Posted on 05/02/2019 3:37:26 AM PDT by Gamecock
The race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States continues to intensify as energy builds from the almost weekly announcements of a new candidate vying for the nomination. Most recently, Vice President Joe Biden officially announced his candidacy for Commander and Chief. It came as no surprise, but now he is officially in.
The surprise in the race is a candidate who has captured the continued (and largely adoring) gaze of the media. His name appears relentlessly in the headlines from every major media outlet. He has become a national sensation—and he is a name that very few of us knew until just a few months ago.
He is Mayor of South Bend Indiana, Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg’s ascension to fame and popularity comes as an anomaly. In what political climate could a major contender for the Democratic Presidential Nomination be a 37-year-old mayor from a town in Indiana?
Buttigieg, however, perhaps represents a perfect composite of what so many Democratic voters long to see in a political candidate. First, Buttigieg is young—he represents a new wave of life and vitality in party who boasts candidates like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden who are age 77 and 76 respectively. Buttigieg also has a sharp mind, receiving his education from Harvard University and attaining the highest academic honor as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, gaining a degree in the highly acclaimed “Politics, Philosophy, and Economics” program. He was also a Lieutenant in the United States Navy and served on active duty in Afghanistan.
The mayor also speaks charismatically and exudes an uncommon confidence among enormous crowds and intense media interviews. Since his candidacy began, the media has depicted him as a progressive yet sensible candidate—he couples a very leftist agenda with civility, rationality, and a smile.
Pete Buttigieg is also openly gay and married to a man. Moreover, he is the only major Democratic candidate actively talking about his faith in God.
In short, Buttigieg is the very picture of a kind of diversity the Democratic Party longs to celebrate. Indeed, not only does Buttigieg represent the cherished diverse streams of liberal Democrats, he also comes across as nice—a virtue glaringly absent in much of the current political discourse.
Buttigieg packages his diverse and celebrated background with a neighborly, friendly, and optimistic attitude. His congenial disposition garners him a high likeability as well as respect from those who even disagree with the mayor on almost every major policy issue.
Add it all up and you have a media sensation around an anomalous and unlikely candidate for the nation’s highest office.
Despite the media buzz, when you look closely at Mayor Buttigieg, you find a very progressive candidate. Though he asserts himself as a sane alternative to the far left fringes of the Democratic Party, his moral issues are in lock step with the most progressive wings of the leftist agenda.
Buttigieg, as homosexual married to a man, zealously advocates for pro-LGBTQ issues. When it comes to issues of abortion, Buttigieg supports an abortion-on-demand system fully funded by the taxpayers of the United States. According to Buttigieg, women ought to have the right to secure an abortion for virtually any circumstance at any point during a pregnancy.
In addition to his policy proposals, Buttigieg’s peculiarity gravitates around his openly gay lifestyle coupled with the openness of his version of Christianity. He often mentions God and the role that God has played in his life. Buttigieg represents a new kind of candidate among the contenders for the Presidential nomination—contenders who are far more secular. Buttigieg declares himself as a candidate of a robust and active faith.
The national media has zeroed in on this unlikely contender for the White House and his religion. The Washington Post published an article with the headline, “Faith, not sexual orientation, is what’s most interesting about Buttigieg.” CNN offered a headline, “Buttigieg is a symbol for a rising Christian left.” Pete Wehner at The Atlantic wrote an article with the headline, “Pete Buttigieg’s very public faith is challenging assumptions.”
Most importantly, Kristen Powers for USA Today offered this headline: “Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s countercultural approach to Christianity is what America needs now.”
In the Washington Post article, Jennifer Rubin reported, “In a speech at an LGBTQ Victory Fund gathering… Pete, Buttigieg made headlines by talking about his coming out and his marriage. The South Bend, Ind., mayor spoke eloquently, but this wasn’t the most intriguing part of the speech. (What’s intriguing about his sexual orientation is that it’s not such a big to-do.) What was fascinating was that he wasn’t talking about faith as a ploy to get religious voters’ support in that setting.”
Rubin then cites an article by USA today, which states, “Jack Jacobson, an openly-gay member of the D. C. State Board of Education who attended the Victory Fund brunch, said Buttigieg’s openness about his faith is part of what makes him an authentic candidate. ‘He talked about god in a room that’s probably full of atheists. That’s What I am,’ Jacobson said. ‘He does it unabashedly and in a way that doesn’t come across as threatening, dismissive or negative.’”
