Bill and Hillary Clinton have been attending his church since they moved to Washington in 1993.
Last year, he was among the three clergy members whom the president enlisted as counselors after publicly acknowledging a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and he is the author of the recently published “From the Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out” (Westminster John Knox Press).
But don’t expect his book to provide any eyewitness, inside-the-White House revelations of how Clinton has been coming to terms with his transgressions.
“I would never exploit personal relationships,” said Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, 66, the senior minister of Foundry United Methodist Church, which is a short limousine ride from the White House. “It’s very important that when people share confidences with pastors, we respect that confidentiality.”
He’s reluctant even to say where the Clintons sit.
“Well, it’s interesting,” Wogaman said in an interview during a one-day trip to Chicago last week. “In a congregation, most people tend to gravitate to the same general area, and they do too.”
Which is where? his interviewer persisted.
“Rather close to the pulpit,” he said. “Down toward the front.”
Wogaman also revealed that occasionally a Secret Service agent in the president’s party or a reporter from the press pool that accompanies the Clintons to church will come by after the service and compliment him on his sermon, which is something that any preacher likes to hear.
Yet when he is called upon to give his views about the topic that has dominated the news for more than a year, he regularly says things that some of us may not particularly want to hear.
He writes in his book about such an incident that occurred during an appearance he made on a national TV talk show last Sept. 12, a day after the Starr report was released: “When the program began, I discovered that the two other religious participants were very condemnatory of the president and that the moderator was as well. I agreed with them that the president’s misbehavior could not be condoned, though I disagreed with their sweeping condemnations of his character.”
And what was Wogaman’s assessment of Clinton’s character? the moderator inquired.
“There was a fair amount of self-righteousness floating in the air, if I can say this in a non-judgmental way,” Wogaman writes. “In response, I said something like this: `You know, these sins we’ve been hearing about all day–I’ve been married for 42 years, and I love my wife very much, and I haven’t done any of that. But I have to tell you that if the president of the United States were here, I could not stand in front of him and say, “Bill Clinton, I’m a better man than you are.” I could not say that. And you folks, the ones who are also on this program, you can’t say that either.’ “
The reaction?
“That produced a moment of silence,” he said, smiling.
It’s possible that Wogaman’s words would give a number of people pause–and not just pundits who issue opinions from TV panels or in newspaper columns and editorials.
Whether the discourse takes place in the media, at work, at home or in social situations, an air of moral superiority seems to pervade many of our pronouncements about the impeachment battle, no matter which side of the issue we’re on.
Such a posture, Wogaman noted, can lead to a self-satisfied sort of wrath that dehumanizes and objectifies its targets, whoever they may be: the president, Kenneth Starr, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Paula Jones, the House managers or Clinton’s legal team.
“I wrote the book because I’m concerned our country is running a risk of becoming more divisive and harsh and meanspirited,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the basic character of the American people, which is grounded in religious faith that is more caring and compassionate.”
In adding his voice, Wogaman seeks to reduce the disputatiousness of our national debate and help us to avoid the polarity that could be its legacy by asking us to shed our holier-than-thou attitudes, stop impugning the integrity of those with whom we disagree and think about what’s best for our communities–and our own souls.
Throughout his slender, non-polemical volume, which he started writing in mid-September and completed in early November of last year, Wogaman employs Judeo-Christian precepts in challenging us to examine what the Clinton scandal says about us and our values and to look within ourselves before we look at the president. Some examples:
– “The greatest of the prophets in the biblical tradition were people who did not point at somebody else and say, `There is the sinner.’ The greatest were the ones who went to God and said, `O God, have mercy on us, a nation of sinners.’ “
– “Jesus had a lot to say about morality, but he reserved his most scathing rebukes, not for people who have fallen into sin through weakness, but for those who are self-righteous and hypocritical. . . . If you want to remove the speck from your brother’s eye, he said, first take the log out of your own eye.”
– “The root of the problem, in very large measure, is that our culture is one in which sex has gotten separated from love and commitment. . . . Even the very newspapers that editorially have condemned the president in scathing language are vehicles in all sorts of ways for the disconnection–in the news they carry, in the pictures they show, in the gossip they repeat. The late-night TV shows, loaded these months with ridicule of the president and ribald humor, are purveyors of exactly that crude treatment of sex. All of this sends a very mixed message.”
