Several news outlets have attempted to tackle the question of Hillary Clinton’s faith and the role it plays in her life recently.
The pro-abortion Democrat says she is a Christian and a United Methodist; however, her radical positions on abortion, religious freedom and other issues have many questioning the sincerity of her religious beliefs.
Last week, Clinton wrote a column for the Deseret News in Utah, claiming that she is an advocate for religious liberty. The Atlantic also tried to portray Clinton as more conflicted on abortion than she really is, and referred to her Methodist faith as evidence.
The latest piece comes from the America Magazine, which described Clinton as a “lifelong Methodist who has learned to keep her personal beliefs hidden.”
According to the article:
She is said to read snippets of Scripture each day; she has cited figures from the familiar canon of progressive, modern theologians, including Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Henri Nouwen, as inspirations; and during her husband’s affair with a White House intern, Mrs. Clinton is said to have leaned especially hard on her faith.
Clinton’s position on abortion conflicts with Christianity and the United Methodist Church denomination, though abortion activist Katey Zeh told the magazine otherwise.
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“There’s no conflict, but there’s also acknowledgment that we don’t all agree about all of these issues,” said Zeh, who also is a pro-abortion United Methodist.
The UMC position on abortion says, “Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion.” However, the denomination also “recognize[s] tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures by certified medical providers.”
The magazine said the UMC position matches more closely to former president Bill Clinton, who often said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Hillary Clinton no longer uses the term “rare” to describe her abortion position. Abortion activists who support Clinton say the term “rare” stigmatizes women who have abortions.
Now Clinton supports repealing the Hyde Amendment and forcing taxpayers to fund abortions, a widely unpopular measure even among Democrats. She also said an unborn child just hours before birth has no Constitutional rights. In February, she defended the gruesome partial-birth abortion procedure.
In a speech last year, Clinton essentially said Christians must be forced to change their religious views to accommodate abortions.
“Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth,” Clinton said, using the euphemism for abortion. “… And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
While Clinton’s support of abortion has become more extreme, her denomination’s has become less so. Until this year, the United Methodist Church was a member in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a pro-abortion group. In May, however, UMC delegates voted to end their pro-abortion ties and repeal a resolution supporting Roe v. Wade.
Nicole Russell, a senior contributor to The Federalist, lamented the obvious contradictions between Clinton’s supposed faith and her position on abortion in the American’s article.
“Claiming that Christianity condones the wholesale slaughter of unborn children because babies are sometimes inconvenient is like saying PETA authorizes you to binge on a ribeye just so long as you’re really hungry,” Russell wrote. “It’s unfortunate that the first woman running for president, with purported faith (quiet or not), advocates for an evil so obvious and so hypocritical that it contradicts the very faith she claims to embrace.”