Yet, Buttigieg did indeed take direct aim at Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence. Buttigieg told the crowd, “I wish that the Mike Pence’s of the world would understand… that if you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
While Buttigieg acknowledges the existence of a creator, he avows that his sexual identity exists as an extension of the creator’s will—God made him that way. This is a common argument from LGBTQ activists that now rings louder with the candidacy of Buttigieg.
The argument, however, in no way squares with biblical orthodoxy or the teaching of Scripture.
Yet, Buttigieg demands that evangelical Christians ‘evolve’ their understanding of holy Scripture. The biblically orthodox interpretation of sexuality represents an antiquated morality from a culturally dated book. In Buttigieg’s view, we ought to keep the universal principles but jettison the culturally and socially inconvenient passages that do not square with our modern, moral ideology. Christians must, in short, redefine biblical sexuality in unbiblical terms.
Buttigieg’s argument presses Christians to see homosexuality and LGBTQ identity as a gift from the Creator. Failure to evolve and to adopt an understanding of the Bible freed from the pre-modern worldview puts Christians on the wrong side of history
An article in USA Today focuses on Buttigieg’s indictment of Pence and his religious faith. Maureen Groppe writes: “It’s unusual for Democratic presidential candidates to talk about faith as often as Buttigieg does. It’s groundbreaking that he uses his marriage to another man to illustrate his personal relationship with God.”
Indeed, it is groundbreaking, but not because of a massive political shift. It is groundbreaking because of a massive theological shift, which predates the political rise of Pete Buttigieg.
In her article for the USA Today, Kristen Powers writes, “Does the country need an awakening of the Christian left? Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg thinks so. Mayor Pete, as he is affectionately called, is having a moment with a first quarter fundraising haul of $7 million and a third place showing in an Iowa poll at 11%.” Then, Powers records, “He has also stood out as a devoted Christian who is speaking against the dominance of the religious right in the public square. As Buttigieg told me in an interview Friday, ‘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.’ Buttigieg criticized right-wing Christians for ‘saying so much about what Christ said so little about, and so little about what he said so much about.’”
Powers applies Buttigieg’s formula to the evangelical conviction regarding abortion. According to Powers, Jesus never mentioned abortion at all, thereby making it a dubious issue for Christians to espouse. This line of reasoning applies to other issues like sexual orientation, gender identity, and the entire spectrum of LGBTQ rights.
Then, Powers writes this astounding claim as she reflects on her interview with Buttigieg: “But nonconservative Christians generally do not receive the same level of news media attention as the religious right, despite their deep understanding of Scripture and thriving faith traditions. Because most journalists are secular, they can be gullible in looking to the religious right as arbiters of biblical interpretation, especially as it relates to hot-button cultural issues. Because of this, many Americans aren’t even aware of the rich tradition of progressive Christianity.”
Powers makes several key errors in this line of reasoning. First, she isolates the religious right without acknowledging that conservative Christian convictions on abortion and marriage and sexuality are what all Christians have believed for two millennia. Moreover, she criticizes conservative Christians for biblical interpretation on moral issues while praising the progressive ‘interpretations’ offered by Mayor Buttigieg. The problem with this, however, is that Mayor Buttigieg nowhere offered an exposition or interpretation of Scripture. He merely speaks in generalities, as if his hermeneutical claims are canon.
Try as he may, Buttigieg and progressive, liberal Protestantism cannot contort the Scriptures and make Jesus an advocate for abortion and gay marriage. To do so means that entire passages of the Bible must be ripped out of their context or denied completely. To adopt Buttigieg’s interpretation of the Bible requires an entire denial of God’s plan of revelation and the interconnectedness of each book of the Bible. Progressive Christianity necessitates replacing Christianity with an entirely new religion, refashioned in a progressive image more palatable for modernity.
Yet, what makes the Buttigieg phenomenon astounding is the cultural mood—the culture wants to talk about faith. Buttigieg’s faith, however, has no objective referent; it is a subjective faith in a false god.
But the faith that saves is not faith in faith; it is faith in Christ. Salvation comes by faith alone in Christ alone.
Yet, when the media speaks of Pete Buttigieg as an individual of faith, we must ask to what object does Buttigieg direct his faith? Moreover, what undergirds Buttigieg’s claim of faith?
Most notably, Buttigieg subscribes to Liberation theology—specifically, he espouses LGBTQ Liberation Theology. Indeed, Pete Buttigieg attended a Catholic high school as a boy and went to a Catholic university. His father, a member of the Notre Dame faculty, ascribed to a Marxist ideology. As Buttigieg speaks in his book, his father was a “man of the left.” Now, Buttigieg holds his membership at an Episcopalian church that certainly espouses the tenets of Liberation Theology. This theology replaces the authority of Scripture with the authority of human experience. Moreover, it understands sin not as a transgression against the law and character of God, but as the oppression of a minority by a majority class.
