Reviewer Erika Harlitz Kern Interviews Gary Scott Smith, Author of Do All the Good You Can: How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Politics

Aside from her long reign as one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, we can confidently state that over the past thirty years, no one has done more than Hillary Rodham Clinton to advance human rights for children and women, advocate for public education, and champion healthcare for all in the US. As a first lady, vice president, senator, and secretary of state, she was and continues to be an indomitable force.

Now look back at the top of this page to the title of today’s featured book: Do All the Good You Can. Biographer Gary Scott Smith chose those words from a longer quote from the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. To wit: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

Imagine the world if everyone adopted those words as a guiding principle, as Hillary did when she was a young woman. The idea brings a tear to our eye.

Read Erika Harlitz Kern’s review of Do All the Good here—and enjoy the interview.

Do All the Good You Can is about the influence of religion and faith on the life’s work of Hillary Clinton. In the book, you mention that Hillary Clinton is, arguably, the most admired and hated woman in America. I think you are absolutely right about that. It seems to me that Hillary Clinton is a person where you are either with her or against her. Why do you think Hillary Clinton evokes such diametrically opposed reactions in people?

Hillary Clinton is such a polarizing figure because she is a female politician, because she is married to a former president who has a mixed political and personal legacy, because she has been forced to deal publicly with her husband’s sexual indiscretions, because some of the policies she has promoted (especially ones deemed progressive), and because of her personality.

She’s an outspoken woman who has taken controversial stands on numerous contested political issues for thirty years. As a path-breaking female politician, she has attracted both ardent admirers and caustic critics. Her assertiveness and ambition have clashed with the perceptions many Americans, especially religious conservatives, hold regarding women’s proper roles in society.

Another thing you mention is that throughout her career, Hillary Clinton’s political opponents have accused her of not being a person of faith. But, as your book demonstrates, Clinton’s work is deeply rooted in her faith and upbringing as a Methodist. In many instances, she has been up front about her personal faith and faith-based values, and still this has been largely ignored. Why do you think it is important for this part of Hillary Clinton’s life and work to be known more widely?

For a variety of reasons, Clinton’s faith, although strongly held and sometimes explicitly expressed, has been underappreciated. Her faith has widely been ignored because of the generally secular orientation of mainstream American media, because many of her strongest supporters are either not religiously-committed individuals or concluded that discussions of her personal faith or the relationship of her Methodist convictions to her political policies would be detrimental rather than helpful in her campaigning for public office, and because many of her opponents considered her faith to be disingenuous, a tactic to help her win religiously-devout voters. Cynics complained that during both the 2008 Democratic primaries and the 2016 general election that she professed belief in Christian teaching and traditional moral values solely for political reasons.

I argue that Clinton’s life, policies, and political activities can be properly understood only in light of her personal faith, which is rooted in her Methodist upbringing and involvement in Methodist congregations, reading of Christian literature, participation in prayer groups, and relationships with other Christians throughout her life. Her Christian faith helps explain many of her priorities and actions as first lady of Arkansas, the national first lady, a US senator, secretary of state, and two-time presidential candidate. I provide numerous examples of how her faith informed her understanding of life, helped her cope with personal challenges, and inspired various political policies and endeavors. Analyzing her faith is critical to understanding who she is and what has motivated her political career.

To piggy-back on the previous question, what can a biography focusing on Hillary Clinton’s religious beliefs tell us about her that other biographies haven’t told us so far?

Most of Clinton’s biographies have paid scant attention to Clinton’s religious convictions, participation in Methodist congregations and interdenominational prayer and study groups, or how her faith helped direct her political engagement. Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge (2006) is an exception. So, while many biographers have detailed Clinton’s life, challenges, and achievements, the picture of who she is and what she has striven to accomplish is incomplete and faulty without an assessment of the vital role that her faith has played in her life.

Throughout her life, Clinton has been driven by a dictum often attributed to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Don Jones, Clinton’s youth minister in Park Ridge, Illinois, asserted that caring for the poor and disadvantaged and working to achieve social justice have been a “continuing thread” in her life. Clinton’s pro bono activities as a Yale Law School student, work with the Children’s Defense Fund, endeavors to improve public education in Arkansas, efforts as first lady to reform health care, and quest to end the mistreatment of and provide full human rights for children and women have all expressed her religiously motivated mission to fulfill Wesley’s maxim and bring God’s kingdom on earth.

Her Methodist faith, Clinton testifies, has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.” Others concur. Clinton’s relationship with God, Bernstein maintains, is at the core of her being; it is “the north star of her moral compass.” Former Newsweek religion writer Kenneth Woodward asserts, “She thinks like a Methodist, talks like a Methodist, and wants to reform society just like a well-Sunday-schooled Methodist churchwoman should.”

In the book, you give ample examples of how Hillary Clinton’s Methodist faith informed her decisions during crucial parts of her personal and political life. For the benefit of our readers, I was wondering if there are one or two situations in particular where you would say that her Methodist background determined the course of her actions?