Early in the book, Wogaman, who opposed impeachment but believes Clinton should receive a congressional reprimand, cites a contrast between the presidential prayer breakfast, which he attended Sept. 11 at the White House, and the Starr report, which was made public that afternoon:
“It was as though two tracks were at work: the one emphasizing the moral acts of repentance and forgiveness and the spiritual unity of the nation, the other focusing on judgment and condemnation. Which of these really represents our country? It was if the country was struggling to define its own soul.”
The Clinton controversy raises questions about justice and morality that were at the center of Wogaman’s 26-year tenure as professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and that he addressed in several books, including “Christian Moral Judgment.”
In 1992, he left the seminary to accept an appointment to historic Foundry Methodist, his first pastorate.
“The Clintons’ first Sunday was in March of ’93,” he said. “It was a bitter cold, and there had been a Chicago-style snow storm. We were one of the few churches that was open. My wife and I were among only about a dozen people at the early service that morning, and afterward she met me and said, `Guess what, Phil? There are Secret Service people here, and they say the president and the first lady are going to be walking over from the White House.’
“And sure enough, they slogged through the snow to the second service, and that started our experience with the Clintons. We’ve found them wonderfully supportive and easy to work with.”
Now, however, one can’t help thinking, the Clintons are again slogging through the aftermath of a terrible storm to hear Wogaman’s message.
THEOLOGISTS SQUARE OFF ON PRESIDENT’S BEHAVIOR
Rev. J. Philip Wogaman came to Chicago last week to speak at a Michigan Avenue Forum, a series of lectures and debates about civic and political issues held at the Fourth Presbyterian Church.
Presenting a position sharply critical of the president was Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago.
Elshtain was a signer of a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency,” which was endorsed by some 180 college and university professors throughout the country, most of them on seminary faculties.
The statement is highlighted in “Judgment Day at the White House: A Critical Declaration Exploring Moral Issues and the Political Use and Abuse of Religion” (Eerdmans), which contains essays in support and in opposition to the declaration.
The declaration, which recommends no specific punishment for Clinton, charges him with exploiting religion through “a politically motivated and incomplete repentance that seeks to avert serious consequences for wrongful acts” and by, among other things, having “departed from ethical standards by abusing his presidential office, by his ill use of women and by his knowing manipulation of truth for indefensible means.”
The debate between Wogaman and Bethke-Elshtain on Feb. 1 at the church on North Michigan Avenue and Delaware Place drew more than 800 people and a camera crew from ABC’s “Nightline,” which two nights later featured the evening and a follow-up interview of the pair by host Ted Koppel.
The following is a brief excerpt taken from the remarks by each speaker during the 90-minute forum.
Bethke-Elshtain: “(For) pastor Wogaman our choices are either generous-spiritedness or to become increasingly hard-hearted. . . . (But evoking) love constantly in a public context can often invite a kind of non-discrimination, a terminal affability. In the religious world, this leads to religious sentimentality, and easily turns platitudinous. . . .
“The God professed by many Americans is preeminently, if not exclusively, a god of love. To many others, God is preeminently, if not exclusively, a god of righteousness and justice.
“I asked my Jewish husband if he thought of God primarily in terms of love, and he said, `No, you Christians did that. Yahweh is a god of justice, of righteousness, of the law. This is what I learned in Torah school.’
“But Christians too are subject to that God, a god who is merciful and just, righteous and the font of grace and forgiveness. So it is not–it cannot be–healing versus malice, anger and judgment.”
Wogaman: “A religious perspective can help us see and respect the humanity in others. . . . Many of the president’s critics have treated him with utter disdain, with utter contempt, totally ignoring any shred of goodness in his character or particle of wisdom in his leadership.
“How many of us would like to have our worst flaws used to define who we really are? In fact, while the president’s policies are open to legitimate debate in the normal flow of public life, there is no question in my mind that there is much goodness in this man’s life and character.”
