“Seminary is cemetery” is a warning many Black Christians hear long before they apply anywhere: go study theology and you will come home without your faith. Steven Harris studied at Vanderbilt, Dallas Theological Seminary, Southern Seminary and Yale Divinity School, and he was starting a PhD at Harvard when he talked with Lisa Fields. He thinks the slogan misdescribes the danger. It lumps two different kinds of institutions together, and it hides the harder problem for a Black student: finding sound doctrine and a serious concern for justice in the same building.
Both corrections begin with one distinction. A seminary and a divinity school make different promises to the students who walk in. Once a student sees that difference, the cemetery fear shrinks, and a more practical question takes its place.
What separates a seminary from a divinity school?
Harris did his MDiv at Southern Seminary, which belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention. A school like that holds particular theological commitments. It asks faculty to adhere to them and trains students in them. Evangelical seminaries exist mainly to form ministers, pastors and people headed into full-time ministry. Most students arrive already convinced of what the school teaches, so the classroom starts from shared ground.
A divinity school runs a different project. Many also grant the MDiv, but they generally train practitioners for a world of many religions. In those settings, Harris explains, diversity of religious belief “is gonna be prized and prioritized in those settings.” Some keep loose ties to mainline Protestant traditions. Even so, the faculty does not gather around shared doctrinal commitments. At Yale he met classmates who held no traditional faith and simply wanted a few years to think about spirituality.
That difference is deliberate on both sides. Harris wants students to know which promise they are accepting “so that people can set their expectations rightly.” The practical stakes are high. A student who enters a divinity school expecting a confessional seminary will find professors and classmates who take nothing for granted. That student may read the setting as an attack on faith, when the school is doing exactly what it set out to do. The slogan grows from that mismatch. It blames a whole category of education for one kind of collision, and it gives a student no help choosing.
The distinction also explains why “seminary” in the slogan is a misnomer. The environment people fear is usually the divinity school or the university religion department, where conservative belief is one voice among many. An evangelical seminary is closer to the opposite risk: a room where everyone already agrees.
Does disagreement in the classroom erode faith?
Harris grew up in the National Baptist Convention, in a Bible-believing Black Baptist church. At Vanderbilt, after switching from pre-med into religious studies, he met critical approaches to the Bible that ran against what he had been taught. Some professors had little patience for anything resembling fundamentalism. Mostly, though, he found a room where “The fundamental assumption is not theological conservatism.”
His response cuts against the cemetery story. He was intrigued, because “it challenged me to think about why I believe my beliefs, and then how to articulate those and commend those in a setting where they weren’t shared.” He saw a skill forming that he still uses at work. He goes further: a table where everyone already knows where everyone stands does a student a disservice over time.
His wording lines up closely with an old instruction. Peter wrote to believers living among neighbors who did not share their faith: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). The setting Peter has in view is the one Harris describes. A believer gives reasons to someone outside the community who asks, and gives them gently. Harris’s verb is “commend,” which fits Peter’s “meekness” better than any language of combat. A classroom that withholds agreement is one place where that readiness gets practiced.
Is the racism problem a conservative problem?
Lisa Fields raises a common assumption: many people treat conservatism, orthodoxy and racism as one package. Yet friends of hers at mainline schools such as Duke met racism there too, sometimes as microaggressions where conservative spaces might be more overt. Her conclusion is blunt: “liberalism isn’t the cure for racism.”
Harris agrees from his own experience. He met bias from students and professors across the board, including where Protestant liberalism set the theological tone. He describes very liberal people in divinity school settings who, in conversation, plainly held the stereotypes usually pinned on the conservative right. Racial bias, in his words, “runs deeper than a kind of professed theological distinctive.” He notes that tiered views of human worth appear in some Greek philosophy, long before American denominations existed, and that one version of the American Christian story was bound up with racist ideology.
The root issue, he says, is “how we view and how we value different image bearers.” The phrase reaches back to Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The verse grounds human worth in God’s creative act. No group’s rank enters into it. Any person can drift from that, whatever doctrinal statement their school publishes, and undoing a tiered view of people takes deliberate effort. The practical consequence for a student is plain: a school’s racial climate cannot be read off its theological label.
Why does choosing a school feel like choosing between orthodoxy and justice?
