God and Hillary Clinton (7 page)

Beyond the building of the CDC, Hillary was very involved in the church and took a leadership role. She served on the administrative board and performed pro bono legal work, acting as legal counsel for the local bishop, Richard B. Wilke, who described her as a “vibrant and vital part of the life of [the] congregation.”
⁹
This legal work extended outside the Little Rock church: For a time she was the lawyer for the Methodist Conference of Arkansas.

The First United Methodist Church of Little Rock was then and remains today a liberal congregation, certainly relative to the rest of the South, and reflective of the direction of the denomination nationally. More recently, in 1998, it welcomed its first female pastor, the Reverend Jeanie Burton, who was appointed by Arkansas's first female bishop. This change would have thrilled Hillary, as would others relating to women: At the time of the writing of this book, two newsletters were posted on the church's Web site, the first of which gave a
pitch for a women's conference in California, which featured political and social “workshops” on women and children; the second and most recent newsletter promoted a guest speaker for the “Unity Sunday School Class” at the church—a mother who was coming to the church to discuss how “religious beliefs undermined…and created significant tensions” between her and her lesbian daughter and “ended in a tragic loss.” The newsletter also plugged an upcoming program at Hendrix College, a Methodist institution in nearby Conway, Arkansas, where the topics of study were globalization, the “peace” of the three “Abrahamic” religions, and the “richness and diversity” of the cultures of India and Pakistan. In an interesting irony, the current newsletter also welcomed to the congregation a young woman who would be working with the church youth group, a minister-to-be, headed off to graduate school at Drew University—the seminary of a man named Don Jones.

A Church for Bill

While Hillary found her spiritual home in Little Rock with relative ease, picking a church for Bill was far more controversial because of political suspicions that arose about his motivation to start attending services. In the end, Bill opted for Immanuel Baptist Church of Little Rock, an interesting choice to be sure, and one that rightly raised questions. As everyone in Arkansas knew, Sunday services at the church were televised and had been since the early 1970s, meaning that Governor Clinton could now be seen at church by Arkansas voters every Sunday morning.
¹⁰

Or could he? This presented another complication since the logical place for Clinton would be among the congregation, not behind the pulpit, but here again, Clinton defied expectations, opting instead to join the choir, where he occupied a seat that was perfectly positioned directly behind the pulpit in full view of the TV camera. To
his supporters, it was reassuring to know that their governor was a pious man who was worshipping alongside them every week, though even those who liked Clinton could not help but raise an eyebrow. To his critics it was a shrewd and careful orchestration, a public display designed to reveal him as a churchgoer before the hundreds of thousands of viewers (and voters) who tuned in every week.

Some politicians—even would-be president Ronald Reagan—stopped attending church once they reached higher office, in part because they did not like to be stared at while they worshipped. For Bill Clinton, this may have been precisely the objective.
¹¹
After all, it was not as if Immanuel was the only Baptist church in town: There are more than sixty Baptist churches in Little Rock.
¹²
The one that Clinton picked was not exactly chosen for convenience, as it was an eight-mile drive from the governor's mansion; Bill Clinton presumably passed dozens of other Baptist churches along the way. Also, the pastor was not exactly the Clintons' cup of tea: Worley Oscar “W. O.” Vaught was a conservative, a fact that Bill had known ahead of time, as had all of Arkansas. This, however, was no deterrent to Bill selecting Immanuel Baptist. Despite the myriad reasons for him not to join the congregation, ultimately none of these factors could dissuade him from selecting Immanuel Baptist, and in 1980 Clinton joined the church—and the choir.
¹³

Clinton himself quipped that many Arkansans had a hard time imagining what a liberal like him was doing in Vaught's congregation—“I was this young firebrand and he was an old conservative minister.”
¹⁴

Even in the face of much speculation, Bill has avoided remarking on whether there was a political motivation for picking Immanuel. In Clinton's defense, the church was a remarkable place of worship, overlooking the capitol and housing its four-thousand-member congregation—the largest in the state. In many ways, it should not have been a surprise that Bill was drawn to Immanuel, even though the state's citizens watched the services on their TV sets at 11
A.M
. each
Sunday. As more than one biographer has noted, it was during those services that Clinton found faith and fortitude in dealing with the rigors of his job. Like other Baptists, each week he carried his worn and well-read Bible to church, opened it up inside, listened closely to sermons, and sang loudly.

