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For her, religiously informed politics is in line with classic liberal politics.

Yeah. She wants to take the federal government in some very expansionary directions, especially with healthcare. In that area, she is quite far to the left. Her politics are liberal; they are not moderate.

Religious conservatives wouldn't see any reason to vote for her. If you are a religious conservative, there would be no reason why you would want to vote for Hillary Clinton. Now, if you are a liberal Christian, she is probably a slam-dunk.

Tell me how her marriage to Bill Clinton has impacted her faith.

Probably, what has kept turning her back to God more than anything else through the 80s and 90s has been the trials and tribulations her husband has put her through. He has been well known to be unfaithful to her since, according to rumors, since the earliest days of their marriage and certainly since the 80's.

I interviewed Hillary's Arkansas pastor about this. He talked to her about it many times. It became a scandal in her Methodist church in Arkansas. Bill didn't go to that church. Bill went to a Baptist church. The pastor, Ed Matthews, told me that there were people at the church who were asking him what was going on with this: "This is not good. This is not good for the church." They would leave the service and there would be this man in the parking lot handing out flyers and calling Bill Clinton all kinds of names and accusing him of philandering. So this was a very uncomfortable situation in the church. She's been dealing with it for a long time.

The Monica Lewinsky thing, in particular, she says and her friends say, that she saw that as her cross to bear. She was humiliated and, I think, genuinely surprised. A lot of conservative Christians have said, how could she be surprised? Her husband had behaved like this before. But he had never fooled around with interns in the Oval Office. This is entirely new territory. And what was really humiliating was that she had gone out and defended him earlier in the year, blaming the allegations on a vast right-wing conspiracy. This time the vast right-wing conspiracy was correct.

Did Hillary seek counseling or a spiritual group to help her deal with the Lewinsky affair?

She told her husband he needed counseling. It had been said that Hillary wanted to be a part of the counseling. No, Hillary knew that she didn't need counseling. Bill needed counseling. After researching her life, I kept seeing voices of her no nonsense father stepping in and saying, "Hillary, it is Bill who has the problem. You go see the ministers." So this God-squad ends up counseling Clinton. The three ministers—Tony Campolo, Philip Wogaman, and Gordon MacDonald—end up counseling Bill. Ironically, Philip Wogaman is Hillary's pastor of the Methodist church in D.C., the Foundry.

So, Hillary's response was largely, "Bill, get your act together"?

That's right. Some people will see this as overly cynical, but I think it is true. It is difficult to tell when Hillary holds the marriage together for love for her husband or a love for politics. I think both are clearly factors. She has always seen their marriage as a political partnership as well as a marriage. She clearly married her husband out of love. But she has always seen herself as invested in the marriage politically as well as personally.

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December (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51