Democrat Kirsten Powers Says Party's Politics was Her Religion Before Her Conversion
Former Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers, who worked in the Clinton administration, told Fox News on Sunday that she saw "Democratic politics" as her religion until she converted from atheism to Christianity a few years ago.
"I think my whole life had centered on Democratic politics," Powers said in an interview on Fox News. "I was very much in that bubble. I worked in the Clinton administration so I had all these friends from there, and then in Democratic politics in New York, so that's what we sort of bonded over - that was our religion, to a certain extent."
However, her conversion was also not easy, she indicated.
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"It was a real culture shock for me, and still sometimes is, honestly," she told host Howard Kurtz. "It was a world that was completely new to me. It was a world where most of the people I came in contact with were conservative. If I had a dollar for every time somebody said, 'I don't understand: how can you be a Democrat and be a Christian?' I'd be a millionaire."
She added: "I think what they meant by that was an orthodox Christian. If I had been somebody who was sort of 'Well, yes, I believe in God,' and wasn't too serious about it. But the fact that I was sort of this orthodox Christian - I felt a little bit like a fish out of water. I didn't feel very comfortable there. It was many years until I started meeting other people who were like me: very progressive-minded politically but also very conservative theologically."
Powers, a columnist with various newspapers, said Christians need to guard their image in the media. "The media is not the most Christian-friendly place in the world for the most part. At the same time, a lot of these Christians bring it on themselves," she suggested.
Powers worked in the Clinton administration for six years and rarely saw any open expressions of religiosity. Then she moved to New York to work in Democratic politics.
In a first-person account of her conversion, she wrote last month: "My world became aggressively secular. Everyone I knew was politically left-leaning, and my group of friends was overwhelmingly atheist."
She began to change as she dated a Christian man, with whom she visited the Upper East Side service of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York and heard Pastor Tim Keller speak.
While her boyfriend later broke up with Powers, circumstances gradually led her to put her faith in Jesus around 2006.
