Clinton's Spiritual Journey

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

LEST IT BE THOUGHT THAT BILL Clinton -- a man with a propensity to hug, a devotion to Thelonious Monk and his own jogging track -- is altogether too tidy a baby boomer emblem, members of his generation ought to ask themselves: How many of them, if they were about to become President, would leave a black- tie party with Barbra Streisand to attend a midnight church service off- limits to cameras and reporters?

That Bill Clinton has been religious since childhood sets him apart from his peers -- the legions who, at mid-life, are thrashing about for spiritual moorings. Clinton from age 8 has possessed a conviction about his Baptist faith so private that he does not even share it with his (Methodist) wife. (In Little Rock they attended separate churches.)

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who once said he did not attend church regularly because it was "wrong" to make worshippers go through metal detectors required for his security, Clinton has been a steady presence at Little Rock's Immanuel Baptist Church since 1980, singing in the choir every Sunday he was in town, wearing robe No. 192 and bringing his family Bible with him. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who made his born-again experience as a Baptist a public testament to his integrity, Clinton is deeply reticent about his faith, even showing mild disdain for those who would play up their faith in any way. "He would turn off the TV angrily whenever a beauty contestant said her success was due to Jesus Christ," his mother Virginia Kelley once said.

Unlike George Bush, whose Episcopal faith came to him as naturally as his other responsibilities as a legatee of the Eastern establishment, Clinton describes his relationship with God as something that has to be achieved, a spiritual place he is constantly struggling to reach despite an acute sense of his own mortal shortcomings. In one of three instances when he discussed the subject during last year's campaign, he told viewers of VISN, an interfaith cable network: "My faith tells me all of us are sinners, each of us is gone in our own way and fallen short of the glory of God, and that life's struggle is for sinners, not saints, for the weak, not the strong. Religious faith has permitted me to believe in the continuing possibility of becoming a better person every day, to believe in the search for complete integrity in life."

Clinton's journey began in the living room of his grandparents' home in Hope, where he lived until he was four and where a Bible was always left open. When his mother moved to Hot Springs, she seldom attended church. But the young Clinton was often seen walking to Park Place Baptist Church alone, dressed up in his Sunday clothes and carrying his leatherbound Bible. "I can remember thinking, 'Isn't that neat that Bill is going. He must take it more seriously than we do.' My mother was having to drag us there," recalls Patty Howe Criner, a friend of Clinton's since elementary school. On Oct. 17, 1956, when he was 10 years old, Clinton made the overt profession of his personal commitment to Christ, as required by his Baptist denomination, and was publicly baptized by being immersed in water. A year later, he asked a Sunday- school teacher to take him 50 miles into Little Rock so he could listen to the Rev. Billy Graham. When he got home, he put part of his allowance in an envelope and sent it to the preacher.

After graduating from Hot Springs High in 1964, Clinton entered Georgetown University, where, according to an account he gave the Washington Post, at least one philosophy professor, Otto Hentz, thought his papers were so impressive that he should consider becoming a Jesuit priest. Hentz was surprised to learn that Clinton was not even a Catholic. From the time he was at Oxford through his years at Yale Law School and up through his election as attorney general of Arkansas in 1976 at age 30, Clinton was, by his own description, an "uneven churchgoer for a long time." But his defeat in 1980 after his first term as Governor changed that. Critics say his joining Immanuel Baptist Church, whose services are televised throughout the state, was nothing but an attempt to build goodwill with Arkansas voters. But, says his longtime chief of staff in Arkansas, Betsey Wright, "people overlook what a traumatic occurrence that defeat was. Getting himself into a church family was very important in terms of overcoming what he regarded as his own personal failure."

