[Dialogue] HILLARY’S RELIGIOUS ROOTS

[Len Hockley]

Hi, Maybe you have like me heard that Hillary had RSI in high school.  The 
following article from NEWSWEEK.doesn't exactly say so but close enough to 
makes it nice reading.

HILLARY'S RELIGIOUS ROOTS
At 13, she met a Methodist minister who became a lifelong friend
BY SUSANNAH MEADOWS
in NEWSWEEK Feb. 12 2007 pg 30
IF HILLARY CLINTON AND GEORGE W.Bush have anything in common, it is a 
deeply rooted wariness of outsiders. Both the president and the woman who 
hopes to succeed him have always relied on a small, closed circle of 
friends and advisers who have been with them for years. So it's not 
surprising that there are so many familiar faces on Clinton's new campaign 
team. Ad maker Mandy Grunwald, pollster Mark Penn, strategist Ann Lewis and 
others are loyalists from Bill Clinton's White House.

There is another person on Hillary's shortlist of confidants who goes back 
farther than any of them, but whom you've probably never heard of. The Rev. 
Don Jones, a Methodist minister who is now 75, was perhaps Hillary's 
earliest spiritual and political mentor. She has written of her "lifelong 
friendship" with him. It was Jones who first awakened young Hillary to the 
civil-rights movement and counseled her on questions of faith. They 
continued to be in touch as Hillary became a national figure. Years later, 
he helped her through the darkest period in her life, the aftermath of her 
husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Precocious and confident, 13-year-old Hillary was an active member of her 
Methodist church in Park Ridge, Ill., when Jones arrived in 1961 to lead 
the youth group. Fresh from the seminary, he was anything but stuffy in his 
red Chevy Impala convertible. He carried the Bible, but also the collected 
poems of E. E. Cummings. Hillary, politically aware even then, was a 
budding Republican who took after her staunchly conservative father. In 
long discussions at the church, Jones introduced Hillary to the left. The 
young minister was determined to show his white, privileged parishioners 
the world beyond their suburban town. He took them to the South Side of 
Chicago to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. Jones introduced each of them 
to the civil-rights leader.

But the conversation wasn't all politics. "Hillary would come up to talk to 
me after I preached and make comments about the sermon, how the hymns, 
prayers and Biblical passages were coordinated with the message," Jones 
tells NEWSWEEK. Jones hewed closely to the social justice tradition of the 
Methodist Church, preaching that helping those in need was a means of 
practicing their faith. "I think she responded to my ministry in part for 
its intellectual content," Jones says. "Her heart responded to the social 
responsibility aspects."

Not everyone appreciated the minister's lessons. Within two years, the 
conservative members of the congregation asked him to leave. Jones landed 
at Drew University in Madison, N .J., where he spent his career teaching 
theology. They were in communication while Hillary was in high school and 
later at Wellesley. During her time as First Lady, he visited the I White 
House nine times. After Bill Clinton admitted his affair with Lewinsky, 
Jones gave Hillary a Paul Tillich sermon about grace, and how it comes to 
you when you feel great pain. Jones says he hoped Hillary would pass the 
words on to her husband. "It was my secret agenda," he says. Sure enough, 
five days
later, Jones received a thank you note from the president. Last year he saw 
the Clintons at their home in Chappaqua N.Y. The senator had called him to 
invite her old friend to her mother's birthday party.

Though she's been accused of adopting; religious patina for political gain, 
her relationship with Jones shows that from time she was young, Hillary was 
thinking seriously about her faith. She clearly talks: more about religion 
these days, as many politicians do,-but her connection to Jones reveals 
that her Christianity has always be at the center of her identity. "She's 
not using the language of prayer and God for the first time," says Jones. 
"While there may be a political dimension, it's authentic."

Jones describes Hillary beliefs as falling, like her politics, somewhere in 
middle of the spectrum Unlike the extreme left, she understands the 
limitations of human beings he says. And unlike the extreme right, he 
argues, she believes in humanities potential. She does take seriously the 
doctrine of original sin. And after a lifetime in politics,she has seen 
plenty of it.

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