God and Hillary Clinton (2 page)

This is not to say that Hugh was not a believer. Hillary remembers of her family: “We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God. Each night we knelt by our beds to pray.”
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And Hugh enforced the discipline of this faith-driven routine with his typical military precision. Hillary says that it was Hugh who taught his children to kneel by their beds and pray every night. “Our spiritual life as a family was spirited and constant,” Hillary later wrote, and Hugh was a central reason.
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Much of Hugh's faith seemed inextricably linked to the Methodist upbringing of his youth. He had no special allegiance to the church in Park Ridge, and in fact he was so dedicated to the church
of his roots that he and Dorothy drove each of their babies back to the Court Street Methodist Church in Scranton to be christened in front of Hugh's father and relatives. Though Hillary and her brothers were born in Chicago, Hugh ensured they were all baptized near the Pennsylvania coal mines.
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If Hugh brought religion into the home, Dorothy made sure that Hillary and her brothers traveled outside to get it as well. Dorothy was much more involved at the Park Ridge church than Hugh, teaching Sunday school and attending weekly services with her daughter.
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It was left mainly to the Rodham ladies to do the churchgoing. Dorothy later confessed that one reason she taught Sunday school was to keep an eye on Hillary's brothers, to make sure they actually showed up and stayed after they were dropped off.
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As one might expect, this lack of fatherly “faith modeling” affected the two Rodham boys. Of her and her siblings, Hillary was the only one who continued to attend Sunday worship services upon reaching adolescence, and much of this was thanks to Dorothy's role in her daughter's faith.
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In Dorothy, Hillary had something of a spiritual model, a person who showed her how to interact with a community of faith and demonstrate devotion to God through service to others. Dorothy showed Hillary what the public face of faith looked like.

The combination of Hillary's mother teaching Sunday school and her father insisting on looking upward for sustenance and guidance had a pervasive impact on Hillary's spiritual development. In particular, these disparate but overlapping influences of her parents made prayer a lasting part of her life, playing a key role in the fact that, to this day, she sees prayer as fundamental to a lively faith. Hillary is quick to note that from her earliest days, throughout “the daily back and forth of living,” especially in rough times, she has found prayer to be “a very important replenisher.”
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Dorothy and Hugh were not the only people working to shape Hillary's faith; everywhere she turned she seemed to gain new design and guidance over her faith. Her face was a common sight at Park
Ridge Methodist in the 1950s, as she became an integral part of life at the church, and the church, in turn, became an integral part of her life. It became, she said, “a critical part of my growing up…I almost couldn't even list all the ways it influenced me, and helped me develop as a person, not only on my own faith journey, but with a sense of obligation to others.” She learned from the ministers and lay leaders “about the connection between my personal faith and the obligations I faced as a Christian, both to other individuals and to society.”
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Hillary remembers the church as “the center” not only for Sunday morning worship but also for Sunday evening groups and other activities during the week. Park Ridge Methodist had a senior pastor, a youth minister, a minister in charge of pastoral visitations, a music director, and a staff member who specialized in Christian education. The congregation built a new wing of classrooms to accommodate the burgeoning number of children ushered in by the postwar baby boom, children like Hillary.

Because of Dorothy's involvement, the Christian education element of the church became a big part of Hillary's life. Not only did Hillary attend Sunday school, but she also went to the annual summertime Vacation Bible School, from which she vividly remembers songs like, “Jesus loves the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.”
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Hillary said that her personal experiences in church as a child were “so positive—not only the youth ministry work that I was part of but a really active, vital, outreaching Sunday school experience, lots of activities for children; there was a sense in which the church was our second home.”

Church was more than simply a place for worship; it was a place for life. They went there to study God and read Scripture lessons, but also to help clean up, to play volleyball, to go to potluck dinners, to be in plays, to participate in Christmas and Easter pageants. “It was just a very big part of my life,” said Hillary. “And that kind of fellowship was real important to me.”
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Hillary's Methodism

