Hillary Clinton Attacked ‘Scary’ Justice Alito For His Christian Faith: ‘A Fanatic’

Hillary Clinton attacked Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on his Christian faith in a recent interview, calling the conservative justice “scary” and “a fanatic” for his religious views.

The former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee made the remarks in April during a podcast interview with Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias. A clip from that discussion resurfaced on social media over the weekend.

“You know, I was in the Senate when both John Roberts and Alito were nominated to the court by George W. Bush. Therefore, I had a chance, as you rightly say, to interview both of them,” Clinton said.

“And I found John Roberts to be a kind of conservative, corporate-oriented lawyer, who had a kind of preconceived notion of the way things and people should work,” Clinton continued. “And I voted against him because I thought he was not only a candidate of the far Right, the Federalist Society and their agenda, but that his life experience was just too narrow to really be in that position.”

Alito, however, seemed like a “radical” due to his Christian faith, Clinton said.

“Alito struck me almost immediately upon sitting down to talk with him as a radical, as a fanatic about his views of culture and the role of religion in our society, and his religion, not maybe yours or mine, Marc, but his religion. And I found him scary, and I said so on the floor of the Senate when I voted against him,” Clinton said.

“We got the judges that had been groomed, put into the pipeline to do what they are now doing,” she added.

Roberts and Alito are both lifelong Catholics. Alito frequently votes with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, while Roberts is considered a swing vote on many cases.

Last month, a pair of reports from The New York Times said Alito’s homes displayed an upside-down American flag and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which people at the Capitol riot reportedly carried on January 6, 2021.

Several Democrat senators subsequently demanded Alito recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 presidential election, which Alito refused to do.

Then, last week, Alito was secretly recorded by a liberal activist pretending to be a religious conservative who told Alito she does not think “we can negotiate with the Left.”

“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito allegedly responded, according to the recording, adding that there can be “a way of living together peacefully,” but “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Alito has been a particular target of the Left in the two years since he authored the court’s opinion in overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark abortion case.

The public and private faith of Hillary Clinton

Editor’s note: This is the second of two stories on the religious beliefs of the presidential nominees.

CNN.com excerpt——long read——Circa 2016
—
At a Catholic charity event this month, Hillary Clinton, a onetime Sunday school teacher, made a small but telling theological slip-up. After trading jokes with her Republican rival, Donald Trump, at the Al Smith dinner in New York, Clinton got serious, praising her Catholic hosts and Pope Francis’ fights against climate change and inequality. “I’m not Catholic. I’m a Methodist,” Clinton said. “But one of the things that we share is the belief that in order to achieve salvation we need both faith and good works.”

That’s only half-true. Neither the United Methodist Church nor the Catholic Church teach that believers can work their way into heaven. Good deeds are important, both churches agree, but God’s grace is freely given – and the only means of salvation.

Clinton likely knows this. She’s correctly stated the doctrine before, including at a church service in Washington last year. Maybe her salvation stumble was the work of a sloppy speechwriter – or perhaps, with apologies to Freud, it was a Pelagian slip. (Pelagius was a monk accused of teaching the heresy that humans could earn their own salvation.) Either way, Clinton’s remark revealed a deep strain in her religious thought: There are no freeloaders in heaven.

“She didn’t believe it was how high you jumped for joy in church,” said the Rev. Ed Matthews, Clinton’s pastor when she lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1990s, “but what you did when you came down.” The conventional Washington wisdom holds that Clinton is reluctant to talk about her faith, which is partly true. She doesn’t often divulge details about her private piety, even while hinting that prayer and pastoral counseling have led her to consequential decisions, such as remaining with her husband, Bill, after the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

But during her three decades in politics, Clinton has been quite willing to talk about how her work has been inspired by her Methodist faith. She traces some of her political positions, particularly concerning children and the poor, directly to Christ’s commandment to care for “the least of these.”

