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Introduction

The previous figures in our on–going series on The Mighty and the Almighty have all held highest office: Presidents or Prime Ministers, in effect. Hillary Clinton has not. Indeed, at the time of writing she may never.

[ed. for “may never” read “will never”. Technically this makes this essay irrelevant. However, the author did not have one on Donald Trump up his sleeve and is, frankly, not inclined to write one. So, in the meantime…]

She has, however, been in the political limelight for nearly 35 years and in the top rank of US politics for 25. She is better known than many of the PMs and Presidents so far discussed in the series.

That, however, creates its own problems. If the problem for the British electorate is that they know too little about their new Prime Minister, the problem for the American one is that they may know too much about theirs. A campaign memo from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign said “voters need to meet the real Hillary Clinton. They have a distorted, limited and overly political impression of her.” Many voters in her own presidential campaign nearly quarter of a century later would have agreed.

This might be as much about self–protection as anything else. In the words of one of her many biographers, “raised by a cold and distant father and married to the world’s most famous unfaithful husband, it is little wonder that Hillary appears to have created a seemingly perfect public personal that few can penetrate.” Conversely, it may simply reflect what her critics see as an insatiable hunger for power and attendant willingness to trim her sails to catch the best political winds. “During her time in the public eye, perhaps only Madonna has routinely reinvented herself and reintroduced to the American public more than Hillary Clinton.”
As if this impenetrability weren’t enough, Clinton has also been an astonishingly divisive figure, the subject of much hyperbolic claim and counter claim, and more than her fair share of vitriol. To hold high office means – almost by definition – to have your motives and principles tested, questioned and doubted. To hold high office, or at least public prominence, for as long as Hillary Clinton has is to have such questions and doubts endlessly multiplied.

The Early years
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on 26 October 1947, the daughter of Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, a self–made small businessman and the domineering presence in the family, and Dorothy Emma Howell. The Rodham family, in Hillary’s words, could trace its roots back to Bristol, in the UK “to the coal mines and the Wesleys”, and Methodism was a significant presence in her upbringing. “As a young child I would hear stories that my grandfather had heard from his parents who were all involved in the great evangelical movement that swept England,” she claimed.

Hillary grew up during peak of American Methodism, when the denomination could boast around 11 million members. Hugh Rodham had an individualised, self–reliant faith in God, self, and hard work (though not necessarily in that order) and was not especially devout but Dorothy was committed, teaching Sunday school and attending weekly services at the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois, with her daughter.

In her 1996 book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, Hillary painted a picture of domestic devotion: “we talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God. Each night we knelt by our beds to pray.” However devout her early faith life was, there were tensions. Hillary later described how she found herself caught between her mother’s piety and her father’s tepidity, simultaneously trying “to reconcile my father’s insistence of self–reliance and my mother’s concerns about social justice,” as she says in her memoir Living History.

A similar tension marked her church life, after Don Jones joined the church as youth minister in the 1960s. Jones was socially aware and active, bringing exotic and slightly risqué touch of intellectualism in his wake (Paul Tillich, Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer), along with a smattering of radical politics and social liberalism. He exposed Hillary and her peers to the causes of the moment, including the Civil Rights movement and an event with Martin Luther King Jnr., exciting and stimulating Hillary but upsetting some of the older members of the congregation. “Our church”, Hillary wrote in In Takes a Village – meaning predominantly Don Jones – “exposed us to the world beyond our all–white middle–class suburb”. Jones lasted only two years in the church, and when he died in 2009, Clinton said that he had “helped guide me on a spiritual and political journey of over 40 years.”

However much Don Jones himself shaped Clinton’s faith and political outlook, the church and in particular its Wesleyan outlook, had a profound impact. Clinton repeatedly paid honour to this over the years, saying that her church upbringing taught her “about the connection between my personal faith and the obligations I faced as a Christian, both to other individuals and to society”. More specifically, she repeatedly quoted the statement attributed to Wesley – “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can” – claiming, for example, in her acceptance speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that her mother Dorothy “made sure I learned [these] words from our Methodist faith”.

Hillary’s faith waned a little after childhood, although she continued churchgoing and joined interdenominational chapel society at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she studied political science. She kept a safe distance from the counterculture the swept campuses at the time, although she did subscribe to motive, the official magazine for the Methodist Student Movement, noted for its fashionable stances – anti–Vietnam, pro–labour, feminist – and described in 1966 Time magazine as standing out among church publications “like a miniskirt at a church social.” It was an indication of the political direction she would take the Wesleyan edict to do all the good you can.

