Chelsea Clinton's decade-old claim that she left a Baptist church as a child because they were talking to her about abortion in Sunday school when she was 6 years old has prompted fresh backlash.
On Thursday, pro-life news outlet LifeNews drew more than 1 million views on X for reposting its 2016 story about the only daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushing back against those who question her family's faith.
"My mother is very deeply a person of faith," Chelsea is quoted as saying in her reported comments at the 2016 fundraiser for her mother, which first came second-hand in the "Page Six" gossip column of the New York Post. "It is deeply authentic and real for my mother, and it guides so much of her moral compass, but also her life's work."
Chelsea, whose mother was raised Methodist, reportedly claimed she joined her mother's denomination after leaving the Baptist church over abortion, even before her father. She said she found it "quite insulting sometimes when people say to my mom, my dad or me ... that they question our faith."
"I was raised in a Methodist church and I left the Baptist church before my dad did, because I didn't know why they were talking to me about abortion when I was 6 in Sunday school — that's a true story."
As in 2016, many interpreted the headline on the reposted LifeNews story — "Chelsea Clinton: I Left the Church When I Was 6 Because It Opposed Abortion" — to mean that Chelsea decided to leave the Baptists because of her abortion views at age 6.
"How does a 6-year-old child know what abortion is?" asked Mary Vought, who serves as vice president of strategic communications at The Heritage Foundation. "Because her parents told her abortion is all about freedom rather than baby killing!" replied author Xi Van Fleet.
"Chelsea Clinton loves the murder of babies in the womb because her mom taught her to. That very same mom who is now giving us lectures on empathy and Christianity," conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey said, echoing many other X posts that speculated Chelsea Clinton had been led into supporting abortion by her parents.
In 2016, Snopes labeled LifeNews' headline as misleading, noting that Chelsea Clinton did not technically say she left the church because of her abortion views at age 6, but rather that she came to object that the topic was being discussed in a Sunday school class with 6-year-olds.
"I recognized that there were many expressions of faith that I don't agree with and feel [are] quite antithetical to how I read the Bible," Chelsea Clinton said in 2016. "But I find it really challenging when people who are self-professed liberals kind of look askance at my family's history."
In 2018, Chelsea described herself as a "deeply religious person," and appealed to her Methodist faith to claim that if the U.S. reverted back to a pre-Roe v. Wade society where abortions are banned, it would be "un-Christian." In 2024, the United Methodist Church approved a petition affirming abortion rights while pledging "solidarity with those who seek reproductive health care."
Though raised a Southern Baptist, Bill Clinton drifted from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) after delivering a tearful farewell in 1993 to Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had been a member since 1980. He repeatedly clashed with denominational leadership amid the adultery and pro-abortion policies of his presidency.
In 1996, the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, then under the leadership of Dr. Richard Land and known as the Christian Life Commission, rebuked Clinton for suggesting God led him to veto a partial-birth abortion ban after he prayed about it.
Amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said Clinton dragged the nation into a "moral disaster" because of his "public display of serial sin," and could claim to be a Southern Baptist "only because the congregation which holds his membership has failed to exercise any semblance of church discipline."
By the end of his presidency in 2001, when Chelsea was 20, Clinton no longer identified with the SBC.
