Such a nasty woman.
Donald Trump1
There will long be debate about the election that put Donald Trump in the White House. How did a controversial real estate mogul with no political experience defeat a slate of experienced Republicans in the primaries and then achieve victory over a Democratic heir-apparent who was also one of the most seasoned politicians in the country? A century from now, professors will still be probing the minutiae of the 2016 presidential race before classrooms of astonished students.
There will be much to explore. Did Hillary Clinton’s primary battle with Bernie Sanders exhaust her campaign? What damage was done when she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”?2 How was it possible that Clinton could raise $242 million more than Trump, outgun him three to one in television ads, receive 2.8 million more popular votes than he did, and yet still lose? Why did her campaign wait until October 29 to run a television ad in Wisconsin, a state she lost by just twenty-two thousand votes ten days later? The questions will likely never end.
The topic of religion will certainly inspire some of these questions. Though Hillary Clinton possessed a deeper religious history and wider religious knowledge, and was more articulate in expressing her faith than her opponent, she failed to capitalize on any of these advantages. Instead, her campaign was marked by a surprising neglect of religious voters. This was odd for a candidate who held her first campaign rally at New York’s Four Freedoms Park, named for Franklin Roosevelt’s famous 1941 speech celebrating freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Not only in her speech at the New York rally but also throughout her campaign, Clinton never managed to mention the matter of worship.
It was a shocking omission, particularly since Donald Trump had given clear warning he planned to use religion against her. This occurred as early as June 2016, when Trump spoke to a gathering of evangelicals on the sixth floor of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. “We don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion,” Trump declared. “Now, she’s been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there’s nothing out there. It’s going to be an extension of Obama but it’s going to be worse, because with Obama you had your guard up. With Hillary, you don’t, and it’s going to be worse.”3
Though little of this was true, it was a shot across the Clinton campaign’s bow that ought to have been noticed. It ought to have brought faith to the fore in the campaign’s messaging. It didn’t. Instead, the opposite occurred.
Clinton did mention her Methodist faith in her convention acceptance speech and did appear at a handful of African-American churches during her campaign. Apart from this, the campaign’s treatment of Clinton’s faith was virtually nonexistent. Directors of faith outreach were appointed far too late in the game. Religious media were denied access. The campaign never did respond to requests by leading evangelical magazine Christianity Today for an interview. The all-important matter of symbolism was mismanaged as well. Clinton’s first speech after receiving her party’s nomination for the presidency took place at a Planned Parenthood event. This was guaranteed to distance religious conservatives, many of whom were uncertain about Trump and a portion of whom might have responded to a lean in their direction by Clinton. It never occurred.
Yet there is a broader issue than simply campaign mismanagement in this matter of faith and Hillary Clinton. There is also the reality that she represents a murky, ever fluctuating, uncertain brand of left-leaning spirituality that many Americans find difficult to understand and just as many distrust. Little might have been said of this had she not throughout her life consistently put her faith at the forefront of her politics. Hillary Clinton is one of the most faith-based politicians of our generation. There has been time for Americans to know what can be known of her religious views. It hasn’t happened. Though she has been on the national stage for more than a quarter of a century, at the start of the 2016 presidential campaign season, almost half of all Americans—some 43 percent—perceived Clinton as having no religion at all.4
The truth is far different from the popular perception. She grew up in a deeply Methodist family permeated by religion. “We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God. Each night we knelt by our beds to pray,” she wrote.5 At the family’s Park Ridge Methodist Church, she first heard the famous words of John Wesley that would come to define her life’s purpose: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.” A youth minister at Park Ridge schooled her both in the Bible and in the rising currents of the 1960s counterculture: the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the cadences of beat poet Jack Kerouac, and the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.
It was a spiritual imprint that would remain with her through Wellesley, Yale Law School, marriage to Bill Clinton, and into her role as First Lady of Arkansas. She experienced the same ebbs and flows of spiritual passion and doubt that most people of faith do, but she retained what Park Ridge Methodist Church imparted to her soul. Her pastor in Little Rock later recalled, “One of her favorite thoughts was that the goal of life is to restore what has been lost, to find oneness with God, and until we find this we are lonely.”6
It was when she became First Lady of the United States that she began experimenting with religion in a way that would shape her for decades after. She still held to the core Christian truths of her youth. In a much-cited interview, Bob Woodward pressed Clinton about whether she was still an “old-fashioned Methodist.”
Woodward: “Do you believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?”
First Lady: “Yes.”
Woodward: “The atoning death of Jesus?”
First Lady: “Yes.”
Woodward: “The resurrection of Christ?”