As you note, I provide dozens of examples of how Clinton’s faith helped inform and direct her decisions and priorities throughout her life. Let me provide two examples—one personal and one political. Dealing with Bill’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky compelled Hillary to rely on her religious and spiritual convictions. “I don’t know why God has chosen this for me,” Hillary professed. “But He has, and it will be revealed to me. God is doing this, and He knows the reason.” Although money, power, and political prestige may have played a minor role in Hillary’s decision to stay married to Bill, her Arkansas pastor Ed Matthews insisted, her faith was the most important reason. Numerous friends and colleagues, including Marsha Berry, Clinton’s press secretary, claimed that Hillary relied on “her strong religious faith” to deal with the crisis. In numerous interviews, Hillary stated that prayer and pastoral counseling had convinced her to forgive her husband and remain with him.

Clinton repeatedly insisted that her Methodist faith inspired her as secretary of state to promote several humanitarian causes—reducing human trafficking, providing clean, efficient cookstoves, promoting maternal health care in developing nations, and, most notably, striving diligently to advance women’s rights. Before becoming secretary of state, Clinton, motivated by her Methodist faith and heritage, worked arduously to increase the rights and elevate the status of women. In her travels throughout the world and in numerous speeches, most notably one in 1995 at a United Nations women’s conference in Beijing, Clinton denounced domestic violence, rape, prostitution, and sex slavery, promoted the rights of women, and worked to expand their opportunities. As secretary of state, Clinton helped make empowering women and girls a cornerstone of US policy and argued that women’s equality with men was a moral, humanitarian, and national security issue.

Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008 and 2016 and lost both times. In your book, you make the argument that there is a possibility that she could have won had she leaned in harder on the religious aspect and reached out more explicitly to religious groups. I was wondering if you could unpack that a little bit and explain how you reached that conclusion?

In her 2008 campaign to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Clinton spoke at faith forms sponsored by Sojourners and Saddleback Church and at Messiah College. She also discussed her faith in several interviews and hired an outreach director to woo Catholics. However, she did not campaign as effectively with religious groups as did Barack Obama. As one example, she turned down invitations for interviews with Christianity Today and some other leading religious journals.

Given how close the 2016 presidential race was, Clinton’s loss can be attributed to any of factors. One that stands out, however, is her failure to appeal to religious constituencies, especially evangelicals and white Catholics. Her campaign did not hire anyone to focus specifically on outreach to evangelicals or accept Baptist educator and evangelist Tony Campolo’s offer to create an Evangelicals for Hillary organization. She gave no major speeches to evangelical groups and did not meet publicly with evangelical leaders. Clinton also did little to explain her views on either abortion or religious freedom to evangelicals. Clinton rarely asked people of faith to vote for her, and she took policy positions that enabled Donald Trump to argue that she was attacking their values. Clinton could also have done more to highlight her stances on poverty, education, immigration, human rights, and racism that many people of faith shared.

It must be recognized, however, that Clinton was fighting a difficult battle, especially with evangelicals whose disdain for her had been building for a quarter-century. She was closely connected with evangelicals’ perceived losses in culture-war battles during her husband’s presidency. The former first lady symbolized much they despised, most notably her advocacy of abortion rights, support for same-sex marriage, alleged opposition to religious freedom, seeming commitment to appointing socially liberal Supreme Court justices, and repudiation of biblical ideas of femininity and womanhood.

Nevertheless, if Clinton had met with evangelical leaders and groups, talked about issues that mattered to them, assured evangelicals that she would protect their religious freedom, listened to their concerns, and promised to give them a voice in her administration, she might have convinced enough of them who were repulsed by Trump’s character and callousness to win the election. Several states Clinton lost by small margins including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan had numerous evangelical as well as mainline Protestant and Catholic voters. Many of these voters either did not recognize the depth or importance of Clinton’s faith or thought that her faith was not genuine because of Republican caricatures of it. Had Clinton been more outspoken about her Christian convictions and had her campaign focused more on faith outreach to these groups, she might have won these closely-contested states, which would have given her the victory.

Moreover, nationwide she received only 16 percent of the evangelical vote, 5 percent less than Obama garnered in 2012. Because white evangelicals accounted for at least a fifth of the American electorate, this difference amounted to millions of votes and could have given Clinton the victory some other states she narrowly lost.

What would you say is the role of religion in American politics today, and how does it differ (if at all) from when Hillary Clinton created her legacy?

Religion has been a major factor in numerous American presidential elections, especially those of 1800, 1896, 1928, 1960, 1980, and 2000. It is likely to continue to be in the future. Although church attendance has declined in recent years due to a variety of factors and the number of “nones”—people with no religious affiliation—has increased, religion continues to be important to millions of Americans and to play a significant role in politics at the national, state, and local level as recent battles over abortion, schools, religious liberty, wokeness, and LGBTQ rights indicate. Many Americans continue to care about the faith of candidates and hope that they will espouse policies that are consistent with their religious convictions. Numerous politicians have strong religious belief that direct or at least help shape how they determine their priorities and perform their duties. Clinton’s campaign strategy and tactics offer a precautionary tale for other candidates seeking to win the votes of religiously-devout American.