Hillary Clinton on Religion
I’ve previously made known my stance on how the religion of a major election candidate should be treated. My goal now is to document where each major candidate stands on religion in the upcoming presidential election. This is not an exercise in reading between the lines. I am not talking about stances on abortion or gay marriage, strictly about religion. Hopefully there will be an election in my lifetime where this isn’t required knowledge before voting, but in today’s political (and religious) climate, it is required knowledge.
The following is Part 3 of a multi-part series on each candidates religious views, and how they fit into politics.
Hillary Clinton - Methodist
Quotes:
“People often ask me whether I’m a praying person, and I say I was lucky enough to be raised in a praying family, and learned to say my prayers as a very young child, and remembered seeing my late father by the side of his bed until his very last days saying his prayers. So I was fortunate. But I also say that had I not been a praying person, that after I’d been in the White House for a few months, I would have become a praying person.”
“Government works in partnership with religious institutions . . . to promote public purposes—feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless. Faith inspires those good works, to be sure. But tax dollars are properly used to channel the energies of the faithful in a direction that helps our society as a whole.”
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On an aid to illegal immigrants bill:
“It is hard to believe that a Republican leadership that is constantly talking about values and about faith would put forth such a mean-spirited piece of legislation. It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scripture because this bill would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself. We need to sound the alarm about what is being done in the Congress.”
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”It is always intriguing to me that so many people have a very narrow definition of morality and then often try to peg their definition, in the case of Christianity, to the Scriptures. And 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.”
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“Well, I think it looks like it’s looked for most of my life. I have always had a deep personal faith that was rooted in the Methodist church in large measure because I was christened into it, I grew up in it. But, it also very much reflected how I thought about faith as I matured. You know, if you look at the Methodist book of discipline it talks about the four contributing streams of faith — scripture, tradition, experience and reason. 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.
And so the method of Methodism was very reflective of my temperament and my predilection to look at things from a faith-based center but recognizing that I didn’t have a corner on faith, that I had to be open to experience and that I had to believe with both my head and my heart if it was going to sustain me over time. I remember reading years ago that Thomas Aquinas said that revelation was eminently rational and that’s the kind of confirmation of my faith experience that I found very supportive over the years.”
“I believe in the father, son, and Holy Spirit, and I have felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions in my years on this earth. I pray, I read the Bible, I read commentary on scriptures, I read other people’s faith journeys. That is, for me, at the real core of how I keep feeding my faith. And, I was lucky because, as I said at the faith and politics event, I was taught to pray and I inculcate it as a habit in my daily life.”
“I think the whole Bible is real. The whole Bible gives you a glimpse of God and God’s desire for a personal relationship, but we can’t possibly understand every way God is communicating with us. I’ve always felt that people who try to shoehorn in their cultural and social understandings of the time into the Bible might be actually missing the larger point that we’re supposed to take from the Bible.”
“I was bewildered by it, that it was somehow illegitimate to talk about faith as a Democrat. I found that just so bizarre that we were being, I think, written out of the whole faith experience. So much of the faith journey in this country are people who have put their faith into action on behalf of others – people who fought for abolition, people who fought for women’s suffrage, people who stood up on behalf of the concepts of justice and so much more.”
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More on Clinton and religion:
Hillary’s Prayer: Hillary Clinton’s Religion and Politics
Hillary Clinton Wants Religion in the Public Square, Says Author
Hillary Clinton Talks Religion
What Are Hillary Clinton’s Religious Beliefs?
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Summary:
Hillary Clinton seems genuinely religious. She is not afraid to defend her religious beliefs, nor invoke the Bible when she feels it’s necessary or helpful. How much of it is pure politics is unknown, but judging from her past, as well as her husband’s, anything she says must be taken as politics first, and belief second.
Having said that, she seems to be steadfast with her religious views, yet their potential impact on the nation’s politics appears low. My belief is that she is someone who prays, even when no one is looking, but will not have an affect on her major political decisions. Hillary is a politician and Democrat first, and everything else second. I think she is a believer, but I think the level she takes it to is relatively harmless to American politics.
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This page will be continuously updated with new quotes, or news items to provide the most accurate portrait of Clinton’s religious viewpoints.
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