Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial

A surprising look at the 28 Catholic radicals who raided a draft board in 1971--and got away with it.

When the FBI arrested twenty-eight people in connection to a break-in at a Camden, New Jersey, draft board in 1971, the Bureau celebrated. The case should have been an easy victory for the department--the perpetrators had been caught red-handed attempting to destroy conscription documents for draftees into the Vietnam War. But the results of the trial surprised everyone, and in the process shook the foundations of American law, politics, and religion.

In Spiritual Criminals, Michelle M. Nickerson shares a complex portrait of the Camden 28, a passionate group of grassroots religious progressives who resisted both their church and their government as they crusaded against the Vietnam War. Founded by priests, nuns, and devout lay Catholics, members of this coalition accepted the risks of felony convictions as the cost of challenging the nation’s military-industrial complex and exposing the illegal counterintelligence operations of the FBI. By peeling away the layers of political history, theological traditions, and the Camden 28’s personal stories, Nickerson reveals an often-unseen spiritual side of the anti-war movement. At the same time, she probes the fractures within the group, detailing important conflicts over ideology, race, sex, and gender that resonate in the church and on the political Left today.

Michelle Nickerson is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right and co-editor of Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region.