Just in time for Easter comes Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. Married and gay. Catholic turned Episcopalian. A social justice progressive who speaks easily about his faith and God, as Democrats rarely do.
Just in time for uncomfortable family get-togethers this Sunday, Buttigieg is driving home the hypocrisy of church-going conservative white Christians, evangelical and Catholic, who still support a president whose policies go against Christianity at almost every turn. (Why just “white” Christians? Because black Christians barely support Trump at all).
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But progressive evangelicals like Sojourners magazine’s Jim Wallis, who’s long argued that Trump supporters can’t be Christ supporters too, sees this Buttigieg moment as a delicious and “wonderful irony.”
For years, he told me in an interview this week, “the religious right, the media, and parts of the secular left have agreed on one thing: All religion is right-wing, judgmental, and exclusionary. But it never has been.” Now all of a sudden, there’s a progressive Democrat talking unabashedly about Jesus, something the Trump right can’t now do, Wallis said, since Jesus is all about loving one another, especially the poor and outcast, and Trump is all about money, power, “building walls, and putting people in cages.” (Trump’s most notable public reference to a Bible verse — from “Two Corinthians” — was laughable.)