South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has had a lot to say about religion during his campaign in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, stressing that Republicans don’t have the market cornered on faith. And the 37-year-old Democrat, in an interview taped on Monday, May 6 and aired on NBC’s “The Today Show” the following day, asserted that many economic and social policies of the Trump Administration are not compatible with biblical teachings.
Buttigieg, during the interview, noted that he has been trying to convince voters that they should not be “seeing religion as a kind of cudgel as if God belonged to a political party.” And he added that even if God did have a party affiliation, “I can’t imagine it would be the one that sent the current president into the White House.”
Although Buttigieg is not a Christian fundamentalist — unlike the far-right evangelists who President Donald Trump has been pandering to — he is a Mainline Protestant and has described himself as a churchgoing Episcopalian. And he told “The Today Show” that caring for the economically disadvantaged is an important part of Christianity.
Buttigieg emphasized that what Americans are seeing in the White House under Trump’s presidency is “so different than what I hear in scripture when I am in church.”
The South Bend mayor elaborated, “I hear about taking care of the marginalized and defending the weak and supporting the poor and visiting the prisoner and welcoming the stranger and humility and decency. These are the things that are taught in Sunday schools around this country, and so, the idea that that is the property of the Republican Party — especially this Republican Party and some of the choices they have made in recent years — it just doesn’t add up to me.”
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