The ‘Pluralistic Public Faith’ of a Midwest Mayor Theologian

THIS TALE BEGINS with two Ohio politicians — one famous, the other relatively unknown outside Springfield.

Warren Copeland’s politics did not simply grow out of his faith; they were his faith.

For J.D. Vance, the city was a cudgel, useful in creating a media storm that would attract anti-immigrant supporters to his 2024 race for U.S. vice president. For religion scholar Warren Copeland, Springfield was home, a place to promote the policies that attracted immigrants to Springfield, where he served as mayor from 1990 to 1994 and from 1998 until his retirement in November 2023. Copeland was also a professor of ethics and director of the Hagen Center for Civic and Urban Engagement at Wittenberg University.

Vance and Copeland shared some similarities. Both grew up in laboring families, with parents who did not go to college. Both spent decades in southwestern Ohio. Both achieved degrees from elite universities: Vance, a law degree from Yale and Copeland, a Ph.D. in religion from the University of Chicago. Religion was important to both men.

But the differences are stark. While Vance espouses individual initiative as the way out of poverty, Copeland focused on systemic causes of inequality. Vance entered politics as a U.S. senator and was elected vice president less than two years later, while Copeland started and remained in local politics until shortly before his January 2024 death at age 80.

Vance saw Springfield as a tool. The false rumors he spread last fall about the city’s 15,000 or so Haitian residents were a means to cultivate notoriety, and thus votes. The result, for Springfield, was chaos: demonization of the Haitian community, bomb threats, state police in front of schools. For Copeland, Springfield was a place to put his theology to work with policies intended to make life better for everyone in his community. His story, full of both failures and triumphs, was grounded in what he called a “pluralistic public faith,” an approach that had within it the seeds of the messy regeneration of a struggling city whose new jobs and affordable housing attracted so many Haitian immigrants to Springfield.

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‘A Pluralistic Public Faith’

I MET COPELAND in 1977, when we both joined the Wittenberg faculty. We chatted in the hallways, shared lunches or coffee in the student center, and eventually began going to the same church, First Baptist. We also shared a love of basketball, though he was a player while I was just a fan. Sometimes, we talked about family life or faculty politics, but often he would steer the conversation to Springfield community affairs, particularly the needs of depressed neighborhoods.

When a resignation occurred on the city commission in 1988, Copeland applied for the open spot despite (or probably because of) the fact that the city, whose population had peaked at 70,000, was in crisis. For half a decade, city managers changed almost every year. Streetlights had been turned off for lack of money. Garbage collection had been discontinued. And, as he wrote in his 2009 book, Doing Justice in Our Cities: Lessons in Public Policy from America’s Heartland, “employee morale was at rock bottom, and the citizens were mad.”

Over the next three decades, the city was reborn. In 1989, the city commission went from being made up of mostly white Christian men to including women, Black, Jewish, and Appalachian representatives. The bitterly competitive city and county governments had found ways, through tortuous negotiations, to cooperate in making sewage systems available to everyone in a local industrial park. A huge medical complex, combining the city’s two hospitals, remained within the city limits, improving the tax base and spurring the growth of new businesses, restaurants, and an art center. In the early 2020s, 7,000 new jobs were created, which made Springfield attractive to newly arrived refugees from Haiti.

Copeland did not take credit for all these things. He said often that good city managers, as well as other city council members, city staffers, and key business leaders, inspired the city’s revitalization. He also admitted to failures along the way. These included personal disputes that kept the city council from working together effectively, an early inability to get the LGBTQ+ community included in the city’s anti-discrimination policies, and the persistence of crime and poverty in some neighborhoods that caused him to ask, 20 years into his tenure as mayor, “If I knew so much and had been in the middle of decision making for so long, why did we still face such difficult challenges?”

