Shillady said Clinton could have talked about her faith more during the campaign, but largely blamed commentators for ignoring that aspect of her identity. “It’s been there all along,” he said. “The general public didn’t necessarily want to accept the fact that she’s a Christian because there’s so many critics out there about the Clintons.” Kristin Du Mez, a professor at Calvin College who is working on a book about Clinton’s faith, agreed. “When I would hear Hillary speak, knowing that she was a Methodist, I just heard so many resonances—about education, about women’s rights, about the importance of community,” she said. “Because of that, it was just baffling to me that so many other Americans not only didn’t know she was Methodist, but didn’t accept that she was Christian.”

Clinton might argue that her politics were the ultimate expression of her faith. Methodists helped lead the early 19th-century Social Gospel movement, a faith-based campaign for greater aid to the poor and vulnerable. “Historically, Methodists have been very comfortable talking about policy issues in terms of their faith,” said Heath Carter, a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. But “for them … it’s possible to talk about the reasons why you might support a policy without specifically citing theological doctrines.” As Shillady put it, Clinton “doesn’t wear her religion on her sleeve, she just practices it. She follows the edict of what’s attributed to St. Francis: ‘Preach the gospel always, and if you need to, use words.’”

Shillady insists his book is not intended to be political. “It’s an inspirational book,” he said. “I do not believe that she encouraged me to write this book in any way to change the image of her. She really found [the devotionals] so helpful to her in the midst of the contentious campaign that she felt that people would find some hope … from it.” Perhaps it’s inspirational literature fit for an age of toxic partisanship: Tucked among the passages on hope, blessings, and prayer are subtle shots at Trump, like a tweet bragging about his court defeats on the travel ban or a call for him to step up and condemn the wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers earlier this year. Shillady paraphrased the theologian Karl Barth, saying he wrote with “a newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other”; he wanted to show that he was crafting the devotionals in response to current events. But many of the news clippings and tweets peppered in the margins date from after the conclusion of the project. They seem carefully curated to vindicate not just Clinton’s faithfulness, but her political record as well.

Once a politician has spent as many years in the public eye as Clinton has, always trailed by a faint cloud of real or imagined scandal, it becomes impossible to distinguish the authentic from the tightly controlled public image. It’s ironic that Clinton has chosen this period in her life—on the heels of failure, fading out of public life—to celebrate a part of herself that she cherishes, just as millions of other Americans cherish their faith. Perhaps, after being unwilling to wield her faith as a voter-recruitment tool, she’s willing to sacrifice her privacy in a final bid for public redemption.