Though the general concept of faith was important to Hillary during her formative years, she found herself drawn to the specific doctrines of Christianity that were taught in the Methodist church. Her views at that time and still today were highly influenced by, as she put it, that “wonderful old saying” of the church's founder, John Wesley, about doing “all the good you can.” Wesley's rule, says Hillary, was: “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.”
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To this day, she remains attracted to Methodism's “emphasis on personal salvation combined with active applied Christianity,” and how the faith serves as a “practical method of trying to live as a Christian in a difficult and challenging world.”
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Hillary has always been drawn to, in her words, the “approach of a faith…based on ‘Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason,'” which she describes as the guideposts of Methodism. “As a Christian,” she said, “part of my obligation is to take action to alleviate suffering. Explicit recognition of that in the Methodist tradition is one reason I'm comfortable in this church.”
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She believed that the church at Park Ridge stayed true to that mission; it was a “center for preaching and practicing the social gospel, so important to our Methodist traditions.”
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This Park Ridge definition of Christianity's role in society played a crucial role in establishing in young Hillary's mind what it meant to be a Christian. The social gospel message of the Methodists resonated with Hillary more than any other religious teaching, and the extent to which Hillary's personal faith has mirrored that of the Methodist leadership is remarkable—on both issues and attitude. As the twentieth century plowed ahead, influential elements within the Methodist movement pushed the denomination in the direction of not only progressive thought but also socialist leanings in the realm of
economics, at times even edging toward utopianism and a belief in human perfectibility.

But though her adherence to Methodist doctrine as a young woman appeared steadfast, the revolution of the times was beginning to seep into Park Ridge. Changes were encroaching upon the First United community, whether the community was ready or not. These developments would have a profound impact on not just this church, but churches like it across the country, as significant social upheaval tested people's definitions of faith and challenged their deeply held views about the role of God in their lives.

For most people, these changes would come in all different shapes and sizes in the course of the 1960s, but for Hillary, these changes came to town driving a red convertible.

For much of Hillary's youth, Hugh was the only male influence on her life that had any real bearing. Her views, her political ideas, her religion—all of this was filtered through Hugh, as he helped shape her sense of the world and her sense of self. But all that changed dramatically when she was thirteen, and the Reverend Don Jones, a Methodist minister, entered her life.

Fresh out of divinity school at Drew University, Jones came to Park Ridge to be First United's youth minister.
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When he arrived, Jones was in his late twenties, and with his blue eyes, blond hair, and red convertible, he proved to be a striking contrast to the three previous youth ministers, all of whom, by comparison, were fossils. As such, no one in the congregation was prepared for a newly minted minister like Jones.

Prior to Jones's arrival, there was no doubt that First United was a conservative congregation. Don Jones hoped to shake it up by guid
ing the youth group in a totally new way. For Hillary and the other teens, practicing religion had always been a combination of listening to the senior pastor's sermons on Sunday morning and interacting with the youth minister, whose job it was to act as a spiritual guide for the young minds. Starting in September 1961, Jones arranged to have meetings with the youth group on Thursday evenings, and it was there with his “University of Life” program that Hillary fully discovered Don Jones.
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When he entered the First United congregation, it was difficult to categorize Jones's theology. Some sources claimed he was a self-described existentialist; others said he was shaped to some degree by the influential theologians Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, widely read by generations of both left-leaning and right-leaning Christians. While it seemed from the onset that he was liberal both socially and politically, even this proved difficult to state categorically. Jones walked a fine line between rightly awakening the young folks to the vast social changes happening beyond the world of Park Ridge and indoctrinating them to a particular political point of view. Those sympathetic to his perspective would say he enlightened and educated them, whereas those with whom he disagreed would later charge that he brainwashed them.
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Given the social climate of the times, Jones was certainly justified in bringing his youth ministry in contact with the broader currents of society. He had come to Park Ridge as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum and breaking out of the inner cities. Everywhere it seemed that a revolutionary perspective on the world was beginning to take form, and he saw it as his duty to usher his young pupils into this new era, to give them the information they would need to succeed with their faith when the world around them was changing. A religion is a worldview, and as such, it must weigh in on the pressing issues of the day if it is to stay relevant.

