A Feel-Good Sacrament
Clinton Bares His Soul” declared the Chicago Sun-Times front page, of President Clinton’s August appearance at Willow Creek Community Church for a leadership conference. During the almost 90-minute interview and question-and-answer session led by Willow Creek senior pastor Bill Hybels, the president said he was in a process of “totally rebuilding my life from a terrible mistake that I made,” referring to his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Responding to Hybels’s comment that some people still believe that he never truly apologized for his actions, the president declared that his apology at a National Prayer Breakfast had been “full and adequate.”
But there was little genuine baring of the soul and certainly nothing spiritually edifying taking place at Willow Creek. Sun-Times reporter Ernest Tucker noted that the president “seemed at ease, at times poking fun at himself. The audience applauded and laughed at his Jay Lenolike quips.”
In his Breakpoint radio commentary, Evangelical leader Chuck Colson noted that “you could have mistaken the setting for the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show’.” The president offered “little mention of God and no mention of sin.” Instead, he said in reference to his affair with Lewinsky, “I wake up every day, no matter what anybody says, with this overwhelming sense of gratitude. If I hadn’t been knocked down in the way I was and forced to come to grips with what I’d done and the consequences of it, I might not ever have had to really deal with it a hundred percent.” He also noted, “two-thirds of the American people stuck with me. That’s an incredible thing. . . . In a funny way, when you realize there is nothing left to hide, then it sort of frees you up to what you ought to be doing anyway.”
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James M. Kushiner is the Director of Publications for The Fellowship of St. James and the former Executive Editor of Touchstone.
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