Clinton said he “admired” Vaught and his “careful” teaching of the Bible. “He believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God but that few people understood its true meaning,” said Clinton. “He immersed himself in the earliest available versions of the scriptures, and would give a series of sermons on one book of the Bible or an important scriptural subject before going on to something else.” Clinton said that he looked forward to his Sundays in the choir, “looking at the back of Dr. Vaught's bald head and following along in my Bible, as he taught us through the Old and New Testaments.”
¹⁵

While there was no doubt that his time at Immanuel was helpful for him spiritually, much of the evidence seems to suggest that Clinton's choice of Immanuel Baptist was also the first of many times that he would use church appearances for political opportunism. In the end, his time at Immanuel helped break down a crucial political as well as personal barrier for him; it would only be a matter of time before he would begin campaigning in churches, using public displays of his faith to score him additional political points.

On the other hand, biographer Nigel Hamilton says that it was Hillary, not Bill, who suggested that he attend Immanuel for political reasons. Hamilton writes that Hillary remained doggedly certain that Bill could eventually become president if he was reelected governor, and so together they both agreed that Immanuel was the right choice.
¹⁶

Clinton's own words at least partially substantiate Hamilton's conclusion, as he himself points to Hillary as the reason he chose First Immanuel Baptist Church and joined the choir that seemed so conveniently within camera range—though Bill says that Hillary prodded him for spiritual rather than political reasons. “[M]y wife persuaded me to start going there and to join the choir,” said Clinton categori
cally, adding: “She said I obviously felt the need.”
¹⁷
More than once, including in his memoirs, he said he joined Immanuel and the choir “at Hillary's urging,” always adding: “Hillary knew that I missed going to church.”
¹⁸

While Clinton has always freely acknowledged that he had quit going to church on a regular basis at the start of college, he maintained that the second phase of his faith began shortly after he was elected governor for the first time. “In 1978,” he said later, “when I got elected governor, it was important to me to have a dedicatory service.”
¹⁹
Yet despite this remark, it was still another two years before Clinton would start attending regular services and begin practicing his faith once again.

The Influence of W. O. Vaught

Whatever the motivations for Bill's choice—only God and the Clintons know the true answer—more important is what Clinton learned from his conservative minister at the church. David Maraniss writes of the profound influence that Dr. W. O. Vaught had on Clinton and many of his eventual policy stances. Beyond the preacher's sermons, Bill shared frequent conversations with Vaught, who took time to guide the young governor spiritually and help him balance the reemergence of his faith with his political life.

In addition, Clinton was also spiritually guided by different members of Vaught's flock, some of whom worked with the governor. Each morning when Bill reached his office, there was a Bible quote on his desk, placed by a fellow attendee of Immanuel Baptist—his personal secretary, Lynda Dixon.
²⁰
It was the custom of Clinton and Dixon to begin the governor's workday by reading and discussing the passage. Here were two of Vaught's students continuing the Sunday practice, meaning that Bill Clinton was not strictly a “Sunday morning Christian.”

Yet Vaught's influence was much more direct, and in a way that would no doubt intimidate the more secular-minded elements within the Democratic Party today. According to Betsey Wright, one of the governor's closest aides, Clinton each day included his pastor among his regular round of phone calls, tapping him as a resource in considering policy decisions. Clinton found himself calling upon Vaught constantly during this crucial period when he worked through issues that would extend from his governorship to an eventual American presidency. Betsey Wright remembers the governor often remarking after a Vaught phone call, “Well, Dr. Vaught told me such-and-such.”
²¹

According to Maraniss, this close relationship between preacher and his congregant became very influential for Clinton on two issues in particular, in which Vaught had a significant impact on how Bill Clinton perceived the religious implications of his decisions.

