Rev. Chloe Breyer, a Minister with a Passion for Social Justice

To outward appearances, it didn’t seem as though Chloe Breyer was headed toward a religious life. Quite the contrary. She had experienced a secular interfaith childhood in Cambridge, Mass., where her father, Stephen Breyer, the soon-to-become Justice of the Supreme Court, taught at Harvard Law School. But as the Rev. Dr. Chloe Breyer now describes it, she was always “a spiritual seeker.”

When she became an undergraduate student at Harvard, Breyer majored in comparative religion and government. “It was a concentration that I had made up myself, and it was rejected the first time around on the grounds that religion had nothing to do with government.”

At the age of 27, Breyer felt called to become an Episcopal minister. She moved to New York City to begin her training at the General Theological Seminary. In 2000, she published The Close: A Young Woman’s First Year at Seminary, a well-received memoir of reconciling the spiritual with the secular. She subsequently received a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary.

In its review of The Close, the New York Times was prescient: “Chloe Breyer is someone you’d want as a friend—earnest, analytical and endowed with a keen sense of social justice . . . She sees and comes to accept that the kingdom of the church is, like the secular world, imperfect, and that her task is to make a positive difference in whatever ways she can.”

Breyer has served as the director of the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) since 2007. In its own words, the ICNY’s activist mission is “to overcome prejudice, violence, and misunderstanding by activating the power of the city’s grassroots religious and civic leaders and their communities.” Says Breyer, “I have really tried to maintain the focus on grassroots and immigrant faith communities and getting them to work together for the good of the whole city.”

For the last three years, that has meant helping religious institutions handle the flood of immigrants into New York. “My geography of NYC is around faith communities,” she says. “So, we’ve got mosques in the Bronx, we’ve got gurdwara [Sikh houses of worship] in Queens, and on the Upper West Side, a lot of churches, synagogues, and other faith traditions too.”

In addition to her work at the ICNY, Breyer has had the energy and drive to minister at Harlem churches for more than 20 years, including as Associate Priest at St. Philip’s Church.

Breyer is blunt about the current political environment. “It’s just unthinkable. I think we’re all in the position where we are just sort of terrified to pick up the newspaper or even see what’s on our phones because it just, you can’t make it up and it doesn’t seem to be going away.”

This has hampered work on behalf of immigrants, Breyer says. “So many people who have been relying on houses of worship are now not coming. They’re not coming to worship; they’re not coming to go to school. This is just the chilling effect of everything, of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing from Washington.”

So as always, Breyer is redoubling her efforts to understand and manage the relationship between religion and government, just as she has been doing since her early undergraduate years.