By What Authority

In the fall of 1992, a Yale freshman named Jared Waxman wrote a letter to the editor of the Yale Herald. The Yale Freshmen Assembly had been held on August 29 of that year, and it began and ended with Christian hymns, including “We Gather Together,” a Calvinist doxology that has been sung in American churches since the Dutch colonists brought it over in the seventeenth century. Waxman was offended. His letter, cosigned by three classmates, demanded that the university remove “religious prayers from all Yale functions.” He argued that Yale “prides itself on being a non-sectarian institution” and that “the place for prayers is in a church, synagogue, mosque, or one’s home.” He compared the singing of hymns at Yale functions to the exclusion of women and African Americans from the university’s life, calling these “bigoted traditions” that had been overcome.

The following week, I wrote a response.

I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore—one year ahead of Waxman, having arrived at Yale from Blair Academy the previous fall. I had already declared my vocation to the Episcopal priesthood in the Yale Daily News and given my maiden speech in the Yale Political Union in support of prayer in public schools. I was not operating anonymously. My letter argued that Waxman had misread the situation on its own terms: the hymns used—“We Gather Together” and “O God Beneath Thy Guiding Hand”—were, as I wrote, “so benign, so devoid of any reference to Christ,” that only the most “ardent atheist could make any claim to offense.” To call the Freshmen Assembly a “prayer meeting” was, I said, laughable on its face. The university’s Christian heritage was not a form of bigotry to be overcome. It was a living tradition connecting the present community to its founders. I ended by hoping Waxman would not succeed in his campaign to “sever us from our past, for without it we will have no identity with which to build our future.”

I was right about the argument and wrong about the outcome. Over the thirty years that followed, the campaign begun by Waxman and others succeeded. Not because his arguments were better—they were not—but because the institutional machinery was already on his side, and the nineteen-year-old who thought the argument could be won on its merits had not yet learned how institutional capture works. 

What strikes me, reading that exchange again at fifty-three, is not the arguments we made, but that the debate was already over. We were two undergraduates at a great university, debating the role of religious tradition in institutional life. I would spend the next thirty years trying to work inside institutions I loved, losing ground at every stage, until I found myself released from holy orders by a form letter. Waxman’s position became, without controversy, the settled consensus of every major elite (and formerly Christian) institution in America.

That is not a coincidence. I am sure no one told Waxman to write that letter, but he did. He knew that he should and, more importantly, that it was a safe letter for him to write. This is “the Cathedral” at work, before today’s young people learned to call it that. Waxman’s side wielded while my side argued. My side was right, but we lost. We had no theory of institutional capture—only a theory of institutional service. We showed up to work inside the machine and were absorbed by it, or expelled from it, or both.

On the First Sunday of Advent in 2025, I preached thirty-two minutes on sin, judgment, and Jesus’s warning that he will come like a thief in the night. It was called “Wake Up, Woodbury.” That same Sunday, two other historic churches on the same Main Street in Woodbury were flying the trans-striped flag. By Sunday evening, my Facebook page was on fire with accusations of hate speech. That reaction had been anticipated. Over the summer, the Rev. Darrell Goodwin, conference minister of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ, had published a public warning about “steeplejacking”—defined as a deliberate effort to infiltrate and redirect local congregations. He didn’t need to name me or my church. His timing, and my preaching, did the work.

Here is what the reaction demonstrated: only the old mainline churches still carry institutional weight in a place like Litchfield County, Connecticut. A tenant congregation in a rented building can be safely ignored. When the First Congregational Church and First Ecclesiastical Society of Woodbury—founded 1659, the town’s founding institution—reclaimed its own pulpit and preached the same gospel from the same Bible, the town noticed. The furor was not about theology. It was about jurisdiction.

That is the word that matters. Jurisdiction. The institutions were built for a purpose. The endowments were given for that purpose. The buildings were constructed for that purpose. The inscription is the record of the founder’s intent. When the institution wanders from that intent, the question is not whether the founders meant it—they carved it in stone—but who has standing to enforce it.

Jared Waxman’s letter has been misread—by me, initially, and by most of the orthodox respondents who engaged arguments like it for the next three decades. The letter was not, at bottom, a theological argument. It was an institutional argument. Waxman was not claiming that Christianity was false. He was claiming that Christian practice had no legitimate place in a shared institutional space. The distinction matters enormously, because it means the response to his argument was never going to be won on theological grounds. You cannot out-argue an institutional claim with a doctrinal rebuttal. The question was never whether “We Gather Together” is a Christian hymn. The question was whose institution Yale was, and who had standing to define its character.

The generation of conservative Christians that came of age in the 1990s answered that question by trying to make theological arguments inside institutions that had already settled the jurisdictional question—and not in our favor. We argued about doctrine in forums that had already decided the doctrinal question was not the relevant question. We were playing the wrong game on the wrong field, and we kept losing, and we kept showing up to argue again, because we believed that if the argument was right the institution would eventually honor it.

The institution is not designed to honor right arguments. It is designed to perpetuate itself. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of realism about what institutions are and how change happens inside them—or outside them when inside is no longer viable. In Woodbury, we’re proving they can still be viable.

The First Congregational Church and First Ecclesiastical Society of Woodbury, Connecticut, was founded in 1659 and governed itself directly under the Word of God before there was a Protestant Episcopal Church in America. The meetinghouse standing now was built in 1818—the same year Connecticut’s Standing Order of Congregational churches was disestablished. This historic congregation voted unanimously in October 2024 to call this former Episcopal priest driven out of his denomination for his orthodox witness. The Litchfield South Association—the remnant of the old Standing Order—is shrinking. Our congregation is growing.

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This essay is an adapted excerpt from Jake Dell’s upcoming book, Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church.