The first approach was through the law, which Hillary went on to read at Yale, where she met Bill. Following this she worked as attorney for Children’s Defence Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a new non–profit legal organisation that advocated for better federal policies concerning child welfare and public education, but which became much distrusted by the political right which saw it as massive federal programme intended to fund liberal ideas of social justice.

The couple then moved to Arkansas, to facilitate Bill’s bid for Congress, and Hillary went to work for 15 years as attorney for Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, the state capital. Both Bill and Hillary appear to have returned to their childhood faith in this period, though critics invariably claimed that this was a purely political move on Bill’s behalf, as he tried to achieve the balancing act of being a liberal without alienating Arkansas’ Religious Right vote. Hillary attended the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, taught in the Sunday school, and, once she became First Lady of Arkansas, travelled the state and gave speeches about why she was a Methodist, and how the work of William Wilberforce, the gospel of social justice, and the demands of personal responsibility were important to her. She even launched a public education campaign about the problems faced by modern teenagers, complaining about a society that bombarded them with sexual messages, and sounding sometimes like a conservative, with phrases like “it’s not birth control, it’s self control”. It was a phrase, and pose, that would be harder to reconcile with her later, most socially liberal stance, and which would confuse, disaffect and anger some voters.

White House: part 1
Hillary Clinton has often remarked in her speeches that “if I hadn’t believed in prayer before 1992, life in the White house would have persuaded me.” The Clintons attended Foundry United Methodist Church when they arrived in town, less than a mile away and run by the pastor Philip Wogaman, a respected Christian ethicist standing towards the liberal end of the theological spectrum. In Living History she wrote of how throughout her time at the White House, one of her aides “faxed me a daily Scripture reading or faith message… each of my ‘prayer partners’ told me she would pray for me weekly…[and] presented me with a handmade book filled with messages, quotes and Scripture.” It was a dramatic, and sometimes traumatic, period for her, even by the standards of US Presidencies. When she later remarked that it was only her faith, and the prayerful support of her nearest and dearest, that helped her get through the more sordid and torrid moments of her husband’s eight year tenure, there is little reason to doubt her.

It would, however, be wrong to view Hillary’s time as First Lady simply through the retrospective lens of the Lewinski affair. She intended, and in many ways succeeded, to make her own mark on the administration. The First Lady focused on children and on healthcare, but retained an even bigger vision for national renewal which she articulated at a speech at University of Texas, in Austin, in April 1993. This became known as her ‘Politics of Meaning’ speech, in which she consciously stepped back and invited her audience to ask:

“Why is it in a country as economically wealthy as we are… that is the longest–surviving democracy, there is this undercurrent of discontent – this sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough? That we lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively – that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are?”

Her response was that the nation needed
“a new politics of meaning… a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring… a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

This was ripe for mockery – the normally sympathetic New York Times reported the speech under the heading ‘Saint Hilary’, saying that “the meaning of the politics of meaning is hard to discern under the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon that blanket it” – but the speech was far from nonsensical. Rather, it was of a piece with both the ‘Third Way’ thinking that was making headway under her husband’s administration and would soon spread through New Labour to the UK, where a young (and  then still publicly devout) Tony Blair would make similar comments, and with Hillary Clinton’s own faith. Indeed, Hillary later recalled a conversation with Tony and Cherie Blair several years later about “the connection between our religious faith and public service”, in which she invoked John Wesley’s teaching about living every day doing as much good as you can, in every way that you can. There was clearly a theological resonance between Prime Minister and First Lady, just as much as the more obvious political one.

In reality, the speech was very light on Christian content – no Bible, no church, no Christ, only two passing references to God – but it nonetheless accurately reflected the politicised liberal Methodism that lay at Hillary’s core. Don Jones understood that, commenting that the speech showed Hillary to be “very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.”

Such faith–lite ‘politics of meaning’ did not mean Hillary had become chary of the pulpit now she was politically centre stage. In April 1996, she addressed the quadrennial General Conference of the United Methodist Church, with a speech that ranged over biographical, historical, and moral – if not biblical – territories (confident in her faith as she was, Hillary was never going to deliver her own Sermon on the Mound), but was anchored in our responsibility to children. Delivered shortly after the publication of It takes a village, Hillary spoke about how – as a chapter in the book put it – “children are born believers” and that “we owe our children a chance for them to have a spiritual life… to be part of a church.”

