March 3, 1999

Clinton's faith an enigma to observers
___By David Briggs
___Cleveland Plain Dealer
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--Six years into his presidency, Bill Clinton is an enigma to many observers sifting through contradictory clues as to how meaningful faith is to his public and private lives.
___Richard Pierard, a historian at Indiana State University who has written critically on the manipulation of religion and politics in the Reagan presidency, said Clinton has shown "almost a split personality" when it comes to walking the walk of his very public faith.
___"I found Bill Clinton just unfathomable on this issue," Pierard said. "The man has got me absolutely buffaloed."
___Why, for example, does a politician who makes so many public professions of faith carry out an affair in the Oval Office with an intern half his age?
___"I think he's lost his place in history because of this whole thing," Pierard said. "If you ever wanted to give your enemies a weapon, he did it. That's what was so stupid."
___"Stupidity" is also how Marvin McMickle, author of "From Pulpit to Politics, Reflections on the Separation of Church and State," characterizes Clinton's attempt to cover up his affair.
___When he's preaching, McMickle says, he tells a congregation the devil has three lies, all of which the president seems to have bought.
___"One, everybody's doing it. Two, it won't hurt. Three, nobody's going to find out."
___It was a message Clinton might have heard as a young boy going by himself to Park Place Baptist Church. He was baptized at age 10, and at 11 he would give part of his allowance to a Billy Graham crusade.
___Clinton went through a period of less fervent churchgoing from the end of high school until 1980, when he lost a re-election bid for Arkansas governor, said Marvin Olasky in his new book, "The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton."
___"That year, the future president joined a large Little Rock church that televised services throughout the state. Singing in the choir, which was frequently on camera, suspicions first arose that Clinton was using religion for political purpose," Olasky notes.
___Even after admitting to adultery in his first presidential campaign, Clinton has not been shy in the Oval Office about quoting Scripture or talking about his faith with religious leaders.
___ "My God is a god of second chances," he said in 1994.
___Later that year, amid increasing allegations of sexual affairs and harassment, he would embrace the role of national moral leader, lecturing young people on responsible sexual behavior at a Baptist convention.
___"I'll try to do my part, but this is not a government deal. This is the way people are behaving, as if there was no respect for themselves and no future. We have to stop," Clinton told Baptist leaders.
___When the Lewinsky allegations first surfaced, even conservative religious leaders were slow to judge the president, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in his denials. When physical evidence forced Clinton to admit his adultery and lying, the loss of trust was great.
___"I worry that he has to some extent impeached himself in his role as world moral leader," said Presbyterian minister James Dowd of the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland.
___God gives people second chances, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances also come with some expectations of changes in behavior, religious leaders say.
___"Unless I've missed it, I don't think he has made an affirmation, 'I've done things that are wrong and I won't do them again,'" Dowd said.
___Recently, some 140 moderate theologians and scholars signed a declaration expressing the concern "that the religious community is being called upon to provide authentication for a politically motivated and incomplete repentance that seeks to avert serious consequences for wrongful acts."
___Others see in Clinton a great president who has fallen in one area of his life. The National Baptist Convention and the United Pentecostal Churches of Christ are among religious groups who still publicly support the president.
___What the president needs now is therapy, not condemnation, McMickle said.
___"I have compassion for him in that area of his life," said McMickle, who views Clinton as a great president in other areas from the economy to race relations.
___And the impact of the scandal has been muted by a public divided in a low opinion of his personal character but with high approval ratings of his presidency.
___At the National Prayer Breakfast last month, Clinton spoke of reconciliation. "Remember that all the great peacemakers in the world in the end have to let go and walk away, like Christ, not from apparent but from genuine grievances," he said.
___Some conservative religious leaders have urged the president to resign to restore integrity to the nation's highest office but others have not given up hope in Clinton.
___Dowd would like to see a bipartisan effort to rebuke the president, but he also would urge Clinton to finish the rest of his term working on issues such as urban poverty and the plight of the working poor.
___From King David to the apostle Peter, who denied Christ three times at the end of Jesus' life, even many biblical figures have had to overcome serious flaws in their lives, Dowd said.
___"The heroes are seldom heroic, universally," he said.

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