Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

#73 Will Her Methodist Faith Help HRC Make a Comeback?

26 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by in Politics, Religion, Religious Philosophy

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In a rare glimpse of mettle since she conceded the race to Donald Trump last November, Hillary Clinton showed up for Donald Trump’s inauguration with a smile. She seemed to want to show the world: Hillary Clinton may have been knocked to the mat but she’s not down for the count. That initial smile, though winsome, was too wide to be genuine (the lady doth smile too much, methinks) and quickly turned glum.

By the next day, when Women’s Marches clogged streets in cities across the nation and the world, Clinton had faded from view again except for this tweet:

Thanks for standing, speaking & marching for our values ‪@womensmarch. Important as ever. I truly believe we’re always Stronger Together.

Did she think it would be in bad taste to give a speech, rouse the marchers, and walk alongside the hundreds of thousands of men and women who turned up to express their outrage at Trump’s sexist remarks and behavior (“Keep your tiny hands off my pussy” one sign said) and send a message to him and other elected officials that anything less than 100% respect for women’s rights will not be tolerated? This conundrum did not prevent John Kerry from joining the march.

As she watched the March from her home, was Clinton angry that some (many?) of the marchers had failed to realize what was at stake in the Presidential election until it was too late? Or, was she angry that some (many?) of the marchers had failed to vote? Such pettiness is surely beneath her.

Clinton has overcome body blows before—husband Bill’s affairs, Monica, her health-care plan as First Lady, losing to Obama in 2012. Although few challenges are more painful than career ‘catastrophes,’ with each setback, Clinton found her way to transcend the pain and return to serving the greater good. Will she yet again?

No doubt, her deep faith in God and her lifelong commitment to the United Methodist Church’s social-justice values have helped her overcome these tests. After all, her favorite quote from her beloved John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is this:

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.

Clinton can still do much good.

Wesley himself could serve as her inspiration for another comeback. Though he remained an Anglican minister—he never granted that his teachings had created a religious offshoot—his controversial teachings led congregations to bar him from their pulpits. He faced ongoing trials and disappointments but he kept on keeping on; by the end of his life, he had earned such widespread respect that some described him as the best-loved man in England.

In recent memory, President Jimmy Carter, a person of great piety like Clinton, resurrected his reputation. After he lost the Presidential election to Ronald Reagan, Carter refused to hide his pain and humiliation by retreating from public view. Within two years of his defeat, he had founded the Carter Center, with a focus on human rights.

Determined to continue working to advance rights and reduce suffering, Carter used his high-level connections to play a helpful role in world events. He made himself invaluable by mediating conflicts in countries like Haiti, Bosnia, and Ethiopia. His name became associated with an ability to resolve messy conflicts between intransigent governments.

Perhaps Clinton has not yet decided what future to craft for herself. What is certain, however, is that the longer she remains on the sidelines, out of view, the harder it will be for her to emerge—like a kid who takes a tumble on a slide, she needs to climb back up the ladder. The Women’s Marches proceeded without her. Will she now have to elbow her way into the circle of leaders responsible for those Marches’ planning and execution?

Professors Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward who have researched career disasters among business leaders found that leaders who fail to overcome these disasters are plagued by two issues: they tend to blame themselves and they tend to revisit the past instead of focusing on the present and the future.

Clinton knows she made mistakes running her campaign. She focused on Trump’s character instead of focusing on issues of concern to the discontented white middle class. She listened to the advice of staffers instead of listening to Bill, a seasoned campaigner who pleaded with her to spend more time visiting rural areas and talk to the kind of folks who had voted for him.

Sonnenfeld and Ward also found that the business leaders who overcome catastrophic setbacks do so if, like Jimmy Carter, they take intentional steps to achieve this goal. These steps, according to these researchers, are the following: decide how to fight back; recruit others into the fight; take steps to recover your ‘status;’ prove to yourself and others that you have the ‘stuff’ to reclaim your place at the top. They stress that the journey must be seen as a fight. Those who disappear into the void choose flight or simply don’t fight back.

Sometimes deciding how to fight back can mean taking a tactical retreat. But, whether one chooses to retreat for a while or begin the fight immediately, it is essential, Sonnefeld and Ward write, to “engage others right from the start to join your battle to put your career back on track.”

Perhaps Clinton is in fight mode and, behind the scenes, engaging her vast network of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps she is focusing on the fact that she won the popular vote and reaching out to key players to help her with her fight to resume the work of doing more good. Perhaps she is plumbing her faith for the courage to take the next step.

But why wait to craft a narrative? Why wait to remind the world of the super-star status she achieved as Secretary of State? Instead, she is allowing herself to be viewed, increasingly, as brooding and wounded. The time has come to start managing her status on social media.

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Hillary Clinton. Don’t miss the next Women’s March; take your place in the lead where you belong.

#72 Trump’s White Evangelical Voters: What Were They Thinking?

