Clinton tells religious leaders: ‘I have sinned’
By Chris Herlinger, Ecumenical News International, September 18, 1998
New York, (ENI) In an extraordinary moment of political drama, President Bill Clinton adopted the language of the Bible to tell US religious leaders that he had a “broken spirit” and had repented of sins stemming from an affair with a former White House intern.
“I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned,” President Clinton told more than 100 religious leaders – Protestant, Roman Catholic, Muslim and Jewish – at a prayer breakfast at the White House on 11 September, the day on which the US House of Representatives released on the Internet a 445-page report by Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor.
The report puts forward grounds for President Clinton’s possible impeachment, stemming from allegations that the president lied about an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and sought to cover it up. The report contains many pages describing the intimate relationship between the intern and the president.
Prayer breakfast speech
President Clinton’s 12-minute speech was held at an annual prayer breakfast with church leaders scheduled long before Starr’s report was released.
In what was described by some who attended the meeting as a “holy moment”, the president said he deeply regretted the sorrow he had caused the nation, his friends, family, staff, Cabinet, and Monica Lewinsky and her family. He asked all for their forgiveness.
Acknowledging that a nationally televised speech on 17 August – in which he admitted the affair – had not been “contrite enough,” Bill Clinton told the religious leaders that more than “sorrow” was necessary on his part now.
“At least two more things [are required]. First, genuine repentance, a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making,” the president said, adding: “I have repented.”
“Second, what my Bible calls a ‘broken spirit’. An understanding that I must have God’s help to be the person that I want to be; a willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek; a renunciation of the pride and the anger which cloud judgment, lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain.”
Varied responses
Reactions to the remarks, and to the release of the Starr report, varied among the diverse religious communities of the United States.
Many of those attending the event told reporters afterwards that they had been deeply moved by the president’s admission. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the US National Council of Churches, the nation’s biggest ecumenical organization, described the atmosphere as “deeply spiritual”. She believed Clinton was truly repentant. But she also told reporters it was still an open question whether the United States was “prepared to be led by a repentant sinner.”
Many African American clergy said they sympathized with Clinton’s evocation of the Psalmist and the plea of the sinner in Psalm 51 (“The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”) A prominent African American clergyman, James Forbes, senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church, said in a televised interview following the address that “it felt like a real holy moment. There was not a single false note. Here is a man who has been anointed by grace and awaits restoration,” said Forbes, who led the prayer service’s blessing.
Abusing the Bible
But Clinton’s use of biblical language was criticized by at least one Old Testament scholar. Susanne Scholz, who teaches at the College of Wooster in Ohio, told ENI the president’s public declaration and his use of biblical language and imagery were examples of “hermeneutic [or interpretative] abuse” of the Bible.
Pointing out that the Bible was used as a “powerful source in American culture,” and was “lovingly quoted” by many Americans, Scholz said Bill Clinton had used the Psalms “to pacify a broader American public which likes to read the Bible in a literalist way”.
“To use the Bible for such political ends is an abuse of the Bible,” she told ENI.
Calls to resign
Clinton’s public repentance did not convince some of the president’s prominent conservative critics. Members of the conservative National Association of Evangelicals declined to attend the breakfast. And leaders of Clinton’s own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, who also did not attend, continued to call on the president to resign.
“Personally, while I rejoice at the president’s resolve to go forward with a healing process and a changed life, and I truly wish him God’s blessings in that task, I still believe that if he desires to do what is best for the country, for the presidency, for himself and for his family, he will resign his office,” Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist ethics agency, told Baptist Press, the denomination’s news agency.
Earlier last week, Paige Patterson, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, called on the president to resign, and he continued to do so throughout a weekend of nationally televised interviews. In one interview, he called Clinton “a serial liar” who was “no longer able to lead the free world effectively”.
But conservative clerics were not alone in their criticism of the president. Before President Clinton’s address to religious leaders, three prominent clerics, Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Bishop Richard Grein of the Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s New York diocese, and Herbert W. Chilstrom, a prominent Lutheran clergyman, called on the president to resign “I think his moral presence in the country has been undercut so badly that he can’t lead,” Bishop Grein told the New York Times.
An open letter
Herbert W. Chilstrom, former presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, sent an open letter to Clinton on 1 September stating:
“It’s been two weeks since I heard your admission that you had ‘an inappropriate relationship’ with a young woman over a period of several months near the Oval Office. I have come to the painful conclusion that you should resign your office immediately.”
Chilstrom expressed “personal concern” for the president and his family. Clinton had “betrayed the youth and families of America”, he said, adding that the president’s “critical role” as US Commander in Chief had been “undermined”.
“As Americans, we are not naive,” Chilstrom told Clinton in the letter. “Most of us believe that you cannot make a sharp distinction between how you function at your desk in the Oval Office and how you behave in a side room only a few feet away. We believe it inevitably has an impact on your work as our president.
“To be tempted is one thing; to fall is another. To fall once and be sorrowful is one thing; to fall again and again, and only admit to an ‘inappropriate relationship’ when one is caught is another.” Chilstrom, who served from 1988 to 1995 as presiding bishop of the ELCA, also pointed out in his letter that he was active in the Democratic Party in Minnesota, where he lives in retirement.
“Since it impacts me very directly, I must also mention the disappointment and shame you have brought to our Democratic Party,” Chilstrom wrote.
‘A blessing’
At Washington’s Foundry United Methodist Church which Bill Clinton regularly attends with his wife Hillary, who is a United Methodist, the pastor, J. Phillip Wogaman compared the Starr report to pornography, but said the process “could even be viewed as a blessing because it forced [Clinton] to face up to things”.