U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign rally at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, November 20, 2015. REUTERS/Harrison McClary
WASHINGTON (RNS) — Throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, one facet of Hillary Clinton, 68, has been unchanging. She was, is and likely always will be a social-justice-focused Methodist.
This has been evident across her decades as a lawyer, first lady, senator and secretary of state right up to her passionate response to a question about faith at a Democrats Town Hall a week before the Iowa caucus. Clinton drew her answer from her Bible, where, she said, she learned, “The most important commandment is to love the Lord with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that is what I think we are commanded by Christ to do.”
Here are 5 faith facts about Clinton’s life and how her faith shows in her run for the presidency.
1. Look to the Methodists
She was shaped by a saying popular among Methodists: “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,” says Paul Kengor in his book “God and Hillary Clinton.”
As a girl, she was part of the guild that cleaned the altar at First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill. As a teen, she visited inner-city Chicago churches with the youth pastor, Don Jones, her spiritual mentor until his death in 2009. During her husband’s presidency, the first family worshipped at Washington’s Foundry United Methodist Church and this fall she spoke at the church’s 200th anniversary. Time magazine described her membership in a bipartisan women’s prayer group organized by evangelicals.
2. There’s a Bible in her purse.
But, she told the 2007 CNN Faith Forum, “advertising” her faith “doesn’t come naturally to me.” Every vote Clinton made as a senator from New York, she said, was “a moral responsibility.” When asked at the forum why she thought God allows suffering, Clinton demurred on theology, then swiftly turned her answer to activism:“The existence of suffering calls us to action.”
In a 1993 speech at the University of Texas, Clinton declared: “We need a new politics of meaning. … We have to summon up what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct and do the best we can with God’s guidance.” A month later, she was pictured as a saint in a Sunday New York Times Magazine exploration of that “politics of meaning” phrase.
3. Prayer matters.
Clinton joked at the Faith Forum that sometimes her plea is, “Oh, Lord, why can’t you help me lose weight?” But her daily habit, she said, is praying, “for discernment, for wisdom, for strength, for courage … ”
What she calls “grace notes” matter, too. She described them to adviser Burns Strider as “a gift that is undeserved but bestowed by the everyday joys, beauties, kindnesses, pleasures of life that can strike a deep chord of connection between us and the divine and between us and the mundane.
4. God politics is tough.
In 2008, Clinton battered then-Sen. Barack Obama for saying economically hard-pressed Americans were bitter and “cling to guns or religion.” At the CNN Compassion Forum, Clinton said the Democratic Party “has been viewed as a party that didn’t understand the values and way of life of so many Americans. … It’s important that we make clear that we believe people are people of faith because it is part of their whole being. It is what gives them meaning in life.”
In April 2015, Clinton told the annual United Methodist Women Assembly that their shared faith has guided her to be “an advocate for children and families, for women and men around the world who are oppressed and persecuted, denied their human rights and human dignity.”
But no matter what she says about her faith informing her life, she faces a catch-22, an American religion expert Daniel Silliman wrote in the Washington Post. “It’s not clear how she should talk about faith on the campaign trail. Voters want to hear about her beliefs, but they also often don’t believe her.”
5. On the campaign trail…
Clinton never hesitates to outrages conservative evangelicals.
Just weeks after her 2016 campaign launch in April, Clinton told a global woman’s conference that, in countries where women struggled for education and reproductive rights, “laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
Christian media and Republican candidates took that comment to the bank. Fox News’ headline: Hillary: ‘Religious Beliefs’ Must Change For Sake Of Abortion.
Her support for Planned Parenthood, in the wake of a series of covert videos that purported to show executives negotiating the price of fetal tissue, is a rallying cry for the anti-abortion rights movement.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign rally at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, November 20, 2015. REUTERS/Harrison McClary 
