Hillary Clinton: The Faith Angle
Hillary Clinton’s hiring of “faith guru” Burns Strider as an adviser to her presumptive presidential campaign, reported two days ago in the Hotline, draws some rare attention to Clinton’s religiosity, as yet unexamined in the same way that ’08 heavyweights like Mitt Romney and, through his high-profile meeting with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama have been.
In Clinton’s case, there’s plenty to examine: religion seems to be the only part of her life that hasn’t undergone rigorous scrutiny.
Though Strider, as a onetime staff member for Nancy Pelosi, is squarely in the liberal camp, Clinton is part of not one, but two, prayers groups with distinctly conservative bents: an exclusive Senate prayer group that meets on Wednesday mornings, and a women’s prayer group that she’s been a part of since her early White House days. The women’s group is run by Holly Leachman, a layperson at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia, itself magnet for prominent conservatives, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Republican senators John Thune and James Inhofe, as well as several Bush staffers and their families.
Leach's prayer group includes many prominent Republican wives, among them Susan Baker, wife of Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker, who along with Leachman ministered to Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Leachman, mentioned briefly in Clinton’s memoir, Living History, is the wife of Washington Redskins chaplain Jerry Leachman).
Both prayer groups are affiliated with The Fellowship, a reclusive and often controversial evangelical organization with a decades-long history of ministering to powerful people in government including Clinton, who herself has spoken at The Cedars, a mansion that The Fellowship maintains in Arlington.
Because it insists on utmost secrecy, The Fellowship has cultivated something of the air of one those sinister organizations you come across in John Grisham novels and, though it runs the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., is the type of outfit that would make many liberals blanch. All of which is to suggest that candidates’ religion will an ongoing topic of fascination for political reporters, and it won’t just be limited to Romney. [JOSHUA GREEN ]
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