The first was on the death penalty, on which Vaught took the initiative to reach out to Clinton when it became apparent that the governor would soon be setting dates for executions and deciding which death-row inmates would or would not be spared. In 1976, when Clinton ran for attorney general, he told conservative Southerners that he advocated capital punishment. When he became governor, in the early 1980s, the lives of certain incarcerated citizens once again lay directly in his hands, but whereas during his first time in office he did not have spiritual guidance, now he had a pastor who could sense that Clinton was troubled. Vaught called, and Clinton quickly responded by inviting the pastor to the governor's mansion to advise him on the subject.

Clinton asked the Baptist minister if it was biblically permissible for him to execute a man, and Vaught told him that the death penalty was not prohibited in the original translation of the Ten Commandments. He went further into the subject, examining the Old and New Testaments, the Hebrew and Greek. The final decision would be Clinton's, noted Vaught, but he “must never worry about whether it's [the death penalty] forbidden by the Bible, because it isn't.”
²²

The second major issue on which Vaught helped to guide Clinton was abortion. In this case, Clinton sought Vaught, and again on this question, Clinton was reportedly troubled, expressing a deep personal ambivalence. Maraniss reports that Clinton consented to the pro-choice argument intellectually, especially since he surrounded himself with devoutly pro-choice women, including Hillary. Indeed, Hillary's ob-gyn, William F. Harrison, the abortion doctor, stated that Bill was firmly pro-choice as early as 1974; in fact, Harrison was angry that Clinton did not speak out more forcefully in support of legalized abortion throughout his governorship—which the Fayetteville doctor ascribes to Bill straddling the fence to appeal to voters.
²³

Nonetheless, something inside Bill Clinton—his conscience, presumably—was prompting questions, perhaps even second thoughts about his stance on the issue. Maraniss says that the governor was struggling over the definition of human life. Could Vaught provide some insight from the Hebrew and Greek?
²⁴

Although many would presume to know what Vaught's response was after consulting the text, in reality Vaught's reported reaction was interesting and quite surprising. He was one of the leading abortion opponents among Little Rock clergy, but said he shared some of Clinton's ambivalence, having personally witnessed “some extremely difficult” pregnancy cases as a pastor. He was not convinced that the Bible forbade abortion in all circumstances. What he most likely meant by this was that there were no literal biblical passages condemning or describing precisely what a woman should do in each situation.

In Maraniss's account, the minister went to his Bible to revisit and reconsider, after which Vaught determined that in the original Hebrew, “personhood” stemmed from words translated as “to breathe life into.” Thus, he averred, the Bible would define a person's life as beginning at birth, with the first intake of breath. He reportedly told the governor that this did not mean that abortion was right, but he felt that one could not say definitively, based on Scripture, that it was murder.
²⁵

Vaught's guidance proved instrumental. Says Maraniss, “In all of his discussions about abortion thereafter, Clinton relied on his minister's interpretation to bolster his pro-choice position.”
²⁶
In short, then, this conservative, pro-life Baptist minister, based on Maraniss's account of the situation, helped steer Bill Clinton into the pro-choice position from which he never again wavered.

Though Pastor Vaught may have felt in his heart that abortion was wrong, it was up to him alone—possibly in consultation with other “Bible Protestants”—to study his Bible to assemble the collection of scriptural references that he used to guide Clinton's decision. In the early 1980s, the decentralized system of Vaught's denomination meant that it was up to Vaught alone to make these determinations for his four-thousand-member congregation until his Baptist church could vouch for the biblical soundness of the pro-life position. For tens of millions of other Protestants in the United States, the issue would become the single greatest moral-social issue.