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Paul Kengor has written spiritual biographies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. A professor at Grove City College, Kengor recently published God and Hillary Clinton.

Why did you choose to write about Hillary?

I wanted to show the Religious Left, and I knew that Hillary would be running for President.

What is Hillary doing to court religious conservatives?

In 2004, I think she saw the importance of the conservative religious vote. So you see her do an about-face on abortion. Her speech in January 2004 to NARAL was terrible, demonizing pro-lifers. But the following year she gave her now-famous address to the New York State Family Planning Providers in which she reached out to pro-lifers.

She has hired someone to reach out to pro-life Democrats and pro-life evangelicals. I understand she consults with him very frequently. But that is as far as her strategy towards pro-life evangelicals goes.

On the other hand, in regards to the Religious Left, she is going to continue to campaign in churches as she has done to an unprecedented degree. She campaigned in 27 churches two months before the November 2000 vote when she ran for the New York Senate seat. That's amazing. She was in six churches on election-day morning alone. She is going to keep talking about social justice, because that works for the Religious Left.

I will give you a striking number. The Pew Research Center did a poll a few weeks ago comparing Hillary versus Rudy Giuliani. It found that she would win the race by eight percentage points. But what is most remarkable is that they were dead even with voters who go to church weekly or more.

I would have to say that her strategy toward religious people can work if she has the right Republican opponent, someone like Giuliani who is perceived as less religious than she is. But if she is running against a Republican who is a strong evangelical, I think she loses the churchgoing vote easily.

Tell me about the difference between Hillary's perceived religiosity and her actual practice.

She is widely perceived as not religious. There was a poll done in 2000 by NBC and The Wall Street Journal and of all the major politicians she was judged the second-least religious, that second behind only Bill Clinton. In September 2007, there was another Pew Research poll done that showed that Hillary of all the major political candidates of both political parties finished second only to Giuliani.

Only 12 percent judged her very religious in 2000 and now it's up to 16 percent in 2007. She hasn't done much to change that perception. In reality, she has been a committed Methodist since she was a little girl in Park Ridge, Illinois.

The Methodism she grew up with isn't the kind of Methodism she may now practice.

She went to a pretty conservative church in Illinois in the late 50s early 60s. What moved her politically to the left is important to understanding her faith. She moves from conservative politics, she used to be a Barry Goldwater supporter as a teenager, to liberal politics in the mid to late 60s.

The bridge between the two is a left-leaning youth minister named Don Jones at her Park Ridge church. She began to follow left-leaning Methodism, and now Hillary Clinton walks step by step with the Methodist leadership into a very liberal Christianity. She is with them lockstep on almost all issues.

It was Don Jones who brought her to see Martin Luther King, Jr., right?

Exactly. But he introduced more than civil rights issues. Jones followed the Methodist church on social justice, economics, class, and moral issues, including abortion. The Methodist church leadership officially supports legalized abortion. Whereas a lot of conservative Methodists have left the church because of that liberal drift. Hillary says, "I am so comfortable in this church." That drift has been perfectly suitable for her.

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December (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51