Where the 2008 candidates stand

[Professor Chaos]

Interesting link (http://pewforum.org/religion08/compare.php?Issue=Church_and_State) dissecting both parties' 2008 presidential candidates' postion on church/state.

[Jeremy]

Thanks for the link, Prof. I printed it out and gave my red marker a workout.

[Professor Chaos]

Who knew Hilary Clinton was such a cunt?

*Professor Chaos sees virtually every forum member raising their hands...

I meant about Church/State issues. I got this e-mail from a Yahoo! group of which I am a member (Pennsylvania Godless) I've never heard of the website this comes from. Can anyone enlighten me?

Link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html

To follow is about the first 1/4 of the article. It's too long to post the entire thing.

Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics
For 15 years, Hillary Clinton has been part of a secretive religious group that seeks to bring Jesus back to Capitol Hill. Is she triangulating—or living her faith?

Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet
September 01 , 2007

It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill's infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?

After a glancing shot at Republican "pharisees," Clinton explained that, of course, her "very serious" grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the "extended faith family" that came to her aid, "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me."

Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to "inject faith into policy." It was language that recalled Clinton's Jesus moment a year earlier, when she'd summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would "criminalize the good Samaritan...and even Jesus himself." Liberal Christians crowed ("Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible," declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.

In fact, Clinton's God talk is more complicated—and more deeply rooted—than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we've interviewed dozens of Clinton's friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton's subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats' broader move to recapture the terrain of "moral values," those who know her say there's far more to it than that.

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

Clinton's faith is grounded in the Methodist beliefs she grew up with in Park Ridge, Illinois, a conservative Chicago suburb where she was active in her church's altar guild, Sunday school, and youth group. It was there, in 1961, that she met the Reverend Don Jones, a 30-year-old youth pastor; Jones, a friend of Clinton's to this day, told us he knows "more about Hillary Clinton's faith than anybody outside her family."

Because Jones introduced Clinton and her teenage peers to the civil rights movement and modern poetry and art, Clinton biographers often cast him as a proto-'60s liberal who sowed seeds of radicalism throughout Park Ridge. Jones, though, describes his theology as neoorthodox, guided by the belief that social change should come about slowly and without radical action. It emerged, he says, as a third way, a reaction against both separatist fundamentalism and the New Deal's labor-based liberalism.

Under Jones' mentorship, Clinton learned about Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich—thinkers whom liberals consider their own, but whom young Hillary Rodham encountered as theological conservatives. The Niebuhr she studied was a cold warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. "He'd thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in," Jones explains. "But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook his faith in liberal theology. He came to believe that the achievement of justice meant a clear understanding of the limitations of the human condition." Tillich, whose sermon on grace Clinton turned to during the Lewinsky scandal, today enjoys a following among conservatives for revising the social gospel—the notion that Christians are to improve humanity's lot here on earth by fighting poverty, inequality, and exploitation—to emphasize individual redemption instead of activism.

Niebuhr and Tillich's combination of aggressiveness in foreign affairs and limited domestic ambition naturally led Clinton toward the gop. She was a Goldwater Girl who, under the tutelage of her high school history teacher Paul Carlson (whom Jones describes as "to the right of the John Birchers"), attended biweekly anticommunist meetings and later served as president of Wellesley's Young Republicans chapter. Out of step with the era's radicalism, Clinton wrote Jones from college, lamenting that her fellow students didn't believe that one could be "a mind conservative and a heart liberal." To Jones, this question indicated that Clinton shared Niebuhr's notion of Christians needing to have "a dark enough view of life that they can be realistic about what's possible."

Two decades later, while Bill was campaigning for president, Clinton picked up that theme once more, displaying a theological depth that conservative believers could appreciate. In an interview with the United Methodist Reporter, she expressed regret that her church had focused too much on social gospel concerns in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, "to the exclusion of personal faith and growth." The spirit, believe theological conservatives, matters more than the flesh. Clinton added that she was happy to see her liberal denomination becoming more salvation centered in the '90s.

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

[nkb]

This may just be the calculating politician in Clinton talking, but she is the only one among the serious candidates that has said that a person's faith should be personal, and not be trotted out for political purposes.

That contrasts with what I was reading here.

[Jeremy]

Who knew Hilary Clinton was such a cunt?

*Professor Chaos sees virtually every forum member raising their hands...

I meant about Church/State issues. I got this e-mail from a Yahoo! group of which I am a member (Pennsylvania Godless) I've never heard of the website this comes from. Can anyone enlighten me?

Link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html

To follow is about the first 1/4 of the article. It's too long to post the entire thing.


"Mother Jones" is a left-wing political magazine that's been around since the mid '70's. It's kinda along the lines of The Nation. Here's a wiki piece on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_%28magazine%29

You just found the official website.

[Jeremy]

I think it's worth mentioning that Hillary has always been a big supporter of Tipper Gore, the PMRC and other censorship movements. When you look at the types of people who have been the driving force behind these movements it's clear that church-and-state separation isn't high on the agenda.

[nkb]

I'm hoping it doesn't come down to the choice of Hillary vs one of the Republican asshats like Romney or Thompson, but, if it does, it will be tough.

[Irreligious]

And, let's not forget her support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. I think this is an example of where her "faith" negatively informs on her judgement on some issues.

[ubs]

This is a very troubling list. I'm not sure our votes even count, but either way the list says a lot about the tone of the next decade.

[clambake]

I'm hoping it doesn't come down to the choice of Hillary vs one of the Republican asshats like Romney or Thompson, but, if it does, it will be tough.

That's my biggest fear, which sadly seems to be our future. By "tough" I assume you mean choosing between getting ass-fucked with a cheese grater or getting fucked in the ass with a cheese grater.

[nkb]

That's my biggest fear, which sadly seems to be our future. By "tough" I assume you mean choosing between getting ass-fucked with a cheese grater or getting fucked in the ass with a cheese grater.
Close. In one of the scenarios, the cheese grater is replaced by a sawzall.