Check it out: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s faith in God was shaped by her grandmother’s hymns and the bedtime prayers from her gruff Navy father, the former secretary of state told thousands of Methodist women Saturday.
Clinton said she struggled as a young woman between her father’s insistence on self-reliance and her mother’s concern for compassion. She reconciled those in the Biblical story of Jesus instructing his disciples to feed 5,000 people with just five loaves of bread and two fish.
“The disciples come to Jesus and suggest they send away the people to find food to fend for themselves. But Jesus said, ‘No. You feed them,’” Clinton said. “He was teaching a lesson about the responsibility we all share.”
It was a personal speech from a woman considered the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president. And while the speech mostly steered clear of politics, she made the case on moral grounds for increasing the minimum wage and equalizing pay for men and women — two issues that have polarized Congress in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections.
Clinton’s remarks came at the quadrennial United Methodist Women’s Assembly, where 7,000 women gathered for three days of teaching, singing and service.