First Lady: “Yes.”7
As orthodox as she could sound, she had also begun leaning to nontraditional religious influences. She hosted White House gatherings of leaders from nearly every alternative religious stream. She even famously consented to what amounted to a séance with noted spiritualist Jean Houston. Though news of it proved embarrassing, there was no clearer evidence that Hillary Clinton was in search of help to withstand her husband’s betrayals, the bludgeoning of an unsympathetic press, and the stresses that any First Lady is forced to endure. She was in search of something to answer the needs of her soul. The truths of her Methodist upbringing were no longer enough.
She carried her religious ideals into the Senate, where she invoked her faith often. When Republicans proposed an offending immigration bill, she bashed them with biblical force. “It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scriptures,” she scolded. “This bill would liberally criminalize the Good Samaritan—and probably even Jesus himself.”8 When John Kerry lost the presidency to George W. Bush, she mourned, “No one can read the New Testament of our Bible without recognizing that Jesus had a lot more to say about how we treat the poor than most of the issues that were talked about in this election.”9
What was missing were understandable connections between her faith and her politics. If she was going to put her faith in play politically, she had an obligation to explain what the content of that faith was. She never did during her Senate years. This was vital, chiefly because she had chosen to move to the left edge of American politics. As one biographer has written, “Not a single US senator was more liberal on economic and social matters than Mrs. Clinton, and in 2003, no senator surpassed her liberal ranking on social issues.”10 Her unswerving pro-abortion politics tell the tale. The Christian Coalition and the National Right to Life Committee both put her at zero. Meanwhile, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League gave her a stunning 100 percent.11
To this move from centrist to extreme left she added a confusing abandonment of faith-based positions she had once championed. Though her husband had signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law and she had fiercely defended it with Scripture quotations at the time, she began moving in the opposite direction. This shift marked her years as secretary of state and her campaigns for president. She described the change as fruit of “the guiding principles of my faith” but offered no further explanation.12
She repudiated DOMA and rejoiced when President Obama instructed his Justice Department to stop defending it. She then began transforming herself into a champion of gay rights. No one publicly celebrated the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same sex marriage more than Hillary Clinton.
Her advocacy for abortion knew no bounds. As late as 2007, she had shared her husband’s commitment that abortion in America should be “safe, legal and rare.” Soon after, she dropped the “rare.” Unfettered abortion access became her litmus test for a just society. Nothing must stand in its way, even convictions of faith. At a global conference of women in New York, she declared that abortion rights required that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”13 She later insisted that a woman’s decision to get an abortion is a decision “based on her faith” but she never explained what this meant.14
Nothing revealed her extreme support for abortion rights like the scandal that plagued Planned Parenthood in 2015. In that year, videos went viral that depicted Planned Parenthood officials illegally negotiating the sale of organs from fetal tissue. One described how a fetus can be “crushed” to preserve livers, lungs, and hearts “intact.” Another joked that she wanted a Lamborghini for her services and then explained the “crunchy” procedures used to harvest fetal organs. Hillary Clinton defended it all.
By the time she ran for president against Donald Trump, she was the candidate most outspoken about having a faith and the least clear about the meaning of that faith. It was possible to wonder if her religion was nothing more than mystical justification for whatever she decided to do. Did it have any ethical content? Were there any firm lines? Was there a sense that God had spoken final truth to all humankind, or was her religion based on what Barack Obama called a “living word” that constantly morphed and evolved? It was impossible to know, for while faith was ever-present in Hillary Clinton’s politics it was also ever ill-defined and unexplained.
The truth of this was confirmed by her race against Donald Trump. She certainly had the longer religious history. She was better-spoken in matters of faith. She ought to have bested Trump at every religious turn.
He was, after all, the man who claimed faith but said he had never found reason to ask forgiveness of God. He was the candidate who eagerly held up a Bible his grandmother had given him and then excitedly told a national television audience that she had even written his address in it. When asked about the role of God in his life, he spoke of his many victories in business. When asked about God’s role in the nation, he confirmed that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Reporters sought religious depth or even basic understanding in vain.
Yet Hillary Clinton lost ground with religious voters when compared with the previous Democratic standard-bearer, Barack Obama. He had won support from 26 percent of evangelicals in 2008 and 20 percent in 2012. She drew only 16 percent in 2016. Meanwhile, Donald Trump drew an astonishing 81 percent, more than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney in their presidential runs.
It was a stunning feat, and it was only possible because by the 2016 presidential race a large portion of voters were weary of politicians touting religion without dimension, religion that was ever invoked but seldom defined. They preferred someone like them—raw, imperfect, but fierce in defense of what they believed. This left them only one choice: Donald Trump.