Is failed presidential shoe-in Hillary Clinton considering a vocational move? A recent article in The Atlantic magazine, entitled “Hillary Wants to Preach,” suggests that Clinton, a lifelong Methodist, has for years harbored a dream of being a minister. “Scattered bits of reporting suggest that ministry has always been a secret dream of the two-time presidential candidate,” observes writer Emma Green in The Atlantic. “Last fall, the former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward revealed that Clinton told him in 1994 that she thought ‘all the time’ about becoming an ordained Methodist minister. She asked him not to write about it, though: ‘It will make me seem much too pious.’”
More recently, “as Clinton works to rehabilitate her public image and figure out the next steps after her brutal November loss, religion is taking a central role,” Green writes. “After long months of struggling to persuade Americans that she is trustworthy, authentic, and fundamentally moral, Clinton is lifting up an intimate, closely guarded part of herself” — which, apparently, is meant to present a softer, more reflective Hillary who is motivated by faith.
Two books slated for publication this fall will, supposedly, help to cast Clinton in a more favorable, reverent light, Green notes. The first book, entitled What Happened, will supposedly be largely filled with the former first lady’s personal narrative of what went wrong in her humiliating November electoral loss to Donald Trump.
But it is Strong for a Moment Like This, a devotional penned by Clinton’s “longtime pastor” Bill Shillady, and for which she provided the foreword, that apparently is meant to help personify Clinton as largely motivated by her lifelong Methodist faith.
Green recalls that the devotional emerged “from a project Shillady started shortly after Clinton said she was running for president in 2015. Every morning, he would get up at 4 a.m. to pick out a bit of Scripture and write a quick devotional for Clinton to use in the day ahead…. The book offers a rare window into the way Scripture appears to have shaped Clinton on the campaign trail — as it has throughout her life.”
Green’s glowing account of Hillary’s supposed deep spirituality hearkens back to Clinton’s growing-up years attending a United Methodist Church in suburban Chicago, and segues into her years as first lady during husband Bill’s White House years. “During the Clinton administration,” writes Green, “the family attended Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary during the early Monica Lewinsky years and now teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary, told me ‘her faith and her ability to think about forgiveness … was a very, very important part of how she dealt with that family crisis.’ A well-worn Bible was always on the Clinton family’s dining room table during that time, he said.”
Fast-forward to the present and Green speculates that following her loss in the 2016 presidential race (which appears to have closed the book on her career in politics), “Clinton may be settling on an alternate path, one she’s apparently fantasized about in secret for a long time.” Green quotes Shillady as saying that “given her depth of knowledge of the Bible and her experience of caring for people and loving people, she’d make a great pastor.”
In the 1994 interview referenced above, Woodward observed that “despite what some critics believe, the nation’s First Lady is not markedly feminist in her religion. She thinks abortion is ‘wrong,’ but, like [Bill Clinton], she says, ‘I don’t think it should be criminalized.’ She does not follow feminist theology and seems unaware of the upheaval its most radical exponents have created among Methodists in the name of greater inclusiveness.”
However, Hillary’s record in the 20-plus years since then suggests that her present convictions are decidedly not informed by Scripture or the ideals embraced by a majority of Bible-believing Christians. LifeSiteNews.com noted that, as a committed Democrat, “Clinton ran on a platform fully embracing homosexuality, transgenderism, and taxpayer-funded abortion.”
As for her stance on abortion, LifeSite noted that on NBC’s Meet the Press in April 2016, candidate Clinton declared that “the unborn person doesn’t have Constitutional rights.” Additionally, reported LifeSite, she “once likened pro-lifers to ‘terrorist groups’ and told Planned Parenthood that her campaign ‘belongs’ to the abortion giant and its abortionists.”
Similarly, writing in National Review, Ben Shapiro noted that Hillary Clinton “opposed every version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; supported the Human Rights Campaign [a pro-homosexual organization], which wishes to use federal law to crack down on businesses to ‘discriminate’ on the basis of ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’; and opposed the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, which allowed religiously owned businesses to avoid promoting abortion.”
Responding to Shillady’s claim that Hillary’s “faith is stronger” despite her dismal 2016 election defeat, Shapiro wrote: “Surely it is. After all, the faith of leftists lies not in a God of personal responsibility, but in a god of collective blame. And that god has never left Hillary’s heart, not even for a second.”
Image of Hillary Clinton: Screenshot from ad at https://www.hillaryclinton.com/