During this period, Clinton's religion found a dual expression, matching in some ways the tension in his personality between his populist leanings as an Elvis Presley-loving son of a small-town nurse and his intellectual elitism as a Rhodes scholar and full-time wonk. He developed an intense relationship with the Rev. W.O. Vaught of Immanuel Baptist, a biblical scholar known for his erudition, whose sermons were drawn directly from Scripture. Friends of both men say Clinton, who lost his father to a car accident before he was born, was drawn to him for his paternal and nonjudgmental counsel. Vaught, who died of bone cancer three years ago, helped Clinton reconcile the conflict between his pious instincts and his political ones on two major positions -- his defense of the death penalty and abortion rights. According to Vaught's son Carl, the Governor summoned the minister for breakfast one morning to discuss the morality of capital punishment. Vaught argued that in its Hebrew translation, the Sixth Commandment does not say one is never allowed to take the life of another; what it forbids is murder. From a sermon he delivered, Vaught also helped Clinton come to terms with his ambivalence about abortion. According to his son, Vaught argued that "the Hebrew word for life is 'breath,' and that life is connected to the moment when one is born and takes one's first breath." Above all, says Carl, a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University, the two men "met at the sacred place where people can encounter something ultimate, something that you just don't go beyond."

Clinton found a similar experience in a more open, musical setting -- the Pentecostal revival meetings held once every summer in Redfield, Arkansas, where about 2,000 worshippers commune with God by singing, clapping and speaking in tongues. His relationship with the state's Pentecostal community had its political uses: several Pentecostal pastors served as conduits between him and the religious right on issues like the state regulation of church- based schools and day-care centers. But what began as a political stopover in Redfield in the late '70s also became a different kind of pilgrimage. Vaught would often voice his disapproval of the Pentecostals for their emotionalism, but Clinton returned every year, sometimes with his saxophone, and his ties grew more solid in the weeks after his 1980 defeat when two Pentecostal ministers sought him out at the Governor's mansion to offer love, comfort and prayer. Clinton's childhood friend Carolyn Staley recalls bumping into Clinton at a Little Rock shopping center around 1986 and being asked inside the Governor's Lincoln Continental to listen to a taped rendition of In the Presence of Jehovah by a Pentecostal singer. "He was spellbound. He was carried away with it," she says.

Clinton's faith has occasionally been on display during the past year. He mentioned God occasionally in his campaign speeches and, whether in his Inaugural Address or at a prayer breakfast in Washington two months ago, has displayed his knowledge of Scripture. He shed a very public tear at the ceremony at Washington's A.M.E. Metropolitan Church on Inauguration morning while listening to a live performance of In the Presence of Jehovah.

This faith has not protected him against attacks by his Baptist brethren. In fact, his minister friends have been startled by the degree of pious animus directed at him from some conservative pulpits since his election. The Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of the 8,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, whose religious broadcast is carried on 360 television stations nationwide, earlier this year cited a tabloid account of Clinton's alleged affair with former Arkansas cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers as an indication of the President's moral delinquency. "If his wife cannot rely upon him to keep his vows of fidelity to her in marriage," Kennedy said in an interview, "then why should the country be expected to believe that he would keep his vows made in the assumption of his office?" The Rev. Jerry Falwell told his Old-Time Gospel Hour television audience on Nov. 8 that he objected to having a "womanizer" in the White House and said he had a tape of Clinton and Flowers discussing oral sex. Falwell did not reveal precisely the source or nature of the recording and, as if to spare his fellow worshippers the experience, told them he would not play it. But, he said, "it makes it a little hard for me having heard him say that . . . to, uh, respect him."

If such attacks against Clinton are so acutely personal, it is because the religious right sees him not just as a political enemy but also as a wayward relative. Since the election, eight state Baptist conventions have passed resolutions condemning Clinton's stance on abortion or homosexuality or both. "It's very rare that so many conventions would direct such critical remarks directly at a President," says Greg Warner, the executive editor of the Associated Baptist Press, an independent news service. "Part of the reason is that he claims the Southern Baptist label but does not behave the way they want or expect a Southern Baptist to behave."

Much of the intensity of Clinton's spiritual life remains enclosed within his family and, occasionally, a small circle of believers. He prays with Chelsea at her bedtime on the nights when he is home, and on past occasions when he and Hillary could not get to church, the family held its own devotional. He has said that in recent years, he and Hillary, a devout Methodist who carried Scriptures on the campaign trail, have had increasingly long conversations about how to live an honorable life and the nature of life after death. On the day after Christmas, at a gathering in Staley's home of Little Rock preachers, Clinton let on that he harbored some pastoral ambitions in the Oval Office. One of the guests handed him a plaque with the verses from Psalms describing how God presented David to his people as their shepherd and "David cared for them with a true heart and a skillful hand." Visibly moved, he replied, "That's what I want to be."