[Vision2020] Hey, Donald Trump, We Know Plenty About Hillary Clinton’s Religion

[Nicholas Gier]

Hey, Donald Trump, We Know Plenty About Hillary Clinton’s Religion
A 334-page book has been written about her Methodist Faith
06/22/2016 02:36 pm ET *The Huffington Post *Robert Farley FactCheck.org

Speaking to a group of evangelical Christian leaders, Donald Trump claimed
there’s “nothing out there” about Hillary Clinton’s religion even though
“she’s been in the public eye for years and years.” That’s inaccurate.
Clinton’s religious practice as a Methodist has been well-documented and
widely reported.Trump’s comments came during a closed-to-the-press meeting
with evangelical leaders
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/284281-trump-questions-clintons-religion>
 in New York City, but his comments were videotaped by one of the faith
leaders and posted on the internet. The video begins with Trump saying, “…
don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion.”

“Now, she’s been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there’s no
— there’s nothing out there,” Trump continued. “There’s like 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.”

In fact, there is a lot “out there” about Clinton’s religion, and its
influence on her world view, starting with her religious involvement as a
child.

According to the Religious News Service
<http://religionnews.com/2016/01/29/hillary-clinton-religion-methodist/>,
“As a girl, she was part of the guild that cleaned the altar at First
United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill. As a teen, she visited
inner-city Chicago churches with the youth pastor, Don Jones, her spiritual
mentor until his death in 2009.”

A *Time* magazine profile
<http://time.com/2927925/hillary-clintons-religion/>, which ran under the
headline “Hillary Clinton: Anchored by Faith,” had this to say about
Clinton’s early religious training:

*Time, June 27, 2014*: Clinton grew up attending First United Methodist
Church of Park Ridge in Chicago, where she was confirmed in sixth grade.
Her mother taught Sunday school, and Clinton was active in youth group,
Bible studies and altar guild. On Saturdays during Illinois’s harvest
season, she and others from her youth group would babysit children of
nearby migrant workers.

The article notes that in college at Wellesley, “Clinton regularly read the
Methodist Church’s Motive magazine,” that she and Bill Clinton were married
by a Methodist minister, and that in 1993, she joined a women’s prayer
group.

When Bill Clinton was president, the Clinton family regularly attended
<http://www.foundryumc.org/who-we-are/our-history> Washington’s Foundry
United Methodist Church. Hillary Clinton spoke
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09/13/hillary-clinton-showed-up-for-church-today-will-faith-help-or-hurt-her-on-the-campaign/>at
the church’s 200 anniversary in September. In that address, she spoke about
the Methodist churches she attended as a child, in college, in Arkansas
when Bill Clinton was governor, and in Washington, D.C., when he served as
president.

“In place after place after place,” Clinton said, “the Methodist church and
my fellow Methodists have been a source of support, honest reflection and
candid critique.”

During a presidential forum
<http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/04/sitroom.03.html> in 2007,
Clinton said that “a lot of the talk about and advertising about faith
doesn’t come naturally to me.” She said that faith “is something that — you
know, I keep thinking of the Pharisees and all of Sunday school lessons and
readings that I had as a child. But I think your — your faith guides you
every day. Certainly, mine does. But, at those moments in time when you’re
tested, it — it is absolutely essential that you be grounded in your faith.

CNN noted
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/27/politics/hillary-clinton-2016-election-faith/>
that
in May 2015, Clinton impressed a voter in a bakery after she cited and
discussed Corinthians 13 on the spot.

In an interview with the *New York Times*
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/books/review/hillary-rodham-clinton-by-the-book.html?_r=0>
in
2014, Clinton cited the Bible as “the biggest influence” on her thinking.
“I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by
it,” she said. “I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and
encouragement.”

As a senator, she participated in weekly Senate prayer breakfasts. The *New
York Times* noted
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/us/politics/07clinton.html>that she was
also once a Sunday school teacher.

That article goes on to say: “In a brief quiz about her theological views,
Mrs. Clinton said she believed in the resurrection of Jesus, though she
described herself as less sure of the doctrine that being a Christian is
the only way to salvation. As for how literally to interpret the Bible, she
takes a characteristically centrist view.”

