God and Hillary Clinton Read Online Free Page A

challenged their deeply held views about the role of God in their lives.
    For most people, these changes would come in all different shapes and sizes in the course of the 1960s, but for Hillary, these changes came to town driving a red convertible.

C HAPTER 2
The Don Jones Influence
    For much of Hillary’s youth, Hugh was the only male influence on her life that had any real bearing. Her views, her political ideas, her religion—all of this was filtered through Hugh, as he helped shape her sense of the world and her sense of self. But all that changed dramatically when she was thirteen, and the Reverend Don Jones, a Methodist minister, entered her life.
    Fresh out of divinity school at Drew University, Jones came to Park Ridge to be First United’s youth minister. 1 When he arrived, Jones was in his late twenties, and with his blue eyes, blond hair, and red convertible, he proved to be a striking contrast to the three previous youth ministers, all of whom, by comparison, were fossils. As such, no one in the congregation was prepared for a newly minted minister like Jones.
    Prior to Jones’s arrival, there was no doubt that First United was a conservative congregation. Don Jones hoped to shake it up by guiding the youth group in a totally new way. For Hillary and the other teens, practicing religion had always been a combination of listening to the senior pastor’s sermons on Sunday morning and interacting with the youth minister, whose job it was to act as a spiritual guide for the young minds. Starting in September 1961, Jones arranged to have meetings with the youth group on Thursday evenings, and it was there with his “University of Life” program that Hillary fully discovered Don Jones. 2
    When he entered the First United congregation, it was difficult to categorize Jones’s theology. Some sources claimed he was a self-described existentialist; others said he was shaped to some degree by the influential theologians Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, widely read by generations of both left-leaning and right-leaning Christians. While it seemed from the onset that he was liberal both socially and politically, even this proved difficult to state categorically. Jones walked a fine line between rightly awakening the young folks to the vast social changes happening beyond the world of Park Ridge and indoctrinating them to a particular political point of view. Those sympathetic to his perspective would say he enlightened and educated them, whereas those with whom he disagreed would later charge that he brainwashed them. 3
    Given the social climate of the times, Jones was certainly justified in bringing his youth ministry in contact with the broader currents of society. He had come to Park Ridge as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum and breaking out of the inner cities. Everywhere it seemed that a revolutionary perspective on the world was beginning to take form, and he saw it as his duty to usher his young pupils into this new era, to give them the information they would need to succeed with their faith when the world around them was changing. A religion is a worldview, and as such, it must weigh in on the pressing issues of the day if it is to stay relevant.
    To that end, Jones was not timid. He introduced his wide-eyed flock not only to the world of Wesley but also to existentialism,abstract art, beat poetry, and even the radical politics of the counterculture. 4 Gail Sheehy maintains that Jones was not as fired by theology as he was by the “cultural revolution” that he felt was under way. Jones asked one of Hillary’s classmates, Bob Berg, to play for the youth group Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” as Jones’s impressionable disciples ruminated upon the lyrics. He distributed sheets of poetry and handouts in which D. H. Lawrence refuted Plato. He rented a projector to show François Truffaut’s classic 400 Blows , Rod