But transformation did come, and no one — including his detractors — would have questioned the central role his leadership played in it. J. Wesley Babian, Copeland’s pastor and an engaged city leader, said, “Warren was responsible for any progress the city has made.” Or, as one of Copeland’s angry critics put it shortly after Vance had made his scurrilous comments about the city, “Comrade Copeland brought” the influx of Haitians to Springfield. Nor did many miss the connection between the mayor’s religious convictions and his political actions. He himself said often that his politics did not simply grow out of his faith; they were his faith.

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Two years ago, his wife, Clara, shared a copy of Copeland’s unpublished memoir, A Pluralistic Public Faith, with a few of his friends. Copeland and I talked about it when I visited them during what turned out to be the last summer of his life. At the heart of his faith was a passionate commitment to diversity and inclusion, which he called “pluralism.” From the day he arrived in Springfield, racial and economic equity were his core principles. He and Clara bought a home in the southern part of the city, where the highest concentration of low-income people lived. They attended First Baptist Church, a mostly white congregation that deliberately chose to stay on the south side when the city’s affluent population moved north after mid-century. He was a fanatical supporter of the South High School basketball teams, whose players were mostly Black. When he died, the president of Springfield’s NAACP chapter told a reporter that Copeland had not missed one of the organization’s events until his final illness.

In A Pluralistic Public Faith, Copeland noted that people accused him of being “a sort of missionary presence in the midst of dysfunction.” But Ramona Henry, a Black community leader, told me in a phone conversation that she saw “white saviors” in some citizens “but never in him. He called it like he saw it. He didn’t shy away from race. But he didn’t try to be a savior.” It was hardly surprising that Clara was approached on the sidewalk nine months after his death by an African American person she didn’t recognize who simply said, “I loved your husband. I miss him.”

The definitive religious experience of Copeland’s life was on a Wednesday night in 1965 at a Black Baptist church in Hollandale, Mississippi, during a short trip South in what he described as his “minimal participation in the Civil Rights Movement.” Hearing people sing freedom songs and testify about their struggle for equality, he wrote, “I was born again as a Christian.” It was a moment that gave birth to a faith that meant “acting to create a more just community.”

The moment also made Copeland ready for immigrants from Central America and Mexico who began coming to Springfield early in the 2010s. “We have these folks in our community, and they need to be included and considered part of the community,” he said in support of a 2014 Welcoming America ordinance that pledged the city to integrate immigrants into city life. He saw their arrival as one answer to Springfield’s declining population and struggling economy.

Belief-Informed Politics

WITHIN THE NEXT few years, this welcoming approach, combined with an abundance of affordable housing and a business community “desperate for workers,” brought thousands of Haitian people to Springfield. Copeland visited Haitian churches, attended their social events, defended them publicly, and celebrated their holidays. He intensified this support, despite vitriolic criticism at city commission meetings and on social media after the opening day of school in 2023 when a child died after a car driven by a Haitian man collided with a Springfield school bus.

Springfield’s St. Vincent de Paul Society director Casey Rollins said that, from the first, “this Haitian community knew who loved them and who supported them. That was Warren.” In 2022, the 450-member First Haitian Evangelical Church of Springfield presented him with a plaque that read, “You made a difference.” The pastor of that church, Reginald Silencieux, said Copeland “was a very good mayor for us. He opened his hands and said, ‘Come in.’ He gave a lot of joy.”

Local businessman Luckens Merzius shared a memory with me from his country’s flag day on May 18, 2023, when, thanks to Copeland’s leadership, the Haitian banner waved next to the American flag in City Hall Plaza. “He always honored our Haitian community,” Merzius said, “It meant a great deal to us. There was a bunch of people — actually, just a few — trying to protest us that day, but he showed his support.”

If Copeland’s belief in diversity and equality made Haitian people feel welcome, his practical focus on economics provided them jobs. Few things illustrated this better than the way he combined public inclusivity and economic vitality in the early-2000s debate over where to locate Springfield’s new hospital. Much of the business establishment wanted to build the complex outside the city, near the interstate that ran to the south; so did the CEO of the combined hospital. Most Springfield residents, on the other hand, wanted the medical center downtown, where it would stimulate city growth and be more accessible to those with limited incomes.

