“PRAYER AND PROTEST are not two different things.” Princeton Theological Seminary professor Keri L. Day’s proclamation—part of a rousing sermon she preached on the first day of Black History Month—provoked applause and amens from students gathered for worship in the newly renamed Seminary Chapel.
These seminarians recognized the truth of Day’s words because they had galvanized a prayerful protest to change the name of what had been known—for 129 years—as Miller Chapel. The building name honored Samuel Miller, a white Presbyterian minister who in 1813 became the second professor at Princeton Seminary. Like many of the institution’s founders, Miller preached “the enormity of the evil” of chattel slavery yet opposed the movement for immediate abolition. Miller was also an enslaver who held a number of people in bondage during his tenure at the seminary. Miller believed that Black people “could never be trusted as faithful citizens.” He played a key role in making Princeton Seminary the unofficial theological headquarters of the American Colonization Society, formed in 1817 to send free African Americans to Africa as an alternative to multiracial democracy.
Recently the seminary has begun to reckon with this past. In 2018 the institution published a report documenting and confessing its sinful “connections to slavery.” In 2019 the board of trustees made a $27.6 million investment in a range of initiatives that seminary president M. Craig Barnes characterized as “the beginning of our community’s journey of repair.”
Over the past months, students helped spur the seminary to take the next step. In November 2021, the Association of Black Seminarians (ABS), led by Rev. Tamesha Mills, petitioned the board for the immediate removal of Miller’s name from the chapel. Ahead of the January board meeting, ABS led a strikingly diverse coalition to request that the board also immediately establish “a renaming process for all buildings on campus named after people tied to slavery.”
The students backed these requests with protest in the form of prayer meetings. Students committed to fasting and vowed not to attend worship inside the chapel unless the board moved forward with the name change. Miller’s stances against abolition and for “enforcing colonization of freed black slaves” do not “reflect the theological imagination and pioneering spirit of this institution,” the students declared.
Princeton Seminary’s board of trustees agreed. On Jan. 25, the board voted unanimously to disassociate Miller’s name from the chapel and to establish a taskforce “charged with developing guiding principles and decision-making rubrics for naming, renaming, and the conferring of honor” on seminary-related sites and objects.
This essential gospel work urgently needs to be taken up within but also beyond the ivory tower. Believers of color have courageously led the way, bearing a disproportionate share of the burden and blowback. While a few white churches in the U.S. are reckoning with historic entanglements in the sins of slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and more, most are not.
It is not too late. The process might start by asking whose names are inscribed onto the sanctuary walls and stained-glass windows. Digging into history can surface painful realities, but it can also be an engine of humility and creativity for today. The truth is that the sins of the past are rarely just in the past. As we learn more about how we got here, we may see more clearly where God would have us go.
Heath W. Carter, author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, is an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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