To that end, Jones was not timid. He introduced his wide-eyed flock not only to the world of Wesley but also to existentialism,
abstract art, beat poetry, and even the radical politics of the counterculture.
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Gail Sheehy maintains that Jones was not as fired by theology as he was by the “cultural revolution” that he felt was under way. Jones asked one of Hillary's classmates, Bob Berg, to play for the youth group Bob Dylan's “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,” as Jones's impressionable disciples ruminated upon the lyrics. He distributed sheets of poetry and handouts in which D. H. Lawrence refuted Plato. He rented a projector to show François Truffaut's classic
400 Blows
, Rod Serling's
Requiem for a Heavyweight
, and other art house films of the time.
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Clearly the freethinking, freewheeling Jones was not afraid to make waves. The point was to make real “the feelings of others,” as one student remembered, and to enliven the “practical conscience and content” of their faith.
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If that was the goal, Jones certainly achieved it. One of the youths, Rick Ricketts, whom Hillary had known since she was eight years old, recalled the lively discussions Jones generated: “I remember when he brought an atheist to the group for a debate with a Christian over the existence of God,” said Ricketts of Jones's class. “There was also a discussion of teenage pregnancy, which got the whole congregation upset.”
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Black and White

While many of Jones's teachings were designed to increase the students' general sense of cultural perspective and awareness, he put a lot of emphasis on the church's role within the racial struggles of the time. Racial awareness and activism were integral to Jones's aim of raising social consciousness among the adolescents, and it was a point that Hillary responded to with a great deal of enthusiasm.

“In Park Ridge then,” said Jones, “you wouldn't know there were black people in the world.”
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And so, Jones made it his goal to give them firsthand experiences with the larger world. It was not enough
to learn about things from books, films, and poetry; Jones wanted his students to live these teachings, to see their faith interacting with the world around them.

He drove the youngsters to a community center on the Southside, where he brought them together with inner-city youth and assembled them all around a print of Picasso's
Guernica
that Jones had brought along and propped up against a chair. The painting graphically depicts a bombing raid by pro-Franco forces on a village during the Spanish Civil War. The minister opened an edgy dialogue over war and violence, asking questions like, “What strikes you about this?” “Any imagery?” “If you had to title this painting with a current piece of music, what would it be?” “Have you ever experienced anything like this?”
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As Hillary and her friends spoke of the horrors of war in the abstract, the inner-city kids related the mayhem to their everyday lives. One girl looked at the painting and, to the shock of the Park Ridgers, chimed in, “Just last week, my uncle drove up and parked on the street and some guy came up to him and said you can't park there, that's my parking place, and my uncle resisted him and the guy pulled out a gun and shot him.”
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The girl's response jolted the white-bread kids.

Jones's goal was accomplished. And whether his pupils, or even he, knew it or fully grasped it, he was preparing them for the social upheaval about to befall them and America before the decade ended.
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Amid the radical dialogue and rhetoric of Jones, there was another influential young adult who was battling for the heart, mind, and soul of Hillary Rodham and her peers—Hillary's teacher Paul Carlson, a conservative Republican and staunch anti-Communist. Carlson remembers returning to Park Ridge after graduate school and going to the Methodist church to hear Jones speak. He was alarmed by what he heard. “I approached him after the service and suggested we get together. I was teaching at Maine East [High School] at the time and
was concerned. I had lunch with him the next day and explained that I wasn't at all amused with his message, that it was not a Christian speech. He really gave me no defense of what he had said.”
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Referring to the trip to the Southside of Chicago, Carlson complained that Jones's intention was to take Hillary and her white friends to the slums to blame them and their class for the conditions of the inner city and to fill them with white guilt, an accusation that to this day Jones adamantly denies.

Whatever Jones's intention, the encounter had a profound effect on Hillary, as did the moment in April 1962 when Jones took the teenage Hillary and her class back to Chicago to hear a rousing speech by a man named Martin Luther King Jr. at Chicago's Orchestra Hall. There the civil rights pioneer preached a sermon titled “Sleeping Through the Revolution,” and the experience gave Jones the opportunity to leave yet another indelible mark on his pupils. “I wanted them to become aware of the social revolution that was taking place,” says Jones of his Park Ridgers. “Here was the major leader of that movement, a Protestant preacher, coming to town. It was an opportunity for them to meet a great person…. Park Ridge was sleeping through the biggest social revolution this country has ever had.”
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Dr. King could not have agreed more. In his speech, King said that too many Americans were like Rip Van Winkle, snoozing through the historic changes happening all around them.
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That night was one Hillary would never forget, particularly because of the moment after the speech, when Jones shocked the teen and her comrades by arranging to have them briefly meet with and shake the hand of King. Jones introduced King to each of the kids, one by one, and Hillary would be forever grateful.
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Later in life, Hillary would remark that these experiences in Chicago opened her eyes “as a teenager to other people and the way they live [which] certainly affected me.”
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Church Politics