Fields names the bind. Mainline schools tend to be strong on justice and liberation, conservative schools on orthodoxy. A student convinced that both matter can feel forced to choose which half of their convictions to starve.
The seminary and divinity school distinction explains much of that bind. Seminaries are organized around doctrinal agreement, so their strength is orthodoxy. Divinity schools are organized around breadth, so they often hold the archives, the historians and the critical tools a student needs to trace how doctrine played out in history. Harris went to Yale for a second master’s partly for that access, working under the historian Clarence Hardy, who studied under James Cone. He values professors who did not share his convictions but trained him as a historical archivist.
He describes the goal with a mentor’s charge: take theological orthodoxy and “dip it in chocolate.” The phrase means more than making doctrine sound familiar to communities of color. It means rereading the history these doctrines traveled through, with attention to the communities Black students come from. That requires reading “the triumphal reading of history, those in power,” which he says is usually the version told about American Christianity. It also requires reading from the underside and facing “how Christianity was complicit in a lot of those tragedies.” He admits the cost, describing a kind of Du Boisian twoness inside Christendom, and credits evangelical seminaries with slow progress. The integration he wanted existed in no single school. He assembled it across several.
Did the split begin in the Black church?
Harris thinks the traditional Black denominations argue against it. He names the National Baptist Convention, the Church of God in Christ and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he disagrees with those who describe them as running leftward. He asks why bodies born partly in resistance to racist forces have kept conservative theological commitments so stubbornly. His answer: “black folk believe in the Bible,” and they find in it, rightly read, a God of justice who hates what they have suffered. In that tradition, faithfulness to Scripture and the fight for justice belong together.
He handles Black liberation theology with care. He understands why a theologian of color, asking white evangelical theologians what their orthodoxy said about the mid-twentieth-century South and hearing nothing, would build something else: “I’d probably go back to my room and start writing too, and come up with a theology that does have something to say.” Still, he argues that as a full system it never took hold in traditional congregations as intended and became mainly an academic discipline, with exceptions such as Trinity United Church of Christ. He cites Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church as an effort to call churches back toward it. That is Harris’s reading of the evidence, and readers should weigh it as one interpretation.
Fields adds that she knows mainline graduates pastoring Black churches who reject the claim that Jesus is the only way yet say they would never preach that, because they would lose their jobs. Harris warns against treating the pews as backward: “I think some humility is deserved there about why that mother on the front row wearing her hat believes what she believes.”
His planned dissertation on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Calvinists aims to test the narrative he hears in secular academic settings, that “theological conservatism will always get you to injustice. It will always get you to racism.” He hopes to show a tradition where conservative doctrine and liberating action went together. He calls the project early and open to change, so these are research aims, not findings.
Put together, his account points to a sharp conclusion. Many Black students come from churches that never treated orthodoxy and justice as a trade. The trade is built into how theological schools have been sorted.
Is the warning ever right?
Yes, and Harris says so. People who wrote his recommendations treated non-confessional schools as needing a strict warning. He rejects a blanket warning but would caution some people himself. He has encouraged some students toward secular divinity schools and given others pause, based on what he saw in each person. He also admits “there wasn’t a kind of ready made map for me.”
He names what made his own path workable: roots. He says he would not have pursued the Yale degree or the Harvard PhD without his training at Southern, because his grounding in the convictions he holds let him engage diverse tables with substance. His case does not show that anyone can enter any classroom and come out stronger. It suggests that a rooted faith can learn from disagreement, and that the order of training matters.
The evidence has limits. This is one scholar’s experience and judgment. It does not measure how often students lose faith, or how a given school treats Black students now. A prospective student still has to ask those questions about the specific place.
What does an honest history ask of conservative schools?
Harris turns his argument on his own camp. To conservative colleagues, especially white evangelicals, he says “we need to make sure that we’re telling an honest history.” In his view, a cleaned-up, triumphant account of American Christianity does not protect orthodox convictions. It makes them look suspect, and it leaves people raised in theological silos unequipped for a moment when those accounts keep being challenged.
That puts part of the burden on the schools. If seminaries want Black students to stop hearing a choice between doctrine and justice, they have to teach the underside of the history alongside the doctrine, which is the double work Harris assembled for himself across four campuses. Until then, the student’s job is clear: know what kind of school you are entering, know what it cannot give you, and stay rooted while you go looking for the rest.