THE RECENT BICKERING over the role of religion in presidential politics — brought on by a sudden and unexpected eruption of Bible-thumping from Sen. Joseph Lieberman — has of course alarmed the enlightened classes. “I was appalled,” read a typical letter last week to the Washington Post. “Mr. Lieberman’s comments were insulting to ethical and moral nontheists . . . ” And it is not only they who should worry. By happy coincidence, a mere fortnight before Sen. Lieberman began tooting his hymns to an “awesome God,” the country was treated to a pristine example of what happens when politicians and preachers get their roles mixed up. The example should have been enough to give all of us pause — moral nontheists, immoral theists, unethical pantheists, situational monists, everybody.
For almost eight years now, from the beginning of his presidency, Bill Clinton has been periodically visited at the White House by Bill Hybels, pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois, thirty miles outside Chicago. Willow Creek is one of the fabulously successful “megachurches” that have bloomed in the last twenty years, providing its 20,000 parishioners with every conceivable amenity short of dry-cleaning. Within its 155-acre compound, there are theaters, parenting seminars, youth groups, marriage counseling, retail outlets, libraries, treatment programs for sundry addictions, film and recording studios, musical entertainments, individual therapeutic services, rehearsal rooms, dramatic productions, and so on. There’s even Bible study.
Among evangelicals, Hybels is universally admired for his entrepreneurial vim. His friendship with the president has been more controversial. (Clinton himself, among evangelicals, is not at all controversial; everybody hates him.) According to news reports Hybels had offered the president an open invitation to visit Willow Creek whenever the spirit moved him, and at last the spirit did so, four days before the president was scheduled to open the Democratic National Convention with a much-anticipated speech. The occasion for Clinton’s trip to Willow Creek was Hybels’s annual Leadership Summit, at which 5,000 evangelical pastors gather, with several thousand more hooked in by satellite, to hear presentations from corporate CEOs, management consultants, and facilitators of all kinds.
When the president suddenly accepted Hybels’s long-standing invitation, everyone with a license to practice punditry smelled a rat. The consensus was that Clinton would use the Willow Creek audience to reiterate his apologies for the Lewinsky scandal, absolve Al Gore of any peripheral sleaze, and thereby relieve himself of the “necessity” of doing the same a few days later at the convention. (You may wonder who decided that Clinton “needed” to do this at all, but you’re not a pundit.) The news coverage of Clinton’s appearance reinforced this storyline. One soundbite in particular — “Surely no fair-minded person would blame [Al Gore] for any mistake that I made” — aired on all the TV news shows. But far more interesting, especially in light of Lieberman’s subsequent homilies, is the broader message of the event. It was the work of a master. By the time Clinton left the stage at Willow Creek, his audience of hostile evangelicals was in tears.
Rather than deliver prepared remarks, the president offered answers to questions gently lobbed his way by his host. This allowed him to open with a chummy anecdote about Buddy, his canine castrato, and then move on to a smattering of flattery for Hybels, with a reference to how often they pray together and with thanks for the same, which in turn allowed him to make indirect references to how hard he, the president, works and how strenuous his job is, making decisions “under circumstances which are unimaginably difficult.” (No president has ever worked harder at explaining how hard he works.) “It can crowd out all that other stuff inside you that keeps you centered and growing and whole,” the president said.
“Centered,” “whole,” even “stuff” — these are New Age terms of art familiar to the sort of evangelical pastors who attend leadership seminars and listen with rapt attention to management facilitators. But the president’s identification with his audience extended beyond a simple mastery of catch phrases. He showed this especially when, without further preamble, he plunged into a discussion of the scandal that was on everyone’s mind — without, literally, discussing it at all.
Asked to describe “where you’re at spiritually,” Clinton gave a rambling response. “I feel much more at peace than I used to,” he said. The humiliation of “what I went through” had brought him to “a different place.”
“I’m now in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life from a terrible mistake I made. . . . I wake up every day, no matter what anybody says or what goes wrong or whatever, with this overwhelming sense of gratitude, because it may be that if I hadn’t been knocked down in the way I was and forced to come to grips with what I’ve done, and the consequences of it, in such an awful way, I might not ever had to really deal with it 100 percent.”
The ordeal of Lewinsky had thus been a learning process, as the phrase goes — a thinly disguised gift for the president, a rough patch in his personal journey of the spirit, a chance to squeeze lemonade from the lemons of life. It was, to use another current phrase, all about him. And hey: He’s doing great.
Key to his newly won self-understanding, the president said, was the famous apology he offered up at a prayer breakfast in September 1998, a few weeks after his disastrous prime-time address to the nation admitting “an inappropriate relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.”
“I finally realized,” the president told his Willow Creek audience, “that I’d never be all right unless I stood up there and said what I did, and said it was wrong, and apologized for it.”
Hybels himself is full of admiration for that apology, in which Clinton quoted St. Paul, the fifty-first Psalm, and the Yom Kippur liturgy, and announced somberly, “I have sinned.” Even so, Hybels pointed out, “there’s a whole bunch of people who just continue to believe you never came clean.”
Now there’s a reason people continue to believe this, and one explores it at great risk of seeming pedantic, but it is crucial to understanding how the president has mastered the use of religion for political purposes — how he has managed publicly to conflate his responsibilities as a government official with his obligations as a practicing Christian.
The essence of the confusion is this: No one knows what precisely Bill Clinton means when he refers to the “terrible mistake I made.” He sometimes calls it a “personal mistake.” But it is always singular, and even when he apologizes for it, it remains nameless. The mistake cannot be the multiple instances of lying under oath, first before a judge and then before a grand jury, since the president continues to deny that these lies occurred. The mistake cannot be suborning perjury, because he denies that too. Ditto his summoning of the vast resources of the presidency to frustrate a civil lawsuit and a criminal investigation. Besides, these wouldn’t have been merely mistakes but also criminal acts.
Was he apologizing, then, for adultery? Apparently so, although his remarks seemed less like an apology than a confession. And here his command of Protestant etiquette rescues him. An apology is an expression of regret to those who’ve been hurt. A confession of sin is properly made privately, either to a minister of some sort or to the “community of faith.” It is not meant to be a public act. But Clinton managed to mix the two up — so that the apology looks like a confession of sin and the confession looks like an apology, and he winds up looking contrite, though no one knows why for sure. Has he apologized for betraying his oath of office, or confessed to diddling the intern? Either way, his audience is in a bind. For as the theologian Robert Jewett wrote after Clinton’s apology, “By placing his remarks in the language of confession of sins, Mr. Clinton placed an obligation on believers to accept him at his word and to offer immediate forgiveness.”
It didn’t work right away, of course, at least among evangelicals, the great majority of whom, as I say, have no use for Clinton. But it undeniably worked with the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. “When the interview [with Hybels] was done,” wrote one who was there, Richard Mouw, there was “another standing ovation — except this time people all around me were wiping tears away. I saw this through my own tears.” It helps that at Willow Creek, as at many of the megachurches, the brand of Christianity on tap is highly therapeutic, suffused with the language of self-absorption and personal growth that is the president’s primary mode of speech.
As Sen. Lieberman and his critics know, politicians have always used religion — borrowed its imagery and idiom and watered it down for their own advantage. The Deists of the country’s founding drained Calvinism of its metaphysics and invoked the stern moralism that remained. Bill Clinton has done something similar, though less admirable, using the evangelical Protestantism of our day to muddle the discussion of his own public transgressions. Which leads you to wonder: Maybe the problem isn’t politicians who exploit religion, but the kind of religion that politicians find it easy to exploit.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
