THE CHRISTIAN IN THE RACE:

[M]any 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."

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.

"His words, the power of his example, affected me deeply and added to the lessons of my minister to face the world as it is, not as we might want it to be," Clinton told a group of Baptists in September, "but to commit ourselves to turning it into what it should be."

Bill Clinton credits King's speech with changing the trajectory of his wife's moral and political life. "It took my breath away when I realized 45 years ago that is really what motivates her," he said in Iowa this year.

At the time, though, Clinton remained a "Goldwater girl," a rock-ribbed Republican like her father. At Wellesley College, she headed the college's Young Republicans Club.

But a Methodist magazine, motive, flooded Clinton with progressive opinions -- rooted in liberal Christian theology -- on the Vietnam War and civil rights movement.

"I wonder if it's possible to be a mental conservative and a heart liberal," she wrote in a letter to Jones, who'd become a lifelong mentor and confidant. By her senior year, Clinton appeared to have completed her political conversion to liberalism, writing her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky, the leftist community organizer.

After college, Clinton says her Christian faith inspired her decision to do public service, rather than apply to white-shoe law firms. At the Children's Defense Fund, she says, she went undercover to expose systemic racism in the deep South and the plight of children with disabilities in New England.

Around the same time, she met Bill Clinton at Yale Law School, and eventually followed him to Arkansas, where they married in 1975. Several years later, while raising their daughter, Chelsea, Hillary Clinton joined First United Methodist Church in Little Rock.

While Bill attended a Baptist church down the road, Hillary became an active and "vital part" of the Methodist congregation, the local bishop later recalled. She volunteered to be the church's chancellor and taught adult Sunday school on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion.

The Rev. Ed Matthews, former pastor of First United Methodist Church of Little Rock, recalls one of Clinton's lessons keenly. It was about forgiveness, and how it is not a human quality but rather a gift from God.

When Clinton was first lady and facing her own crisis, Matthews said he went to the White House and reminded her of that lesson.

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