, one who is wholly other. And what we are seeing now is an attempt by a person and a movement—not just this past few weeks, but for quite some time—to flip that and suggest that rights, life, liberty, truth happening, voting rights. Who has birthright citizenship is determined by who gets 51 percent of the votes and who has the biggest amount of money in their treasury and who happens to be president at a particular time. And that, my friend, is a war on divinity.
When you come to a place that you think because of political office, you get to decide who lives and who dies and what civilization gets to be and what civilization doesn’t get to be. Who gets citizenship and who doesn’t? Which parts of the Constitution will matter and which rights will be respected and which rights will not be respected. I’m not just worried about what’s happening now, but what the precedent of what’s happening now creates even for the future. We learned in Scripture that once you clean the house of its basic moral premises and leave the house open and you allow certain things to go unchallenged, you make room for something to happen later that may be seven times stronger than what you’re experiencing now.
We have to speak. Just 10 days ago on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, President Trump told Russell Vought, the director of the Federal Office of Management and Budget, don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be left up to the states. We can’t take care of daycare. We have all these other people and we are fighting wars.
Was it not Dr. King that warned us that whenever military and violence and war is determining all the other policies, that we are on a spiral dangerously going down. We can’t take care of poor folk because we in war, wars of choice. We can’t care for children. We can’t have healthcare. The budget that was passed, he called it “Big Beautiful,” we call it “Big Debt, the Ugly Budget.” The economists tell us all of the shell games that went on to make room for more money for war, while we cut money for healing. Not only is war unholy, notice what I said, war is unholy‚ because in an age of nuclear weapons, war itself is the challenge.
But when any human or president acts in word indeed as though they can determine who lives and who dies, is heresy. Assuming God-like authority, and again—and I keep repeating—it represents a war on divinity.
For more information, visit Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy website at theologyandpolicy.yale.edu. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