Martin Luther King Jr. might have been the best-known activist to whom Don Jones introduced his youth group, but there were many others to whom he exposed his class of young minds. Chief on that list was the legendary radical and social activist Saul Alinsky, whom Jones took his group to meet with in Chicago. Born in 1909, the often profane, crude, and always irreverent Chicagoan was dedicated to ripping down the “power structure” throughout capitalist America, and he devoted much of his life to organizing demonstrations throughout the country. For much of Alinsky's life, rumors of his affiliation with the Communist Party surrounded his actions, and his skilled rhetoric often had a strong appeal to many people on the left.
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Alinsky penned
Reveille for Radicals
, the 1946 bible of the protest movement, forever establishing him as “the father of community organizing.” The organizer considered himself a survivor of the “Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s,” who was now at the “vanguard” of the “revolutionary force.”
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Here, too, Jones left a lasting impression, and Hillary would later describe Alinsky as a “great seducer” of young minds, but then again, that may have been the very reason Jones brought the group to Alinsky in the first place. In truth, Jones's goal in introducing his acolytes to Alinsky could not have been all that religious, since Alinsky was a well-known and committed agnostic Jew who proudly declared his “independence” from any affiliation, including Christianity. Hillary was among those taken in, so intrigued and impressed by Alinsky that she would later write her college thesis on his strategies.
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It certainly would not have been out of bounds for Park Ridge Methodist parents to question the relevance of such introductions to the church youth ministry, since it was becoming increasingly clear that the trips, like the one to visit Alinsky, were simply another vessel through which Jones could advance his progressive message. But
though some parents questioned many of Jones's decisions, they continued to support First United's choice of Jones as youth minister.

Personal Jones

As his relationship with the group developed, it was becoming clear that Jones was advancing his own brand of socially conscious Methodist thought. Using theologian Paul Tillich as his spiritual mentor, Jones believed the most important role of the church was to help the less fortunate. He drew the social justice lines in bright colors on the chalkboard inside the Methodist church, and with his persuasive arguments, he began to win over Hillary and some of her classmates. Said Hillary, “He was just relentless in telling us that to be a Christian did not just mean you were concerned about your own personal salvation.”
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Instead, he preached a message that to be a Christian meant that one also had to be concerned about others—particularly those with less money.

In the spirit of Alinsky, by late 1963, Jones had his pupils busy organizing. They set up food drives for the poor and even coordinated a ministry to the children of migrant farm workers, with Hillary taking a lead role in the latter. These Hispanic laborers were trucked in for temporary farming work. They lived in squalor amid fields west of Chicago—not far from Park Ridge. Fourteen-year-old Hillary organized groups of older students into a babysitting pool, while she served cold drinks and cupcakes. Some of the girls sewed children's clothing and doll clothes.
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Meanwhile, Jones taxied Hillary and the other teen girls to the migrant camp in his convertible.
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Hillary responded positively to Jones's message of social responsibility, and in Hillary, Jones saw the potential for really activating a teen and molding her. The relationship between Jones and Hillary was intellectual, spiritual; still, in that way, it was also personal. Hillary was hooked by Jones, and he was impressed by her. She immediately
struck him as a “straitlaced Methodist,” but the more they worked together, the more he discovered that there were other layers to her. “She was serious, but she was also gregarious,” Jones said of Hillary. “She wasn't the cheerleader type, but she wasn't the shy bookworm, either.”
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At twice her age, Jones obviously viewed himself as purely a mentor to her, and Hillary, who was not the giddy, girly, boy-crazy type, was far more interested in the brain of an adult like Jones than the looks of a boy from math class. She began dropping by Jones's office after school or during summer afternoons, eager to talk about ideas or insights she culled from the youth minister and his sermons. According to Roger Morris, biographer of the Clintons, Jones had her read Tillich, Niebuhr, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and they had lengthy, increasingly serious discussions. “She was curious,” says Jones. “She was just insatiable.”
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They discussed Tillich's reformism, Kierkegaard's “leap of faith” in the face of rational cynicism, Bonhoeffer's “religionless Christianity,” and especially Niebuhr's views on history, human nature, and the necessary force of civil governance—all of which played crucial and formative roles in her constantly evolving sense of faith. “She realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition,” Jones took from Hillary's study of his good works, adding this important insight: “She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.”
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