Adapted from “Interesting Blood” in The Family for The New Republic.

By Jeff Sharlet

Lost in the hysteria over Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s remarks is the fact that the current race offers a rare snapshot of the three great strands of American political religion. It’s ironic that Wright occupies center stage, since, in the twenty-first century, his is by far the weakest of these–a progressive Christianity which stretches from the Social Gospel to black liberation theology, a big tent of liberal and left religion that’s not very crowded anymore. John McCain’s problem pastor, a Texas pulpit-pounder named John Hagee, stands in for a more familiar faith: populist fundamentalism, a crowd-pleasing mix of hellfire and the kind of prosperity preaching that encourages followers to ante up to the Lord in both spirit and dollars. And then there’s Hillary Clinton’s religion: the third strand of political faith, the least understood and arguably the most powerful.

Clinton, an evangelically inclined Methodist, is by far the most religiously rooted and theologically astute of the three candidates, a Christian intellectual schooled in the cold war religion of Reinhold Niebuhr’s post-leftist years. Don Jones, her youth pastor and a lifelong spiritual mentor, calls the faith he instructed her in then and which they still share a third way between old-school fundamentalism and liberal Christianity. It’s not centrism, though; Jones describes it in terms of Burkean conservatism, after the eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher’s belief that change should be slow and come without the sort of “social leveling” that offends class hierarchy.

That’s the crux of the conflict between the progressive Christianity that’s broad enough to encompass both Jeremiah Wright and Jimmy Carter, and the elitist variation long embraced by Hillary: The former dreams always, if imperfectly, of challenging power, while the latter works to reaffirm it. Clinton’s faith is not the liberal version of Christianity that Democratic leaders have traditionally invoked–instead, her version, exemplified by her alliance with a shadowy network of powerful conservative Christians, is steeped in the kind of establishmentarianism that she has otherwise tried to distance herself from throughout the primary season.

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