Bill Clinton's Surprising Faith

Bill Clinton’s father died in an automobile accident before he was born in 1946, and his mother Virginia Kelley remarried Roger Clinton in 1950. Bill regularly attended a preschool program at First Baptist Church in Hope, Arkansas, where he learned about Jesus. He also went to its Sunday school and summer Bible school program.  His stepfather, who never completed high school, frequently got drunk and often beat his wife. Eager to escape the turmoil  at home, at age 6, Bill began walking a mile alone to attend Park Place Baptist Church after his family relocated to Hot Springs, Arkansas.  None of his friends attended this church, but Clinton “felt the need” to go. By age 9, Clinton wrote, “I had absorbed enough of my church’s teachings to know that I was a sinner and to want Jesus to save me. So I came down the aisle at the end of Sunday service, professed my faith in Christ, and asked to be baptized.” The pastor, James Fitzgerald, “convinced me that I needed to acknowledge that I was a sinner” and “to accept Christ in my heart, and I did.” Attending church as a child, Clinton later explained, was very important to him. The church provided important moral instruction and helped him understand “what life was all about.”  Cora Walters, who served as his family’s housekeeper and nanny for eleven years, had the most spiritual influence on young Clinton.  She was an “upright, conscientious, deeply Christian” grandmother, who, according to Clinton’s mother, “lived her Christianity.” In 1959 Clinton attended Billy Graham’s crusade in Little Rock. He was so impressed with Graham’s message and refusal to segregate his audience, especially in the aftermath of the controversy over the integration of Central High School and pressure from the White Citizens Council and Little Rock businessmen, that he began sending part of his allowance to the evangelist.