BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON have found themselves an awfully sympathetic minister — the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, who presides at a Methodist church a few blocks from the White House. Wogaman has recently sounded less like a clergyman than a purveyor of the Clinton line. Shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, he was complaining to the New York Daily News of a “concerted effort to bring [the president] down” and accusing Kenneth Starr of “personal interest and bias.” Wogaman hoped that “the American people” would not “succumb to hysteria.”
A few weeks later, he was on Nightline, explaining that character meant infinitely more than sexual morality: Clinton’s “commitments to poor people and to persons of ethnic minorities” were also “issues of character,” a fact that those looking at the president “in a more narrow and sometimes more sanctimonious way don’t quite catch.” Wogaman perceived “deep well-springs of morality and love” in Clinton and could not imagine that the country would turn on him, saying, “I don’t think the American people really want to see him suffer.”
Then, only last week, Wogaman gave an interview to the New York Times, warning again of an elevation of marital fidelity over other virtues, such as a concern for world peace. He also used the occasion to take another swipe at Starr: “The whole purpose in having a special prosecutor is to ensure that. there will be no hint of partisanship or self-interest infecting the professional decisions made.” Starr, according to Wogaman, had failed in his duty.
Wogaman is clearly delighted to have the Clintons in his flock, and they are equally delighted with him. Wogaman is an ethicist of some renown and a veteran political enthusiast. As his friend and congregation member George McGovern says, the reverend is “interested in the whole of society; he does not compartmentalize.” Wogaman has been a faithful advocate of nationalized health care, environmentalism, gay marriage, the power of labor unions, and what may roughly be called social democracy. Of legal abortion — even the partial-birth variety — he is a firm defender. He is a founder of a group dedicated to countering the religious Right. And, when it comes to the Scriptures, he is an interpreter of startling elasticity. In short, Wogaman may be the most Clinton-friendly pastor in all of Christendom.
Bill Clinton is a lifelong Southern Baptist — his wife is the Methodist — but he has found a home at Wogaman’s Foundry Methodist Church. On a typical Sunday, the president arrives with a Bible in hand, which he waves at cheering onlookers, photographers, and TV cameras. (Methodists, however, ordinarily do not bring their own Bibles. At Foundry, Bibles are provided in the pew racks.) McGovern guesses that the congregation is “Republican in complexion — an older, more conservative crowd.” Indeed, Elizabeth Dole used to belong, but she left in 1994 after finding herself uncomfortable with the church over what she describes as “a wide range of philosophical issues.”
At about the same time, Cal Thomas used his syndicated column to publicize Wogaman’s political and theological beliefs. Wogaman denounced Thomas in his next sermon, along with Mark Tooley, a researcher at the Institute on Religion and Democracy who had made a thorough study of the minister’s career. In a subsequent newspaper article, Wogaman, a la Clinton, drew a connection between the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City and “corrosive words and destructive actions”: “People in the media don’t plant bombs. But if they plant hatred and division, doesn’t that affect the behavior of unstable hearers or readers?” As for the Doles (Bob had attended occasionally with Elizabeth), Wogaman “grieved over their departure — I have to confess that. I thought it would have been wonderful . . . to have both candidates worshiping together.”
In many ways, Wogaman is a model of the contemporary mainline clergyman. He was born in 1932, the son of a midwestern minister and his wife. An eager student, he distinguished himself at the College of the Pacific and Boston University’s theology school, which he entered months after Martin Luther King had left. In 1964, he ran for the California legislature on the Democratic ticket, losing, but securing a place on the Democratic State Central Committee, where he stayed for two years.
Thereafter, he devoted himself to teaching, writing, and political causes. He marched with King in the South and protested the Vietnam War in Washington (“I still remember being tear gassed . . . near Lafayette Park”). He was not exactly a Cold Warrior, writing in 1967, “The U.S.S.R. is characteristic of the more tolerant Communist arrangements for religion,” and, “It is highly questionable whether Christians in Russia or China are treated any worse than Marxists are treated in the United States.” In 1974, he authored a pamphlet defending the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade: “It will do no good to argue that it is possible to affirm the sanctity of life in the presence of even the most miserable of circumstances. . . . That is romantic sentimentality.” Wogaman also cautioned against “a theological over-valuing of early embryonic life,” opining that “abortion may be faithful obedience to the God of life and love.”
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Wogaman taught at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, eventually becoming its dean. (Ken Starr, incidentally, sits on the seminary’s board.) Wogaman also increased his reputation as a theologian-radical — joining Jesse Jackson, Harvey Cox, and the Berrigan brothers in blasts against Israel, serving as chairman of an infantformula task force, and so on. All the while, he was pushing the frontiers of the sexually permissible, claiming, for example, that “it is quite possible that some people have . . . received considerable human fulfillment and enhancement of self-esteem on the basis of short, never-to-be-repeated sexual encounters” (which laymen refer to as “one-night stands”). He was also casting a pox on both “Marxist communism” and “laissez-faire capitalism,” judging them “not suitable” for “Christian economic thinking,” but counting capitalism as the greater offender against the environment.
It was in 1992 that Wogaman left Wesley and assumed the pulpit of Foundry Methodist (which had dismissed its previous minister for sexual indiscretions with church members). When Bill Clinton fought off “bimbo eruptions” during the Democratic primaries, Wogaman spoke up for him, pointing out that the governor and his wife had remained married, which was “not unimportant.” Wogaman made no apologies for his forays into politics: “To ignore the issues would be a dereliction of duty.” Did Scripture require universal access to health care? Yes, just as Jesus fed the entire multitude, not merely a portion of it. In 1994, Wogaman helped launch the Interfaith Alliance, hoping to offset the influence of Pat Robertson and other conservatives. Two years later, he signed a letter in support of partial-birth abortion, agreeing that “none of us . . . can discern God’s will as well as the woman herself.”
Wogaman has been particularly emphatic in his embrace of gays — their right to be ordained as ministers, their right to marry. The national Methodist church maintains that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching,” but Wogaman has made Foundry a “reconciling church,” meaning that it looks with favor on gay relationships and marriages. A year ago, he lent his name to a “statement of conscience” arguing that “to withhold rituals of support for committed relationships is unconscionable.” “A lot of good people have been injured by the church,” he told a reporter, “and it’s time we called attention to that.”
Wogaman is a devoted left-liberal, but he is no flake: His writings and conversation exhibit a wide-ranging intelligence, solid learning, and — for the most part — fair-mindedness toward his adversaries. He is a modern-day proponent of the old Social Gospel, which George McGovern locates at “the heart of the Christian message.” McGovern contends that Wogaman, while in robes, “never says anything partisan, never gets into specific political actions.” Still, the reverend finds it hard to resist the political arena, dashing off a column, for instance, on the desirability — on the morality — of portraying Franklin Roosevelt seated in a wheelchair.
For Clinton, he is perfect. The president no doubt sits comfortably as Wogaman preaches. In a 1994 interview, Clinton said that Christianity “frees you of all the guilt that you would otherwise carry around from all the mistakes you make. I mean, the important thing to me about my life and my faith is that every day I get to get up and try again” — because “the God I believe in is a God of second chances.” Wogaman surely concurs, being — as he and his admirers constantly avow — “non-judgmental.”
Yet Wogaman is not completely without severity, not completely unwilling to condemn. Starr’s taping of Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel? That, Wogaman insists, was “a moral outrage.”
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
