Pete Buttigieg: Towards a Christian Left
If you’ve been following the budding 2020 election, you’ve probably heard of Pete Buttigieg—the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana—who is running for President. Apparently, his campaign has caught a bit of lightning: Buttigieg has appeared on countless talk shows and major events with an outsider message uniquely connected to his personal background. Buttigieg, if elected, would be the youngest President ever at age 39, and America’s first openly gay Commander-in-Chief.
To a certain degree, “Mayor Pete” has built a campaign around his identity, arguing that America, in essence, needs a millennial president to bring a youthful vigor and reform mindset.
However, there is another aspect of his suddenly popular campaign that intrigues me even more, which ties back to religion. For context, it’s worth examining the often misunderstood role of Christianity in American political history. Some, including certain members of the Exeter community, often subscribe to a rather one-sided narrative—that at every turn, Christianity has stood more or less as an enemy to progress, that organized religion subverts freedom and that it was only with the dawn of secular culture that progress began. Such a narrative is naive, to say the least, and fundamentally misconstrues the role of religion in politics. In reality, there have been Christians on both sides of plenty of major issues. Sure, segregationists and bigots favored the usage of extremely-hardline “Christian” rhetoric. But civil rights campaigners invoked God just as much, claiming him for their side of a cosmic struggle bending towards justice. Similarly, Christians, in particular Catholic immigrants, formed a formidable part of the New Deal coalition and other movements for total economic justice.
The notion of a religious right was actually popularized around the 1980s and is basically nothing but another Reaganism; in essence, it sought to build a political coalition around two issues—abortion and same-sex marriage. The marketing was swift and severe: one could not be Christian and vote for a Democrat, the Reaganites argued. It became unimportant that Reagan repeatedly invoked language that demonized the poor in order to more or less rob them with widespread deregulation. It became unimportant that Reagan was actively involved in the funding of Latin American interventions. It became unimportant that Reagan slashed the top tax rate while raising taxes on the middle class eleven times. In the face of the murder of children, they contend, how can any of that matter?
In case you couldn’t tell already, I’m a card-carrying liberal. And if you’ve ever had a conversation with me, I’ve probably brought up my Catholic background. I see my identities very much intertwined—I worship a poor Judean who gave out free healthcare, ultimately to die an innocent victim of the death penalty. It lends credence to the notion of a religious left—a loose coalition of individuals who see in Christ’s message a powerful call to social justice, particularly for the poor and oppressed. We see in the Gospel a call for the liberation of the poor, the marginalized, the hungry, the victimized.
Unfortunately, this Gospel message has been pushed to the side. In its place, a group of ideologues has attempted to hijack political Christianity and transform it into a two-issue movement. Now, I contend that one can absolutely be both Christian and conservative. As difficult as I may find it to rationalize voting for someone in favor of capital punishment, the very sentence that killed their Lord and Saviour, there is still a valid theological argument for a conservative Christianity. But, no singular party should maintain a stranglehold on religious dialogue in America.
This is where “Mayor Pete” comes in. You see, Buttigieg lives in the same state as Vice President Mike Pence, who has repeatedly invoked “Christian” rhetoric to justify conversion therapy and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Despite coming under fire, as one might expect, Buttigieg has refused to back down, articulating his religion in a beautiful reconciliation of his faith and his sexuality in a speech at the LGBTQ Victory Fund Brunch: "That's the thing I wish the Mike Pence’s of the world would understand: that if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator." In that very same speech, Buttigieg said that his marriage to another man has actually brought him closer to his own God and spirituality.
It’s hard to understate how transformative that message is. Buttigieg’s frank and direct approach to religion is what Democrats need in order to break a conservative monopoly on religious politics. I worship a God who preached to the poor, to lepers, to the outcasts, to tax collectors, to prostitutes, to outsiders, to ethnic minorities, to a people marginalized as one of the poorest regions of the Empire. It heartens me to see that I’m not the only one.