Kenneth Woodward’s new book Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama is out, winning a positive review from D.G. Hart in
Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “His subject is how Americans get religion, and the author’s own formation as a Catholic both explains his approach to religion stories and provides a baseline for understanding the ways that getting religion changed between 1950 and the present day.” Woodward treats changes in Methodism in particular, not surprisingly, since Methodist Hilary Clinton could be our next president.
Methodists have always been “zealous monitors of American morals since the middle of the 19th Century,” Woodward wrote in a Journal op-ed last week, but by the early 1960s “the church’s social concerns had shifted from alcohol, gambling and shopping on the Sabbath to racism, sexism, and the war in Vietnam.” The latter would also become concerns of the Democratic party by 1972, the same year that the former Republican Hillary Rodham became a Democratic party activist. She already was a Methodist, of course, having been raised in that church. And like other serious Methodists she regarded public service as a form of ministry.
Woodward wrote in the Journal that Clinton “is by far the more religious candidate” and also that “hers is the more religious political party.” The first observation cannot be doubted, but what about the second? Woodward’s argument, grounded in his reporting, is that since the early 1970s “the Democratic Party has advanced a righteous politics that mirrors the political righteousness of the United Methodist Church.” Notably, even as early as the 1970s both the church and the party were framing the nation’s economic ills as “systemic,” and in need of “wholesale transformation.” Clinton in her campaign for the White House often uses “systemic” to describe racial problems in need of “transformation” by government.
Woodward interviewed the first lady in 1994, and in his book he says she assured him “that upstairs in the family area of the White House she kept the latest edition of the Methodist Book of Resolutions, which records the denomination’s consistently liberal stands on a wide range of moral, social and political issues. Piety plus politics was her message.” It still is.
