Pete Buttigieg shows how to campaign on values in the age of Trump
By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
April 4 at 10:15 AM
One of the most horrifying spectacles of the Trump era is the moral and spiritual sell-out of evangelical Christians who have made a Faustian bargain with President Trump. They condone or ignore his alleged sexual predation, bigotry, cruelty, lies, abject materialism and egomania. For some judicial appointments, they not only tolerate a host of non-Christian qualities but deify him, becoming the most devoted foot soldiers in the Trump cult. (These were the people who vilified President Bill Clinton for sexual immorality and decided that Jeb Bush wasn’t sufficiently supportive of the pro-life movement.)
Thanks to Trump, his evangelical excuse-mongers and his right-wing media chorus, the Republican Party has become a mostly male, white-grievance party, which is indifferent to real discrimination against women and minorities, to trauma inflicted on migrant children, to those who may lose health-care coverage — really to anyone who is not a devoted Trump fan. The question for the party is no longer whether something is conservative or even good for Americans (or true!), but whether a position helps Trump. It’s idolatry plain and simple.
Into this vacuum of values and faith steps savvy Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
During a remarkable interview with USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, Buttigieg explained, “The left is rightly committed to a separation of church and state . . . but we need to not be afraid to invoke arguments that are convincing on why Christian faith is going to point you in a progressive direction.” Not since the civil rights movement has the left truly embraced faith as a motivation and justification for policies toward the powerless. He continued:
When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works. And what we have now is this exaltation of wealth and power, almost for its own sake, that in my reading of Scripture couldn’t be more contrary to the message of Christianity. So I think it’s really important to carry a message (to the public), knitting together a lot of groups that have already been on this path for some time, but giving them more visibility in the public sphere.
That’s an effective nonparochial statement that non-Christians and even nonbelievers can embrace.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/04/buttigieg-shows-how-campaign-values-evangelicals-have-only-themselves-blame/?utm_term=.68fa345880b2
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