Pete Buttigieg’s Strange Religious Pitch

God, according to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, does not belong to a political party or have a preferred candidate… but if He did, that candidate would be Pete Buttigieg.

During Thursday’s Democratic Debate, the Mayor of South Bend went on a digression:

We’ve got to talk about one other thing, because the Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion. Now, our party doesn’t talk about that as much, largely for a very good reason, which was, we are committed to the separation of church and state and we stand for people of any religion and people of no religion. But we should call out hypocrisy when we see it. And for a party that associates itself with Christianity, to say that it is OK to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.

Now maybe Buttigieg is unaware that a president of his own party also put children in cages, but ignorance is not exactly a trait that one who is running for president on his alleged intellectual brilliance wants to be associated with. We know that Obama put children in cages because we weren’t born yesterday, his DHS Secretary unapologetically told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday about it, and we have photographic evidence of it.

So, what is Pete Buttigieg suggesting Christian immigration policy be? On one hand he says children should not be separated from their families. Okay, but then on the other hand he says putting children in cages is not acceptable. Is he saying that we give these families a date and say “Okay come back on Month X Day Y for your hearing” knowing full well that many won’t show up for their court hearing? With Democrats proposing the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings, this is, whether Democrats want to admit it or not, tantamount to endorsing open borders.

There’s plenty of room for debate in Christian circles about what immigration policy should be, because scriptures do not provide an answer to the question. They certainly do not mandate open borders, however. It is almost humorous how many people think the Bible provides an answer for the question “What should the United States’ immigration policy be in 2019?”

Those, like Buttigieg, who favor a more open immigration system usually rely on a historically problematic interruption of the Nativity Story (Mary and Joseph were escaping from one part of the Roman Empire to another, not from one country to another).

Asylum has also been trivialized. To be granted asylum, your government needs to have determined that you belong to some entity, such as religious or political affiliation, that they deem to be undesirable to the extent that threaten your life. It is not simply “I want a better life” or “my home town/country has high crime rates.” Since gangs and drug cartels are not vying for state power, claims of asylum are not well founded, to put it mildly.

Beyond immigration there are plenty of Christians who are not members of the religious left, but who are not enthused with Donald Trump — his policies or his personal history and character flaws — or his grifter supporters such as Jerry Falwell Jr. Some are conservatives, some are not, but they all think it was a mistake for Evangelicals to tie in being a Christian with being a Republican. Yes, the Democrats have increasingly gone completely bat guano crazy on abortion, but Christians are supposed to believe there are more important things in life than who wields the levers of legislative and executive power.

These are the voters Buttigieg is trying to appeal to, but is trying to appeal to them by not appealing to them. These voters likely don’t care, at least from a political perspective, that Buttigieg is married to another man. If they did, they would probably already be in Trump’s corner. But these voters also aren’t on the left for if they were they would already be in Buttigieg’s corner and despite his “authentic Christian” shtick, he has done nothing to appeal to them.

Buttigieg supports taxpayer funded abortion on-demand because it’s not his place as a politician to tell women what to do. When talking about abortion all of a sudden, any talk about religion becomes some creeping right-wing theocratic nightmare.

If you by all accounts a solid professional working relationship with Buttigieg as Governor of Indiana while he was Mayor of South Bend, despite your disagreements, he will burn that bridge in the hopes of advancing his long-shot presidential campaign.

He supports using the strong arm of the government to compel people, especially religious people, that they must participate in compelled speech and associations they don’t agree with. If you disagree with Pete Buttigieg, he does not care, he will be force you to bake the cake, supply the abortifacients, and subsidize the abortion.

Pete Buttigieg’s political talent is to advocate for radical, far-left ideas in a moderate tone of voice as the mayor of a medium sized city from the Midwest. His campaign, revolves around the premise that a Joe Biden: Return to Normal Campaign won’t work, indicates that he doesn’t hate Trump voters and wants to bring them back into the Democratic fold. But, Buttigieg does have an ire for people like Vice President Mike Pence and people like him who are steady Republicans and conservatives, who support Trump, claiming they aren’t real Christians.

There are a great many Christians who do not like Trump, but look at the Democratic Party and go “Yeah Trump’s awful, but have you seen the Democrats lately?” and so they bite the bullet, hold their nose, and support him. Buttigieg has billed himself as the candidate for these voters, a Democrat who religious voters can feel comfortable with, but he has not yet been willing to meet them where they are. It is as if he thinks saying “Trump = Bad” is enough to convince religious Americans who are skeptical of Democrats to suddenly vote for him.

It is one thing to say that Trump’s Christian followers are bad Christians, but if you are going to portray yourself as the authentic Christian and that good Christians should support you or your party, it is hard to take you seriously when you spend more time appealing to the hard-left intersectional subsets of the Democratic Party than Christians who have serious problems with Trump, but who would never, ever vote for a Democrat given the party’s current platform.

You can’t tell Christians who aren’t already Democrats that they have a moral obligation to vote for Democrats and then get upset at them when you made no effort to appeal to them.