This was an ecclesiastical responsibility but also, obviously, a parental one, and indeed one that extended to business and entertainment industries:
“We would also ask those in the business community to think about the decisions they make in terms, not only of their primary responsibility to their bottom line, but also to the communities that they serve and work in…if we were able to persuade everyone who has any control of what appears on our televisions and what we hear on our radios, to think about their own children, would they want their own children to see and hear what comes into our homes on a daily basis?”

This was rhetoric that was intended to appeal beyond Hillary’s Democratic constituency and something she expanded on in her book, saying that she shared the President’s view that “nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion–free zones, or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door.”

This did not indicate a shift on contentious issues like school prayer. Hillary went on to state that the nation ran into problems “when people want to use governmental authority to promote school prayer or particular religious observations.” However, she was, she said, in general agreement with the then Secretary of Education Richard Riles and Attorney General Janet Reno, who, when asked by the President to develop statement of principles regarding permissible religious activities in schools, said that students may participate in individual or group prayer during the school day, as long as they do so in a non–disruptive manner and when they are not engaged in school activities or instruction;students should be free to express their beliefs about religion in school assignments; and
schools may not provide religious instruction, but they may teach about the Bible or other scripture in the teaching of history or literature, for example.
This was hardly a commitment to the kind of religious recognition and freedom that many on the right sought, but it was closer to their concerns for freedom of religion than it was to the more secular Democrat concerns about freedom from religion.

Senator
The Clintons left the White House in January 2001, by which time Hillary had made history by becoming the country’s first First Lady to stand for and to win elected office, as Senator for New York, defeating the Republican Rick Lazio, after Rudy Giuliani was forced from the race for personal and health reasons. Her public religiosity in the White House notwithstanding, the victory was clearly achieved in spite and not because of her faith. Committed Methodist played less well on the East Coast than across much of the country and, in any case, a 2000 poll by the Wall Street Journal/ NBC News, found only 12% of the American public thought Hillary was “extremely/ very religious” and a quarter thought that she was not that religious. Of the public figures polled only her husband scored lower.

One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly her stance on abortion, which had been clear and unyielding (and sometimes rather belligerent) from the days of Roe v Wade. Bill Clinton’s administration showed itself to be most pro–choice in US history from its early days, angering John Paul II’s papacy in the process. Such tensions were exacerbated and publicised through the Clintons’ very public encounter with, and tongue lashing from, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa was “unerringly direct” in her communication and she used the occasion of a National Prayer Breakfast keynote in 1994 to berate the Clintons in terms that left them both squirming. In reality, Hillary did go on to find some common ground with Mother Theresa, supporting her campaign to fight abortion by adoption, encouraging pro bono lawyers to do legal work, fighting bureaucracy, generating support among church leaders, and helping found what would become the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children (but would only remain open for a decade). Nevertheless, Hillary never wavered in her position on abortion itself, not even when berated by a saint, and could, when the moment was right, whip up pro–choice supporters with some unsubtle rabble rousing, such as in her keynote address to NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League) in January 2004 when she claimed that pro–lifers were:

“a powerful few…chipping aware at much of the progress of modern society…They simply do not believe in the right of privacy…Evidence doesn’t matter, science doesn’t matter, even the Constitution doesn’t really matter. When the Constitution doesn’t support their views, they say we should alter it, change it, re–interpret it, until it fits their worldview”.

The address pleased supporters but it came at the start of the year that ended with the Republican President George W. Bush decisively beating the Democrat candidate John Kerry and precipitating much soul searching among Hillary’s peers. Some of this oriented Democrats towards a faith constituency that they have somewhat written off – in both senses of the phrase – but now recognised they needed to woo to win.

Hillary was, in theory, well positioned to do this. Her Methodist background was genuine and well–attested. She had made socially conservative noises in the past, had joined a weekly prayer group in the Senate which included several conservative senators, and was clearly comfortable campaigning among the religious in the way that other leading Democrats weren’t always. It meant that during the second George W. Bush term, addresses like her February 2004 one to NARAL were somewhat rarer.

In April 2005, she cosponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act with conservative colleagues, to guarantee religious expression in work without fear of recrimination, a measure that, in fact, reflected her long–standing support of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act that had been signed into law by her husband. The following year, she used the Bible to criticise Republicans on a new immigration bill saying “it is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scriptures…The bill would literally criminalise the Good Samaritan – and probably even Jesus himself.”

