For politicians who are searching for an appropriate way to talk about their Christian faith in public, the Bible can sometimes appear to contain contradictory mandates. In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he admonishes his disciples to pray in secret and “not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” Later, however, the resurrected Jesus, just before he is taken up to Heaven, implores his followers to go forth and “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Managing this tension—between public and private, hypocrisy and witness—can be especially vexing for someone under the public glare.
On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Methodist, sat down for a conversation about her faith at Riverside Church, in New York City. The event was a fund-raiser for Camp Olmsted, a camp for underserved children supported by the United Methodist Church. It had the feel, at times, of both a Trump resistance rally and a kickoff event for her book tour, which will officially start next week. Yet it also offered Clinton––no longer a candidate for public office––a chance to discuss an animating influence on her life, but one that she has struggled over the years to convey about herself to a skeptical public. “I was raised to believe that actions spoke louder than words,” she explained to her audience in the pews. “If you were a person of faith, that should be evident in how you treated other people and what kind of life you lived. So, I didn’t go around talking about it a lot, but it certainly was foremost in my mind. I’ve tried to express it, sometimes more effectively than other times, over the course of the last twenty or thirty years. But I’ve tried to be guided by it, even more importantly.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-private-faith-of-hillary-clinton
