Pastor Hillary Wants to Preach to You

By Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Hillary Clinton wants to talk to you about God.

According to The Atlantic, the once-sure-thing White House candidate is back on the campaign trail, this time on behalf of Jesus. Hillary, they say, spent years holding back her faith from public view; she avoided imposing the joy of Christ on the assembled. But secretly, she and God were on solid terms. Never mind the public spectacle of her explaining to religious Americans that their “deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” This was a woman hiding her light under a bushel.

No longer.

The Atlantic explains:

Clinton brought her faith with her as she entered political life, in times both good and bad. . . . Clinton might argue that her politics were the ultimate expression of her faith.

This isn’t atypical language for top-shelf Democrats. President Obama, another man who scorned religious Americans as Bible-thumping rubes, used to regularly quote Matthew 25:40: “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” Obama cited this passage as justification for government intervention rather than as support for evangelism, the more traditional reading.

Leftist politicians aren’t shy about sharing their faith. But they seem puzzled that so few religious Americans seem to take their faith seriously.

Perhaps that’s because religious Americans look at the invocation of the Bible by the political Left as a bit of political appropriation. Leftists seem to rely on the Bible only when calling for precisely the reverse of the personal-responsibility ethos promulgated by the Bible.

A recent poll from the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation found that a plurality of Christians, 46 percent, said that lack of effort was tied to poverty; just 29 percent of non-Christians felt that way. Among white Evangelicals, that number was 53 percent, with only 41 percent blaming circumstances for poverty. That’s a traditionally religious viewpoint: Free will, imbued in us by a just and benevolent God, enables us to make decisions for which we should be held responsible.

That doesn’t mean that charity should go by the wayside, but it does mean that in a free society, blame for individual circumstance should first fall on the decision-maker, and only then should we look to society as the cause of suffering. Political leftism suggests precisely the reverse, favoring social-justice engineering over individual self-betterment.

Religious Americans also look askance at the willingness of the pseudo-religious Left to ignore or denigrate sections of the Bible that run counter to their favored social policies. The same leftists who high-handedly quote Matthew to support redistributionism will ignore Matthew on marriage (19:4–6). They’ll scoff at religious Americans who simply wish to operate their businesses or raise their children in accordance with Biblical values. They’ll even call for the power of government to trump individual adherence to the Bible.

Hillary herself opposed every version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; supported the Human Rights Campaign, which wishes to use federal law to crack down on businesses to “discriminate” on the basis of “sexual orientation” and gender identity”; and opposed the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, which allowed religiously owned businesses to avoid promoting abortion.

Yet the Left remains confused about why religious Americans wouldn’t trust Pastor Hillary. Hillary would “make a great pastor,” says her former pastor, Bill Shillady, adding that she probably won’t go to seminary. “I think it would be more of . . . guest preaching at some point.”

We’ve heard Hillary’s preaching. It sounds exactly like her political agenda, just with a bit of God-talk sprinkled on top. Leftism, American-style, usually does. Leftists like to hijack religious-speak in order to deliver their unpalatable statism in the guise of godliness. Their program is a godless theocracy that worships centralized power, and they understand that Americans are more likely to support such a theocracy with a false image of the Divine Countenance at the center. But that doesn’t make leftist tent revival any less of an Elmer Gantry scam.

After Hillary’s election defeat, Shillady concluded, “I think her faith is stronger.”

Surely it is. After all, the faith of leftists lies not in a God of personal responsibility but in a god of collective blame. And that god has never left Hillary’s heart, not even for a second.