Early on, the odds appeared stacked toward the suburban site, but the people of Springfield, with Copeland’s unequivocal support, organized a vigorous campaign, holding rallies, taking out newspaper ads, and filling the streets with signs that said “Hospital Downtown.” When consultants held a public forum on the issue, they were shocked not just by the huge crowd but by the nearly unanimous — and loud — demand that it be built in the city. The result — what Copeland called “a miracle of public involvement” — was that even the hospital president came around and the hospital was built inside the city. “Public agencies, meaning government, were important to this result,” Copeland wrote, “but so was the public, meaning the people of Springfield.”

The most unusual feature of Copeland’s style was his open discussion of the relationship between faith and public service, not only in articles and in the classroom but in political life. He would never have waved a Bible or quoted scripture on the campaign trail. But he was clear, when he found it appropriate, that his beliefs informed his policies.

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His theology was not narrow. Of people whose theology is grounded in scriptural inerrancy or God’s omnipotence, he wrote: “If their faith in those absolutes helps them live lives of meaning and love, who am I to judge?” But for him faith focused on making life better on earth for all of God’s children, a fact illustrated by his support (initially unsuccessful) for the addition of sexual orientation to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance. After an organization named Equality Springfield proposed the addition early in 2011, a year of acrimonious debate ensued. When a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister expressed fear that the ordinance would encourage a “sinful lifestyle,” Copeland, who was raised and ordained in that denomination, reminded him of the church’s slogan: “No creed but Christ,” adding that Jesus had much to say about loving outsiders but nothing about homosexuality. Later, he shared the same conviction with a group of African American pastors who also opposed the Equality Springfield proposal.

When the proposal was introduced at a city council meeting in February 2012, he spoke about its religious implications, arguing that the legislation was aimed at guaranteeing equal access to jobs, public accommodations, and housing — not at approval or disapproval of a lifestyle. Then he told the packed hall that he regarded himself as what his tradition called a “gospel Christian,” someone who followed Jesus in defending all victims of discrimination. When the measure lost on a 3-2 vote, Copeland said he hoped everyone “would go out of the city hall committed to making Springfield a place that respects every member of our community.” When the issue came up again six years later, it passed, 4-1.

“Those who believe that justice is of God and are courageous enough to put their lives at risk for its sake and smart enough to do so with some strategy can in fact make the world more just.”

Reflecting on what life had taught him, Copeland wrote in A Pluralistic Public Faith: “It takes a lot of faith and is often pretty scary to believe in a persuasive love as the most powerful force in reality.” But love is “the only hope we are finally left with.” A few pages later, he added, “Those who believe that justice is of God and are courageous enough to put their lives at risk for its sake and smart enough to do so with some strategy can in fact make the world more just.”

Belief mattered; it grounded and propelled his life. But so did strategy. It was that combination — nuanced, hardheaded struggle, rooted in love and his interpretation of Jesus’ teachings — that made Springfield a haven for thousands of Haitian immigrants.

Copeland is gone. Vance and Trump won the election. From all accounts, the community has remained relatively stable under the current mayor, Rob Rue, a Republican who said at the time of Copeland’s death that both men share “a common interest and passion for the city and its citizens.” Even so, Pastor Silencieux told me in May that “the community is scared. People don’t know what will happen in the future. We are legal but President Trump said we all are criminals.” With temporary protective status for Haitians ending Sept. 2, many Springfield residents may be facing deportation by August.

Still, “Warren Copeland’s humanitarian spirit has left its mark on countless Springfielders who remain determined to care for the needs of our immigrant neighbors,” Rollins said. As Vance and Trump continue to cast their pall over national politics, the compassion — and strategy — of local leaders like Copeland may be America’s best hope.