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Ethics, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics

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Photo Credit: rhome_music / flickr (creative commons)

Tomorrow, Hillary Clinton is likely to clinch the U.S. Presidency. Before we progressives return to our pre-election routines, we might take a few moments to pause and reflect on the mysterious cadre of white evangelicals who nearly changed the course of the vote. To confirm that Donald Trump’s biggest pool of supporters are white and evangelical Protestants, check out this recent Public Religion Research Institute poll: http://www.prri.org/spotlight/religion-vote-2016/.

Forgetting about these evangelicals for the next few years is an option. To pretend they don’t exist is all too easy—otherwise, we wouldn’t be feeling as if we’ve been yanked out of our can’t-we-all-get-along, rational bubble. We’ve been forced, by some of them, to confront what seems like a new reality of racism, sexism, and more. Many of us are shaking our heads, muttering “I don’t understand my fellow Americans any more.”

Were we aware of such white evangelicals but didn’t realize there were so many? True, most evangelical Protestants don’t live where we live—on the internet or out in the actual world. We tend to maintain a strict wall of separation between “us” and “them,” defriending or refusing Facebook friend requests from those with unacceptable religious or political views. We also tend to live in cities while, since the Civil War (see Casanova in the Reference section), evangelical Protestants, finding the city a “largely foreign, unregenerate, and dangerous environment,” prefer to live in rural areas, hence giving rise to the whole blue state, red state business. Evangelical Protestants, often by choice, remain or settle in the fringes of cities or in the hinterlands, out of the sight and mind of progressive urban folk.

Or, did we pretend they don’t exist because some of their views are alien or so horrid that we, progressive urbanites, can’t fathom that they really really mean what they say when they say it? Were we in denial?

In denial or not, ‘those’ people will return to the public square in a mere two years for the 2018 mid-term elections. As Peter Wehner (a Republican!) pointed out in a NYT op-ed today, “tens of millions of Americans will vote for [Trump] and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another…” Clearly, progressives are not the only ones who are worried.

At least two questions should continue to demand our attention and that of moderate Republicans long after we’ve caught our breath, recovered from watching the polls, and are finally able to get a decent night’s sleep.

First question: why did white evangelical Protestants vote for Trump, a candidate who is casual about his religious faith?

The answer: such accommodations are nothing new. Almost 250 years ago, dissenting Baptists allied themselves with America’s deist “fathers” to put an end to the vestiges of established churches in the newly minted United States. The Baptists wanted to practice their own religion and were anxious to cast off any demands that the established church might make of them. In addition, they balked at the idea that their tax dollars should be used by the state to support congregations other than their own. No surprise there. Like most people, they were driven by self-interest.

Today, the problem to be resisted at all cost by some white evangelical Protestants is the perceived destruction of their way of life by liberal intellectuals with their “secular prejudice” (see Casanova). The object of their ire—which causes these evangelicals to lose sleep at night—is the “deestablishment” of their brand of Protestant public morality and the establishment of choice-of-conduct along with pluralistic sets of norms and ways of life.

If asked to explain what the proper brand of Protestant public morality in the United States should look like, they would describe something akin to the traditional gender roles and family structures of the 1950s. This kind of “right living,” in the words of Jerry Falwell, “must be re-established as an American way of life… The authority of Bible morality must once again be recognized as the legitimate guiding principle of our nation.”

Protestant public morality, for some evangelicals (not all!) is under siege; it is under attack; everywhere forces are at work undermining Biblically-grounded right living. Falwell writes: “[We advocate the passage of family protection legislation which would] counteract disruptive federal intervention into family life and encourage the restoration of the family unit, parental authority, and a climate of traditional authority…and reinforce traditional husband-and-wife relationships.”

State and secular civil society, some evangelicals believe, penetrates into their homes, schools, neighborhoods and impose norms and ways of life to which they are categorically opposed. No wonder they have mobilized against these attempts to colonize their communities.

The bottom line: For some white evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, this a time of dire emergency! And desperate times call for desperate measures. Trump may not have roots in their community but he talks their language, understands their values, and promises, with the authority of a messiah (“I am your voice” he says), to mobilize against the forces and communities that threaten right living and the “authority of Bible morality” (Falwell again).

Second, why did white evangelicals buy into Trump’s message to “Make America Great Again” when, by plenty of objective measures, America is already great?

Given the analysis above, the answer to this question may now seem obvious. The United States, for white evangelicals, is certainly not doing better. They tend to be blind, Casanova explains, to the threats of the market. But they are, and they likely will continue to be drawn to candidates who promise to re-establish their brand of Protestant ethics and end, in Casanova’s words, “the legally protected pluralistic system of norms in the public sphere of American civil society.”

By the end of Tuesday, there will likely be cause for progressives to celebrate. White evangelical supporters of Trump, in contrast, will see his defeat as yet another indication of just how pervasive and how intractable are the forces that they believe are arrayed against them.

References:

Peter Wehner. “Is There Life After Trump?” New York Times, November 5, 2016, The Opinion Pages.

Jerry Falwell, Listen America!, The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. 

José Casanova. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.