Guilt by Innuendo

Mother Jones has a disturbing article out about Hillary Clinton’s faith — disturbing not because of what it says about Hillary, as the authors seem to believe, but because of its vaguely insulting attitude toward evangelical Christianity.

Eric Sapp has already posted at Faithful Democrats about some of the problems with the Mother Jones piece.  I’d like to expand just a bit on Eric’s post.

The apparent point of the article is to show that Hillary Clinton is (a) in league with a secretive, conservative Christian group on Capitol Hill, and (b) a Christian “true believer.”  Both of these things are supposed to be cause for grave concern.  And I don’t get it.

Although the authors, Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, never bash evangelicals outright, they tweak them (and Hillary) through a series of snide and suggestive innuendoes.  Here are a few examples:

• The authors repeatedly point out that Hillary’s prayer group — the Fellowship, it’s called — is “secretive.”  Who cares?  It’s a prayer group.

• Hillary’s observation that the Republicans’ immigration bill last year would have “criminalized Jesus” is dismissed as a “Jesus moment.” Literally, I suppose that was a Jesus moment, inasmuch as Hillary’s Christian faith appeared in her discussion of public policy. But why the ironic detachment? Is there something wrong with “Jesus moments”?

• Joyce and Sharlet seem pretty concerned that Hillary’s involvement in the Fellowship — which includes mostly Republican lawmakers — helped lead her to collaborate with conservatives Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum. What a scoop, guys: relationships matter in politics! Somebody call the New York Times. Before that, though, a question: would anyone care if Hillary had deepened her relationship with those Republicans in anything other than a Christian context?  Or is it simply bridge-building per se that drives these people up the wall?

• The article repeatedly refers to Hillary’s prayer group as a “Christian ‘cell.'” A cell? Like in al Qaeda? Are they kidding me? The word is literally accurate, I suppose, and it’s actually common parlance for evangelicals, as Eric notes here. But the word carries dark and devious connotations to a general audience — and referring to the prayer group simply as, well, a prayer group wouldn’t get anyone’s blood boiling.

Now, to be fair, Sharlet has reported before about how some of the core members of the Fellowship do seem to have bigger aspirations than mere prayer. But there was nothing in the Mother Jones piece to suggest that Hillary is part of some grand conspiracy.

• The authors point out that these prayer group “cells” are “sex-segregated.” In other words, there are men’s groups and women’s groups. So? Must we allude to the Jim Crowe South to express that trivial point?

• The authors implicitly mock Hillary’s sense of “divine guidance” in public life, as if there’s something wrong with her believing that she’s where God wants her to be. I’m all for maintaining a healthy doubt as to what God wants us to do, as it’s all too easy to mistake our impulses for God’s will. But I’m not sure that knocking people who believe in divine providence — a group that includes many of the founding fathers — will get Joyce and Sharlet very far with most voters. (More on that at the end.)

• Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity — who worked with Hillary to set up shop in D.C. — are dismissed as a “conservative Vatican order.” Geez. These folks need to relax.

• The authors content that Hillary is moving toward a “faith-based politics that, under the right circumstances, will permit majority morality to trump individual rights.” OK, um, how’s that? Well, the authors cite a few examples — Defense of Marriage Act, federal funding of faith-based social services, etc. — that pale in comparison to Hillary’s support for abortion rights, civil unions, keeping the Ten Commandments out of the classroom, and so on. Where’s this dangerous, majoritarian moralism? Have any of Hillary’s positions been to the right of other centrist Democrats?

• Evidence of Hillary’s paternalistic politics is supposedly found in the fact that she has written “approvingly of…lessons in Scripture.” Readers could easily gets so swept up in the innuendo of the article that it’s easy to forget something basic: Christians tend to like Scripture. That’s true almost by definition. What’s the problem?

• My personal favorite: Joyce and Sharlet reveal an anti-southern bias. “Then, as now,” they write, “Clinton confounded secularists who recognize public faith only when it comes wrapped in a cornpone accent.” Cornpone is a generally derogatory term referring to the speech of unsophisticated, uneducated hicks. Do any religious right leaders sound like they just came out of the backwoods? Forgive me, but I’m having trouble thinking of any. More likely, of course, the authors simply equate “southern” with “unsophisticated” — which tells us more about them than it does about secularists.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that Hillary Clinton is getting grief for daring to pray with conservatives.  Unless the authors have a particular beef with religion — which, unfortunately, they seem to — they seem to be expecting Hillary not to build alliances across ideological lines.  They seem to think the mere mention of Hillary’s work with conservative Republicans will bring shudders down the spine of any right-thinking Democrat.

The irony here is that any Democrat who fails to build such bridges will either lose the presidential election or be ineffective once in office — thus undermining the progressive agenda to which Joyce and Sharlet are so committed.

So let’s dispense with the guilt-by-association, demeaning mumbo-jumbo.  Let’s let Hillary have her faith and get on with the campaign.