One facet of Hillary Clinton, 71, is unchanged across
her decades as a lawyer, first lady,
senator and secretary of state: She
was, is and likely always will be a
social-justice-focused Methodist.
1) She was shaped by a saying
popular among Methodists: “Do all the
good you can, by all the means you
can, in all the ways you can, in all the
places you can, at all the times you
can, to all the people you can, as long
as ever you can,” says Paul Kengor in
his book “God and Hillary Clinton.”
As a girl, she was part of the guild that
cleaned the altar at First United
Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill. As
a teen, she visited inner-city Chicago
churches with the youth pastor, Don
Jones, her spiritual mentor until his
death in 2009. During her husband’s
presidency, the first family worshipped
at Washington’s Foundry United
Methodist Church, and Time magazine
described her membership in a
bipartisan women’s prayer group
organized by evangelicals.
2) Clinton’s been known to carry a
Bible in her purse but, she told the
2007 CNN Faith Forum, “advertising”
her faith “doesn’t come naturally to
me.” Every vote Clinton made as a
senator from New York, she said, was
“a moral responsibility.” When asked at
the forum why she thought God allows
suffering, Clinton demurred on
theology, then swiftly turned her
answer to activism: “The existence of
suffering calls us to action.”
In a 1993 speech at the University of
Texas, Clinton declared: “We need a
new politics of meaning. … We have to
summon up what we believe is morally
and ethically and spiritually correct and
do the best we can with God’s
guidance.” A month later, she was
pictured as a saint in a Sunday New
York Times Magazine exploration of
that “politics of meaning” phrase.
3) Prayer matters. Clinton joked at the
Faith Forum that sometimes her plea
is, “Oh, Lord, why can’t you help me
lose weight?” But her daily habit, she
said, is praying, “for discernment, for
wisdom, for strength, for courage … ”
What she calls “grace notes” matter,
too. She described them to adviser
Burns Strider as “a gift that is
undeserved but bestowed by the
everyday joys, beauties, kindnesses,
pleasures of life that can strike a deep
chord of connection between us and
the divine and between us and the
mundane.”
4) God politics gets tough. In 2008,
Clinton battered then-Sen. Barack
Obama for saying economically hard-
pressed Americans were bitter and
“cling to guns or religion.” At the CNN
Compassion Forum, Clinton said the
Democratic Party “has been viewed as
a party that didn’t understand the
values and way of life of so many
Americans. … It’s important that we
make clear that we believe people are
people of faith because it is part of
their whole being. It is what gives them
meaning in life.”
5) April, 2014 Clinton told the annual
United Methodist Women Assembly
that their shared faith has guided her to
be “an advocate for children and
families, for women and men around
the world who are oppressed and
persecuted, denied their human rights
and human dignity.”
Be the first to comment