While the media and Mayor Pete claim to hold to a vibrant Christian faith, we must simply ask, “What is the faith and what is its object?”
Henry Olsen wrote a column for The Washington Post with the headline, “Conservative Christians should respond to Buttigieg the way they are commanded: With Love.” Olsen believes that Christians ought not to “cast aspersions on Buttigieg’s faith.”
Indeed, Christians should abound with Christ-like love and charity. This is a hallmark of Christ’s disciples who are filled with the Holy Spirit. However, Christians must never apologize for questioning the content and beliefs of someone’s faith—especially when that individual self-identifies as a Christian. We must judge faith by its content, not its sincerity. Indeed, we cannot judge nor should we doubt the sincerity of Mayor Buttigieg; we cannot see into his heart.
We can, however, and must analyze the operational worldview of a major contender for the White House. This marks the responsibility of not only Christians, but every individual working through the ideas and character of each of these candidates. This is not to cast aspersions on an individual’s faith but to judge its validity as a worldview governed by the Scriptures.
Finally, Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg wrote an article with the headline, “What Would Jesus Do? Pete Buttigieg Has No Idea.” Ponnuru argues, “Pete Buttigieg… is one of the many candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, but that’s not his only long shot bid. He also wants to claim Christianity for contemporary progressive politics.” Indeed, Buttigieg has said as much when on a CNN townhall, he argued that Christianity, rightly understood, naturally produces progressive politics.
This is the great danger inherent in the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg. He does not merely espouse a liberal political ideology—instead, he contends that his Christian faith leads him to no other conclusion other than a progressive agenda. He has made a theological argument for a political reality. He has reinserted liberal theology as the only viable way of reading the Scriptures. He posits a place for religion in the public square, but only a religion in line with liberal theology.
Now enters the cultural pressure directed against biblical Christians. The argument by Buttigieg amounts to nothing less the coercive capitulation—a capitulation on deep issues of eternal significance. His candidacy demands evangelical Christians to see the light of progressive reasoning and reject the antiquated dogma of a bygone era. If, and only if evangelicals capitulate on issues like marriage, gender, sexuality, and abortion will we have a seat at the table of political discourse.
The candidacy of Pete Buttigieg demands our attention. Why? Not so much because of his candidacy as an individual but the ideas he espouses. He attempts to radically shift the understanding of Christianity away from its historic and biblical position.
Buttigieg may quickly drop in the polls as fast as he ascended. That is the nature of American Presidential politics. What will not depart from the political scene, however, is the idea enshrined in Buttigieg’s campaign.
The left in America desperately wants a leftist faith as its handmaiden. They want (and even demand) a new and “progressive” Christianity.
Pete Buttigieg the candidate may fail in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the secular society has no plans to give up on its goal—to see that that the arc of Christianity must bend towards its own “progressive” goals.
Mayor Pete is just the latest prophet of this new religion. He won’t be the last.
In the ‘modern American’ mode it is politically incorrect to call these degenerates what they. The sexual degenerate is a dead soul (sorry ‘Pete’, you’re an abomination in God’s eyes). As such there is no actual moral compass that can point to righteousness in behavior or thought. The end of such degenerate minds is ALWAYS destruction. ‘Pete’ may pretend to have faith in God but his actions spit in the face of God and Christ. And degenerates like ‘Pete’ are unable to see their destitution. The father of lies owns them.
I’m Catholic, and you are not wrong.
Our Protestant brothers and sisters have many sincere and profound disagreements with us over certain things. But as the largest single Christian denomination the Catholic Church played an important role as a bulwark against social decay.
It’s deconstruction by Pope Frankie is not a good thing for any other Christians.
So I agree with you, metmom, that the Catholic Church has long had a problem with "activists" and progressivists/modernists.
Not just for 1,000 years, but for 2,000 years.
Vatican 2 would not have been possible if the mechanism implementing it weren’t already in place.
Some Catholics seem to think it was the cause of the church’s problems.
Rather, it’s a symptom of what was already there.
I was responding to another poster.
Follow my comment back to the one I replied to.
I am great admirer of Albert Mohler, I find him to be an excellent thinker and writer. It's interesting that he defends his point be referring to Christianity's "historic and biblical" position.
To say "Historic and biblical" is to tap into the robust resources of "Scripture and Tradition."
I have seen him arguing, persuasively as well, on the basis of Natural Law, and in this, too, he is in the right.
