The day the social gospel died

"A long, long time ago I can still remember ..."

That's how Don McLean's No. 1 hit from 1971, "American Pie," begins. The news earlier this month was that William Sloane Coffin Jr., America's most famous liberal minister from the 1960s through the 1980s, had just died at age 81. Obituaries noted that Coffin, recipient of an elite education in New England and Paris, had thought of a career as a concert pianist, but became Yale University chaplain in 1958.

"February made me shiver, With every paper I'd deliver, Bad news on the doorstep, I couldn't take one more step."

New Haven often has miserable winter weather, and the ideological slush within the Yale Daily News building from 1968 through 1971 was often as unpleasant as the freezing rain outside. So I went occasionally to Battell Chapel to hear Coffin's fiery sermons about the Sin of the Vietnam War. But his bad news of American evil was tempered by his good news that we bright students could remake ourselves into righteous beings.

Marvin Olasky