By What Authority? An Interview with Rev. Jake Dell

But anyway, digging into this, so the piece begins with you remembering an argument that you had with a fellow by the name of Jared Waxman.

Now, it's not an in-person argument, but it's an exchange of articles and things written at Yale.

And do you want to describe that exchange for us a little bit? Because that's a backdrop for discussing what you want to really talk about.

That's right.

So, yeah, I mean, this was an exchange of letters to the editor in a campus newspaper called the Yale Herald.

And when I matriculated at Yale in 1991, there was something called the Freshman Assembly.

I believe they still have a Freshman Assembly.

And it was one of two times where they gathered the whole class, the second time being at the baccalaureate service at graduation, both of which were explicitly religious, though even by 1991, it was hardly religious.

Christian or even particularly religious.

But the remnant of it was there, and two remnants in particular at the Freshman Assembly were the hymns played on the wonderful pipe organ in Woolsey Hall.

And it was, O God Beneath Thy Guiding Hand, which was written for the bicentennial of the founding of the New Haven Colony.

And it tells the story of how our exiled fathers crossed the waves and the story of the pilgrims bringing with them laws and freedom and truth and faith in God.

But no mention of Jesus Christ or anything.

I think that was certainly implied.

And then we gather together to ask the Lord's blessing.

Again, a fairly benign story.

hymn in the sense of, you know, who wouldn't want to gather together at the beginning of his college career and ask the Lord's blessing.

So this had been, you know, and I appreciated that when we sang those hymns because I was already a professed Christian at the time.

I don't know that many of my classmates appreciated it as much as I did.

But what I saw when we were singing those hymns was the remnant of the Calvinist Yale, of the foundation of that school, whose motto to this day is still Lux et Veritas, light and truth.

And I deeply appreciated it.

I knew I was not in the middle of a Christian, evangelical, born-again-believing school, but I appreciated the institutional continuity.

So a year later, when Mr. Waxman wrote his letter to the editor of the Herald, you know... feigning, I think, offense at having been forced to endure the singing of these hymns, I wrote back and said, you know, I hope you don't succeed because you'll sever what's, you know, what's left of any connection with our institutional past.

And, you know, he described it as, you know, hallmarks of Yale's bigoted traditions that, excluded women and African Americans and Jews.

And I said, well, you know, I denied the premise right there.