Saint Hillary and the Religious Left

Summary

This file is a brief December 1994 polemical essay. Rothbard’s central thesis is that the modern left should be understood less as secular humanist than as a political-religious movement: a secularized, statist, egalitarian postmillennialism seeking to build a coercive “Kingdom of God on Earth.” The essay proceeds by first redefining the left’s spiritual genealogy, then locating that genealogy in northern Protestant and Methodist reform culture, and finally applying it to Hillary Clinton as the ideological embodiment of the Clinton administration.

For some time I have been hammering at the theme that the main cultural and political problem of our time is not “secular humanism.”

This opening reversal is the essay’s core conceptual move. Rothbard argues that secularism alone cannot explain the left’s historical energy; what matters is not unbelief but salvationist politics. He casts the left as animated by a transferred eschatology: mankind, through politics, bureaucracy, and reformist zeal, will remake society into an egalitarian order.

No: the hallmark and the fanatical drive of the left for these past centuries has been in devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a Kingdom of God on Earth.

The historical section compresses a sweeping genealogy into a few paragraphs. Rothbard traces this impulse to northern Protestant postmillennialism, especially among “Yankee” reformers, whose religious mission supposedly turned naturally into moral policing, abolitionism, temperance-style reform, and later economic collectivism. The key claim is that American progressivism inherited not merely policy preferences but a sacred mission of imposed redemption.

During the 1820s, the Protestant churches in the Northern states of the U.S. were taken over by a wave of post-millennial fanatics determined to impose on local, state, and federal governments, and even throughout the world, their own version of a theocratic statist KGE.

Rothbard’s treatment of Methodism is crucial because it supplies the bridge to Hillary Clinton. He presents the Social Gospel not as a benign Christian reform tradition but as the Protestant carrier of statist collectivism. Clinton’s Methodist identity, therefore, is not incidental biography but evidence in his argument that the religious left persists inside modern liberal politics.

The Yankees were driven by the fanatical conviction that they themselves could not achieve salvation unless they did their best to maximize everyone else’s: which meant, among other features, to devote their energies to instituting the sinless society of the KGE.

The essay then turns from broad religious history to contemporary polemic. Bill Clinton’s alleged invocation of “the Kingdom of God on earth” is treated as a revealing symptom, but Rothbard insists Hillary Clinton is the deeper ideological force. Drawing on Kenneth Woodward’s Newsweek profile, he reads her “old-fashioned Methodist” self-description as historically meaningful rather than merely pious or strategic.

But, as we all know, it is Hillary, not Slick Willie, who is the hard-core ideologue in the White House.

Rothbard’s final move is synthesis: nineteenth-century Methodist Social Gospel, twentieth-century Marxism, New Left radicalism, New Age spirituality, multiculturalism, and sexual liberation are fused into one hostile political formation. The essay’s relevance lies in this attempt to interpret late-twentieth-century American liberalism as a religious-political project rather than a secular administrative program.

But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left.

The style is deliberately inflammatory, using theological genealogy as political denunciation. Its scholarly interest is not in balanced historical documentation but in Rothbard’s libertarian diagnosis of reform politics as coercive salvationism. The essay’s enduring significance is its sharp formulation of a recurrent right-libertarian argument: that collectivist politics survives by transforming religious millennial hope into state power.