Speaking to an assembly of Methodist women in 2014, Clinton cited the Gospel story of Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes to feed a hungry crowd. “He was teaching about the responsibility we all share, to step up and serve the community, especially to help those with the greatest need and the fewest resources,” Clinton said.

Since then, the Democratic nominee has adopted a Methodist mantra as her unofficial campaign slogan: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as you ever can.” (The Clinton campaign did not respond to requests to interview the candidate.)

Despite these public testimonies, less than 50% of Americans say Clinton is “very” or even “somewhat” religious, according to the Pew Research Center.

A separate survey, by the Public Religion Research Institute, reveals stark religious and partisan divides in how Americans view the presidential nominees’ faith. Nearly 80% of black Protestants, a traditional Democratic constituency, say Clinton has stronger religious beliefs than Trump; just 28% of white evangelicals, who lean heavily Republican, agree.

Evangelicals’ antipathy toward Clinton runs long and deep, said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Clinton’s decades-long embrace of feminism and abortion rights clash with many conservative Christians’ core beliefs. “Evangelicals see her as the personification of secular, progressive values, and that overshadows any of her self-identified religious practices.”

But many conservative Methodists, even those who disagree with Clinton politically, say her faith appears to be authentic.

“Too often conservatives have been too dismissive of her religious beliefs, which are sincere,” said Mark Tooley, a Methodist and president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative think tank in Washington.

“She was shaped by the church and is still committed to it, and you can’t understand her political framework without understanding her Methodist background.”

The ‘University of Life’
Clinton’s father, Hugh Rodham, wasn’t a churchgoer, but he was a praying man.

“I still remember my late father – a gruff former Navy man – on his knees praying by his bed every night,” Clinton has said. “That made a big impression on me as a young girl, seeing him humble himself before God.”

If Clinton’s father provided the model for private prayer, her mother demonstrated how to put that piety into public action. Dorothy Rodham was active at First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois, a large congregation in a Chicago suburb. She taught Sunday school and regularly raised money for charity, inspiring her daughter’s interest in social justice

In 1961, when Clinton was a teenager, a youth pastor came blazing into Park Ridge behind the wheel of a red Chevy convertible. The Rev. Don Jones would inspire Clinton to see the world as her parish.

Fresh from seminary after a stint in the Navy, Jones gathered the sheltered Methodist youth of Park Ridge and gave them crash courses in the “University of Life.” He read them poems by e.e. cummings, introduced them to Christian intellectuals such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich, and asked them to interpret modernist paintings such as Picasso’s “Guernica.”

“I think it’s fair to say,” Clinton said in 2009 while delivering a eulogy at Jones’ funeral, “that next to my parents … no adult had more influence on my life.”

His challenges were more than intellectual. Jones took his Christian charges into inner-city Chicago churches, where they mingled with black and Latino teens, creating connections with people they might not otherwise have met. Jones encouraged his youth group to babysit for the children of Latino migrant workers and to visit the elderly in nursing homes.

Christians aren’t supposed to sit quietly in church, hoping to get into heaven, Jones taught; they’re supposed to build the kingdom of God on earth.

That idea lies deep in the DNA of the Methodist movement, historians say. The early Methodists in 17th-century England earned their name because they were methodical and disciplined about their duties toward God and to their fellow man. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, preached that Christians should practice not only personal holiness but also a “social holiness.”

“Methodists have always had a strong sense of social purpose,” said David Hempton, dean of Harvard Divinity School and an expert in early Methodist history. They advocated against slavery, corruption, public drinking, animal abuse, popular sports and ostentatious displays of wealth. They visited prisoners and the sick, educated children and gave their extra earnings to charity.

Clinton has said that she spent a lot of time as a young person trying to “work out the balance between personal salvation and the social gospel.”

In 1962, Jones took Clinton and her youth group to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago, where the civil rights leader delivered his famous sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” King’s challenge struck Clinton like St. Paul on his horse. She left the room that night a changed person, she would later recall.

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