Hillary Clinton’s religion

Any trained historian will tell you that discerning people’s motivations is a tricky business. Describing the deeds of historical actors is the easy bit. Figuring out why they did what they did? That’s more difficult. Knowing what they were thinking at the time? Almost impossible.

Gary Scott Smith sets out to accomplish this almost impossible task in Do All the Good You Can: How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Politics (University of Illinois Press 2023). Smith is a professor of history emeritus at Grove City College, a Christian ­liberal arts school. He’s written many books on the intersection of religion and culture, but with this latest he’ll be hard-pressed to convince evangelical readers of Clinton’s robust faith.

Smith begins with Clinton’s spiritual roots. She grew up in suburban Chicago with politically conservative parents. The family belonged to a Methodist church, and Smith argues these formative years provided Clinton with a religious foundation upon which she would build her political career. Her biggest spiritual influence was a youth minister who introduced her to the social gospel.

She attended Wellesley College during the tumultuous 1960s, and later attended Yale Law School. During her time at Wellesley and Yale she devoted herself to a liberal agenda for women’s and children’s rights, a passion Smith ties to her Methodist upbringing, despite the fact that she stopped attending church during those years.

After marrying Bill Clinton and moving to Arkansas, Hillary started attending church, a Methodist congregation, again. After Bill became governor, she stayed busy shaping Arkansas’ policies toward women and children.

Smith depicts Hillary as an intelligent, hardworking woman who never experienced failure until her husband entered presidential politics. She expected to take her do-gooder persona into the White House, and husband and wife joked that voters would be getting two Clintons for the price of one. But she alienated Americans on both the right and the left. Many women felt insulted when Hillary declared she wouldn’t be staying home to “bake cookies,” and the press savaged her when she gave a speech laden with religious language at the University of Texas. After her disastrous attempt to reform healthcare, she took a step back.

She used her time in the Senate to reinvent herself, and she made her own presidential run in 2008. She settled for being Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Smith’s story climaxes with the 2016 presidential election. In chapter after chapter, Smith asserts the importance of religion in Clinton’s decision-­making and then pits her against Donald Trump and his thin religious commitments.

Smith details at great length the various triumphs and failures of Clinton’s political career, but his attempts to tie her policies directly to faith fall short. It’s not enough merely to add the words “motivated by her faith” to the beginning of a sentence, a habit in which he too often indulges. But he does manage to show how well Clinton can speak the language of faith when she wants to, fluently quoting Scripture and talking about the power of prayer. But the social gospel Clinton espouses is no gospel at all. Repentance and faith take a back seat to changing the world. If it’s up to us to “immanentize the eschaton,” Jesus becomes optional.

Smith admits Hillary’s biggest obstacle to winning over evangelical voters was her uncompromising support of abortion and her increasing insistence on the homosexual agenda. Smith tries to argue Clinton found Scriptural justification for these positions, but he fails to convince, especially since for most of her life her own Methodist tradition opposed them. What we end up with is not a case of faith shaping politics, but politics shaping faith.