Does Clint believe in a hereafter?

[-robert]

Dear Members,

  Has anyone heard or read of Clint's beliefs (if any) regarding what people experience after they die? We know he's very bright, so anything he has to say about it would carry a lot of weight with me.

[KC]

You'll have to ask him yourself. And this is, I believe, an issue on which a person's intelligence should carry no weight at all.

[-robert]

You're right.

[_Clintan_]

Well, he's a Christian isn't he?

[KC]

The following is an excerpt from Richard Schickel's 1996 authorized biography, Clint Eastwood. It describes an incident in Eastwood's childhood during the war; he'd have been about twelve or thirteen.

He did, however, rebel against conventional piety—very early and, in part, because of his hardworking life and his dad's. During the war, Clinton Sr. was obliged to give up his agreeable life as a jewelry salesman. He was classified 1-A in the draft, and knew that if he was called up his family, with no savings to fall back upon, would be devastated. His only choice was to get a job in a vital defense industry. So he applied for work in a shipyard-not knowing "one end of a boat from the other," Ruth laughs—and somehow got taken on as a pipe fitter.

The pay was excellent, but the hours were long and exhausting, as he pointed out to his son one day when Clint asked him why he did not join the rest of the family when they trekked off to church on Sunday. "It's my only day off," the elder Eastwood said simply. Clint thought that over and replied, "Well, it's my only day off, too." As a matter of fact, he didn't even have that day entirely to himself, since he had to be up at dawn working his paper route. "Well, then don't go;" said his dad. "There's all kinds of ways to get a feeling of God, however [He] exists for you."

This squared with Clint's instincts. The Bible stories he had listened to in various Sunday schools had never appealed to him. They seemed terribly remote, and they struck him as distressingly violent, too—"the whole idea of religion based upon impaling somebody, the whole center, torture and torment." Critics of Eastwood's subsequent screen career, marked by so many bloody confrontations, may make what irony they care to out of this, but he says these views had begun to take shape even before this conversation, when he found himself contrasting the discomfort Christian myth stirred in him with the experience of visiting Yosemite National Park with his family.

"You looked down into that valley, without too many people around," he says, "and, boy, that was to me a religious experience." And not an uncommon one for a person of his birthright. "Born again," the naturalist John Muir wrote in his diary upon seeing the same sight for the first time. This Pacific Rim Transcendentalism, a belief that nature in the several majestic aspects that California presents it, is the ultimate source of spiritual renewal widely shared by its citizens and has remained a major force in determining the way Clint has lived his adult life.

As far as I know, that is the only public statement Clint has made about his religious beliefs.