Do All the Good You Can: How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gary Scott Smith provides us with an excellent religious biography of United Methodist, Hillary Rodham Clinton. As he has previously published this type of biography, his experience capturing the way that the United Methodist faith has influenced Hillary is riveting. Do All the Good You Can presents a well-integrated understanding of how Wesleyan and United Methodist lived, practical theology is foundational to the speeches, actions, and political motivations of Clinton. Smith shows he is well versed in Wesley, as each of the chapter titles is a Wesleyan quote—and any Wesleyan scholar will notice this right off the bat. Throughout the work, he points to United Methodist niche documents such as Clinton’s use of the Book of Resolutions and Book of Doctrines and Discipline to help her discern her faith and political positions. Smith portrays Clinton’s faith as typically United Methodist—one that is characterized by a lifelong journey of growing in faith lived out as love in action, one that wrestles with theologies of other persons and other religions, and one that refuses to sit idly by and watch the world around her suffer.Each chapter of the book examines a different aspect of Clinton’s political and religious life. Proceeding in chronological order, the book begins with her adolescent years, where the United Methodist influence of Don Jones moulded her faith. Proceeding through her time as First Lady of Arkansas and of the United States, Smith captures how in this position, Clinton used her faith time and time again to enact bold legislation—particularly when it came to the rights of children and access to better education and healthcare. Proceeding then through her time as a senator and secretary of state, Smith’s best analysis of Clinton is in the 2016 presidential run. Here, Smith contextualizes the complexity of Clinton’s lived, (sometimes un-)spoken, and embodied faith against Donald Trump’s repulsive reputation. Smith articulates well how misogyny and false rhetoric were rampant in the election cycle of 2016 eventually leading to her loss.A few things that this book does not do well are very particular to United Methodist scholarship. Smith does not capitalize ‘The’ in ‘The United Methodist Church’, a pet peeve of any United Methodist scholar. His work does not ground Clinton’s faith and politics in the long line of Methodist women who have engaged politically because of the same theological motivations of Wesley. Some of this context would have helped situate Clinton’s faith as a Methodist woman who is living into the true call of Wesley.I would recommend this book for those who are looking to learn about how the Methodist faith compels a person to act politically, for anyone interested in United Methodism and American politics, or for anyone interested in how politics and religion are understood and practised from a woman’s perspective. Overall, this is a fantastic work that adds much needed nuance to the life, ministry, and public witness of Hillary Rodham Clinton, while also helping Methodists understand how our faith is lived out in the public realm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".