For politicians who are searching for an appropriate way to talk about their Christian faith in public, the Bible can sometimes appear to contain contradictory mandates. In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he admonishes his disciples to pray in secret and “not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” Later, however, the resurrected Jesus, just before he is taken up to Heaven, implores his followers to go forth and “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Managing this tension—between public and private, hypocrisy and witness—can be especially vexing for someone under the public glare.
On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Methodist, sat down for a conversation about her faith at Riverside Church, in New York City. The event was a fund-raiser for Camp Olmsted, a camp for underserved children supported by the United Methodist Church. It had the feel, at times, of both a Trump resistance rally and a kickoff event for her book tour, which will officially start next week. Yet it also offered Clinton—no longer a candidate for public office—a chance to discuss an animating influence on her life, but one that she has struggled over the years to convey about herself to a skeptical public. “I was raised to believe that actions spoke louder than words,” she explained to her audience in the pews. “If you were a person of faith, that should be evident in how you treated other people and what kind of life you lived. So, I didn’t go around talking about it a lot, but it certainly was foremost in my mind. I’ve tried to express it, sometimes more effectively than other times, over the course of the last twenty or thirty years. But I’ve tried to be guided by it, even more importantly.”
There have been times when this impulse to express her faith was, undeniably, driven by politics. In 2007, several months into her first Presidential campaign, I interviewed Clinton at length about the influence of religion on her life. During the 2008 campaign, the Democratic Party made carefully plotted efforts to appeal to churchgoers, including white evangelicals, who had voted overwhelmingly Republican in the previous election. A week and a half before our conversation, Clinton had participated in a nationally televised forum with her Democratic primary opponents, then Senator Barack Obama, and the former Senator John Edwards, organized by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, about their faiths. For a moment, it was actually voguish for Democratic candidates to talk about their spiritual lives.
By 2016, the Democrats had mostly abandoned these kinds of concerted efforts—a serious blunder, according to some faith leaders, given Donald Trump’s obvious clumsiness around religion. Nevertheless, on the campaign trail last year, Clinton still occasionally made reference to her spirituality—part of her campaign’s efforts to address questions about her authenticity.
This week I went back and listened to a recording of my 2007 interview with her, and I was struck by Clinton’s fluency in talking about everything from Thomas Aquinas to the tenets of Methodism. “I always resonated to the fact that it was both revelatory and Scripture-based but that you were invited to use your power of reason to think through your faith and to work through what it meant to you and how you would live it in your daily life,” she told me. Evangelicals often criticize leaders of mainline denominations, like the United Methodist Church, for focussing too much on addressing social ills and not enough on the importance of personal salvation. Clinton told me that she believed there was some validity to that critique. “I thought that in the Methodist Church, a lot of the churches had drifted too far on the social-gospel side, which is very understandable, because there were a lot of serious issues, certainly, that were facing me when I was growing up, on race relations and on the Vietnam war, and so much else,” she said. “But you have to keep in balance the feeding of your spirit and your soul and the need to be nurturing your personal faith, while you try to have the energy and the support to go out into the world.” I had pressed Clinton about her personal theology. Did she believe in a personal relationship with God, which evangelicals liked to talk about? “Absolutely,” she said. Did she believe the resurrection of Jesus actually happened? “Yes, I do.” She became more circumspect when the conversation turned personal. I asked, for instance, whether her faith had influenced her decision to stay in her marriage. She demurred on that.
On Thursday evening, Clinton spoke about her election loss and described some of the “tools” that got her through that personally devastating period. “I tried alternate-nostril breathing,” she said, eliciting laughter from the crowd. “And, yes, I had my fair share of Chardonnay.” But she also turned to prayer, she said, and reread writings by the priest Henri Nouwen*, which she said had also helped her during the difficult years at the end of the nineteen-nineties. “Through it all, my faith was really holding me together in a very central way,” she said. “It gave me a lot of courage to get up and keep going.”
Originally, attendees at Thursday’s event were supposed to receive a copy of “Strong for a Moment Like This: The Daily Devotions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” a book put together by the Reverend Dr. Bill Shillady, a United Methodist pastor who, during the Presidential campaign, sent Clinton daily e-mails of spiritual encouragement. But earlier this week, after it was discovered that Shillady had plagiarized several passages, the book was pulled from stores by its publisher. Parts of a moving devotional that Shillady sent on the morning after the election, when he told Clinton that she was “experiencing a Friday”—as in what happened to Jesus on Good Friday—turned out to be problematic. Still, Shillady’s conclusion, when he urged Clinton to have hope, has held up. “You know one of my favorite sayings is God doesn’t close one door without opening another, but it can be hell in the hallway,” Shillady wrote. “My sister Hillary. You, our nation, our world is experiencing a dark Friday. Our hope is that Sunday is coming. But it might well be hell for a while.”
On Thursday night, Clinton didn’t elaborate much on her period in the hallway, as Shillady put it, or go deeper into how faith had helped her find a way out. I wondered why she didn’t. Giving “testimony” is, after all, a crucial aspect of church life. But one of Clinton’s millstones has always been how to expose her inner life to people. Instead of dwelling on the spiritual dimensions of her election loss, she found her way back to the political, getting most invigorated when launching broadsides against the Trump Administration. “Yes, I am O.K.,” she said. “But I’m worried. I’m worried that we face a continuing deliberate effort to undermine our values and our institutions as Americans, and it is something we cannot stay silent about or stay on the sidelines about.” She called upon more people to “join us in speaking out, in resisting, and insisting, and persisting, and enlisting in the struggles that are ahead of us.” And she urged the faithful in the church to do all of this with “a song in our heart.”
*An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Henri Nouwen’s Catholicism.