Although Clinton rarely speaks about her religious faith on the campaign
trail, she did — in length
<http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/25/hillary-clinton-gets-personal-on-christ-and-her-faith/>
—
when a woman asked her about it at a campaign rally in Iowa in January.
Clinton began, “I am a Christian. I am a Methodist.” Here is some, but not
all, of the rest of her answer.

*Clinton, Jan. 25*: I am a Christian. I am a Methodist. I have been raised
Methodist. I feel very grateful for the instructions and support I received
starting in my family but through my church, and I think that any of us who
are Christian have a constantly, constant, conversation in our own heads
about what we are called to do and how we are asked to do it, and I think
it is absolutely appropriate for people to have very strong convictions and
also, though, to discuss those with other people of faith. Because
different experiences can lead to different conclusions about what is
consonant with our faith and how best to exercise it. …

My study of the Bible, my many conversations with people of faith, has led
me to believe the most important commandment is to love the Lord with all
your might and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that is what I think
we are commanded by Christ to do, and there is so much more in the Bible
about taking care of the poor, visiting the prisoners, taking in the
stranger, creating opportunities for others to be lifted up, to find faith
themselves that I think there are many different ways of exercising your
faith.

There is even an entire book devoted to Clinton’s faith, “God and Hillary
Clinton: A Spiritual Life
<https://www.amazon.com/God-Hillary-Clinton-Spiritual-Life/dp/0061136921?ie=UTF8&qid=1428687238&ref_=tmm_hrd_title_0&sr=8-1>.”
The author, Paul Kengor <http://www.visionandvalues.org/staff/>, executive
director of the Center for Vision & Values at the conservative Grove City
College, writes in the preface that “some things regarding Hillary Clinton
and her faith are clear: Although no one can profess to know any
individual’s heart and soul, there seems no question that Hillary is a
sincere, committed Christian and has been since childhood.”

In an interview with *Christianity Today*
<http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/decemberweb-only/150-22.0.html>,
Kengor said that Clinton has often butted heads with conservative
evangelical Christians on issues such as abortion, and that Clinton “walks
step by step with the Methodist leadership into a very liberal
Christianity. She is with them lockstep on almost all issues.”

“We do, in fact, know about Hillary’s religion,” Kengor wrote to us in an
email. “In fact, we know enough about Hillary’s faith that I was able to
write a 334-page book titled God and Hillary Clinton way back in 2007, and
I’ve written dozens of articles and given numerous interviews on the
subject since—and I’m not the only one. I think that what Donald Trump was
telling us is that he knows nothing about Hillary’s faith. For me as a
conservative, that doesn’t surprise me one bit, as I’ve noticed painfully
and repeatedly that Donald Trump also knows nothing about conservatism.”

We could go on and on about the public treatment of Clinton’s faith. But
suffice to say that when Trump says there’s “nothing out there” about
Hillary Clinton’s religion, that’s just not so.

We should note that the *Hill*
<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/284281-trump-questions-clintons-religion>
 and others
<http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/tower-babble-trump-bashes-clinton-religious-devotion-article-1.2682404>
reported
that Trump said, “*we* don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of
religion.” The emphasis on “we” is ours.

Later in the day, David Muir of ABC’s “World News Tonight”
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-dont-hillary-clintons-religion/story?id=40032208>
asked
Trump about his comments, and Trump responded, “I don’t know much about
her.”

Trump said his comments were prompted by a question from someone at the
event.

“Somebody asked me the question,” Trump said. “I didn’t bring it up.
Somebody asked me the question. I said I don’t know much about her
religion.”

Based on the tape, we couldn’t determine whether Trump said “we” don’t know
anything about Clinton’s religion or “I” don’t know anything about her
religion.

ABC News reported, “A source who attended the meeting said that no one
asked about Clinton’s religion.” We couldn’t determine that either, based
on the available video.

We reached out to E.W. Jackson <https://twitter.com/ewjacksonsr>, the man
who posted the clip on Twitter, to see if he had a fuller version of
Trump’s remarks, but we did not hear back from him. Jackson, a conservative
religious leader, is president of the national organization Ministers
Taking a Stand. Nonetheless, Trump’s comments extended beyond responding to
what he, personally, knew about Clinton’s religion, to include the claim
that despite being “in the public eye for years and years” there is
“nothing out there” on Clinton’s religion.

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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