She joined Republicans Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum in co–sponsoring Democrat Joe Lieberman’s bill calling for government to study impact of video games, television and internet on child development (the bill didn’t pass). She continued in her support for the invasion of Iraq (only admitting it was a mistake in her 2014 book Hard Choices) and came out as supporting civil unions but opposing marriage for gay couples. Burns Strider, a Southern Baptist political activist with whom she first met in 2006 and bonded over issues of faith and social justice, went on to serve as her faith outreach director during her 2008 campaign, trying to connect this apparently irreligious Senator with alienated faith communities. None of this endeared her to her liberal heartland. Her loyal supporters said it was evidence of her political principles, in many instances founded on her religious convictions. Her innumerable critics said it was still further evidence of her willingness to adopt or discard causes, especially religiously–flavoured ones, when there was electoral advantage to be had.

Secretary of State
In the end, of course, it was another Democrat with deep–rooted faith credentials, of whom critics were no less sceptical but of whom they knew rather less, who won the party nomination and then the Presidency in 2008, and it seemed, briefly, as if Hillary Clinton’s time at the top was finally over.

Soon, however, Barack Obama asked her to be his Secretary of State and although she was at first reluctant, she came round to the idea, citing, in her memoir Hard Choices, as one of her reasons, her family’s Methodist’s faith and Wesley’s line “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can.”
Her role as Secretary of State removed her from domestic politics for the next four years, although the “the pivot towards the Pacific region… [and] away from Europe and the Atlantic” during Obama’s first term included an interest in educational programmes, alongside economic development, that had marked her years in more domestic politics. In as far as Hillary was instrumental in this ‘Pacific pivot’, some critics claimed to be able to trace faith in its genealogy. “Worthy of consideration in the pivot,” wrote James Boys in Hillary Rising, were the Secretary of State’s “own roots as a Methodist and the importance of a sense of mission.” On the surface, this seems improbable. More likely is the view offered by Mark Landler, in his book Alter egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the twilight struggle over American Power, that Hillarys’ foreign policy

“is less a doctrine than a set of impulses, grounded in cold calculation and what one aide calls ‘a textbook view of American exceptionalism’. She is at heart a situationalist, somebody who reacts to problems piecemeal rather than fitting them into a larger doctrine.”

Nevertheless, for all the truth of this, the general consensus is that Hillary’s international policy has long been hawkish. She encouraged her husband to intervene in Kosovo in 1999; approved of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; warned, in 2008, that if Iran ever launched a nuclear strike on Israel, US would “totally obliterate” it; backed General Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2009; supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave behind a residual force of up to 20,000 troops in Iraq; and campaigned for air strikes in Libya, and to funnel weapons to rebels fighting Bashar–as Assad in Syria. Although, it is clearly far–fetched to link any of this directly to her particular brand of faith, it is not far–fetched to see how such a hawkish approach to international affairs is entirely of a piece with her politicised and interventionist Methodism – doing all the good she could by the means that were appropriate, or at least available, in the situation to hand.

The White House (part 2)
The other reading of her hawkish time as Secretary of State – not incompatible with the politicised Methodist explanation, but at least in tension with it – is that her international politics offered a way of repositioning herself with a American public too many of whom believed that Hillary was no more than a secular liberal, albeit one that was prepared to don the spiritual garments of whichever flock she was pursuing. In the words of Mark Landler, her time as Secretary of State completed “a remarkable, decade–long metamorphosis [in which she shed] the last vestiges of her image as a polarising, left–wing social engineer, in favour of a new role as commanding figure on the global stage.”

If that is the case, the presidential campaign of 2016 showed that she still had a long way to go. The 2016 campaign was extremely bruising, even by the growing standards of such things, and Hillary was constantly attacked for being socially liberal but also for being unfit to lead America on the global stage.

On the first matter at least, the evidence was persuasive. Her position on abortion remained steady, a matter of incomprehension and fury to many Christians in America, but in actual fact falling within the Methodist teaching on the subject, the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church saying “We recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures by certified medical providers”. Her longstanding advocacy of LGBT rights, a constant feature of her diplomacy as Secretary of State, became more socially liberal. Whilst in the 1990s she said that “marriage has historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and… has always been, between a man and a woman”, in the 2000s she supported states’ rights to permit gay marriage, and in the 2010s she came out as fully supportive at a federal level.

On the second matter, her record as Secretary of State spoke somewhat louder than an opponent who had had precisely no experience of public office, let alone service, at all.

Faith played a role in the campaign, although by no means an overwhelming one. Indeed, given the fact that her opponent had fewer Christian credentials than any candidate in living memory, it is noteworthy that Hillary’s campaign did not make more of this difference. The reason is probably down to the fact that Hillary’s faith – not unlike Hillary herself – is not, in fact, now a vote winner (assuming it ever was). Paul Kengor who wrote a ‘spiritual biography’ of her nearly a decade ago remarked that the book flopped because conservatives didn’t believe she was a real Christian, and liberals didn’t care. The analysis applies today, perhaps even more so.

Conclusion
Hillary Clinton told Newsweek in 1994 before mid–terms that she was “an Old Fashioned Methodist”, informing the interviewer she kept in her private quarters The Book of Resolutions of the United Methodist Church along with Bible. A couple of years later she wrote, in It takes a village, “preaching is a distant second to practicing when it comes to values like compassion, courage, faith, fellowship…” Nearly two decades on, coming off stage after finally securing the Democrat nomination, Hillary stood with a group of close friends, watching intently as the Rev. Bill Shillady, a Methodist minister who had buried Mrs. Clinton’s mother and married her daughter, offered a final benediction to the audience, drawing the familiar Wesleyan refrain, “Do all the good we can…”

The three vignettes, spanning Hillary’s 25 years in the political front line, outline and underline the nature of her faith. She is not afraid of speaking publicly, even confessionally, about that faith. She will campaign in churches, as all candidates must, and is prepared to answer rather than dodge questions. When asked by an Iowa voted early in campaign trail, in January 2016, about her beliefs she replied “I am a person of faith. I am a Christian. I am a Methodist”, before proceeding to get theological:

“The most important commandment is to love the Lord with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself… [and the Bible’s commandments are about ] taking care of the poor, visiting the prisoners, taking in the stranger, creating opportunities for others to be lifted up… [the Sermon on the Mount]… does seem to favour the poor and the merciful and those who in worldly terms don’t have a lot but who have the spirit that God recognizes as being at the core of love and salvation.”

Her answers to such questions and her theological account would have been roughly the same in 2008, 2000, 1993 or even the late 1960s. For all the apparent uncertainty, alleged flip–flopping, regular reinvention, and extreme claim and counter–claim that swarms around Hillary Clinton, the core – and sincerity – of her theo–political vision has remained reasonably constant.

But it is precisely the nature of the theo–political vision – the politicised Methodism that entreats its followers to “do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can” as Bill Shillady put it – that opens her up to those claims and counter–claims. For this particular ‘Wesleyan’ approach to politics, grants formidable permission to those who happen to find themselves in power, without doing much at the same time to define the somewhat amorphous content ‘good’. In effect, it risks allowing the political tail to wag the theological dog, baptising temporal power with spiritual authority without doing much to define its terms and conditions.

What the quote (famously Wesleyan but wrongly attributed to John Wesley himself) means for a pastor, or a parishioner – or indeed a policeman or a plumber – will naturally be different to a politicians, let alone a President. For a President who is determined to do all the good she can, by all the means she can, in all the ways she can, in all the places she can, at all the times she can, to all the people she can is an alarming prospect. In this regard, Hillary Clinton seems very like her longstanding political friend and ally, Tony Blair, for whom the sincerity and depth of his belief in something appeared to serve as indication of its veracity and significance.
In spite of what her many critics say, Hillary’s Christian faith is long–standing, deeply–felt and sincere, not simply something put on simply for the camera during campaign season. It has sustained her through some very difficult personal and public times, and no doubt does much to fuel her politics today. But, to pursue the travelling metaphor, it seems to serve as a fuel more than a map, which for Hillary Clinton is provided by her instinctive social liberalism, the geo–political situations in which she finds herself, and perhaps also, as her critics claim, by her determination to reach high office.

Nick Spencer is the acting head and head of research at Theos.

Bibliography
Allen, Jonathan and Arnie Parnes, HRC, state secrets and the rebirth of Hillary Clinton (London: Hutchinson, 2014)
Blumenthal, Karen, Hillary, a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
Boys, James D., Hillary rising, the politics, persona and policies of a new American dynasty (London: Biteback, 2016)
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, It takes a village, and other lessons children teach us (London: Pocket, 2007)
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Living History (London: Headline, 2003
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Hard choices (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014)
Kengor, Paul, God and Hillary Clinton: A spiritual life (New York : HarperCollins, 2007)
Landler, Mark, Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the twilight struggle over American Power (W.H. Allen, 2016)

Image by Gage Skidmore from flickr.com available under this Creative Commons Licence