A lot of the current hot-button "marriage, gender, sexuality, and family" questions are not addressed in Scripture and were hardly to be dreamed of in Biblical times
Yes, you can answer these with general reference to non-specific Biblical "values," not actually commanded nor enumerated in the text, but it's tricky: progressives support socialism, for instance, as a "biblical value." We may argue back, citing "values," but they'll feel justified in arguing back at you, citing "values" and throwing in Acts 6:32-33 to boot.
However, Scriptural Revelation + Christian historic positions (Tradition) + Natural Law (law that can be arrived at by reasoning from evidence and logic) makes a very strong case indeed.
Albert Mohler seems willing to go there. That's why he's such an interesting man to watch.
The father of lies doesn’t own them yet. They can still repent as have others before them. The chances of them repenting is vanishingly small if people abandon them.
Yes, which is why during the Monaca Lewinsky scandal Bill made sure he went to church - as though he thinks we are stupid enough to absolve him because he sat in a pew one day.
And I have seen this trend in publications like Christianity today. I stopped reading it because I got sick of its leftward tilt.
You guys in the US call it by another name, but in Canada the Anglican Church has gone full tilt progressive, kicking its members out of the church who oppose the LGBT movement.
I have to, as a Protestant, confess that Catholic families I have known personally were very faithful and traditional - at least in my neck of the woods.
No such thing as “Progressive” Christianity. You either are a Christian, or you worship the world and sodomy.
Willy had to borrow his secretary’s Bible to carry for show.
Whenever I see Hillary or Bill hold a bible (like at McCain’s funeral) I half expect a bolt of lighting to come down and turn them to ash.
That’s true; our Episcopal church is about as nuts as they come. If it’s in the Bible, the Episcopal church will do the opposite.
Thanks, and I’ll give credit where it is due: When I attended the March for Life years ago, I was very impressed by the number of Protestant denominations there. Until then, I thought it was a “Catholic” event - and it wasn’t.
We’ve certainly had heresies since the beginning - I’ll concede that.
Yes, the “theologians” who twisted the Church teachings have always been around - but the Council put the official stamp of approval on a lot of their BS for the first time. I suspect most Catholics who blame Vatican II don’t believe it was the inception of the problem.
Buttigieg demands that evangelical Christians ‘evolve’ their understanding of holy Scripture. The biblically orthodox interpretation of sexuality represents an antiquated morality from a culturally dated book. In Buttigieg’s view, we ought to keep the universal principles but jettison the culturally and socially inconvenient passages that do not square with our modern, moral ideology. Christians must, in short, redefine biblical sexuality in unbiblical terms.
Buttigieg’s argument presses Christians to see homosexuality and LGBTQ identity as a gift from the Creator. Failure to evolve and to adopt an understanding of the Bible freed from the pre-modern worldview puts Christians on the wrong side of history
An article in USA Today focuses on Buttigieg’s indictment of Pence and his religious faith. Maureen Groppe writes: “It’s unusual for Democratic presidential candidates to talk about faith as often as Buttigieg does. It’s groundbreaking that he uses his marriage to another man to illustrate his personal relationship with God.”
Indeed, it is groundbreaking, but not because of a massive political shift. It is groundbreaking because of a massive theological shift, which predates the political rise of Pete Buttigieg.
what makes the Buttigieg phenomenon astounding is the cultural mood—the culture wants to talk about faith. Buttigieg’s faith, however, has no objective referent; it is a subjective faith in a false god.
Indeed. The definitive and original source of the word "Christian" is Scripture, which describes a people who upheld the universal basic moral laws of Scripture, and its principles. In which we see that God made man and women distinctively different yet uniquely compatible and complementary, and only joined them together in marriage - as the Lord Jesus Himself specified - and only condemned homosexual relations wherever they are manifestly dealt with .
Yet there is still room at the cross for all who will come to God in repentance and faith, and trust in the Divine Son of God sent by the Father, the risen Lord Jesus, to save them on His account, by His sinless shed blood, and thus be baptized and live for Him. Acts 10:36-47
According to Powers, Jesus never mentioned abortion at all, thereby making it a dubious issue for Christians to espouse. This line of reasoning applies to other issues like sexual orientation, gender identity, and the entire spectrum of LGBTQ rights.
Which is absurd, for it not only relies on the “red letter hermeneutic” - that only what Christ personally is recorded as saying in the gospels constitutes His teaching, but also rests on the untenable premise that only what Christ explicitly specifically stated qualifies as a condemnation or that which is unlawful.
Based upon that ignorance or sophistry it can be said that the Lord Jesus never condemned everything from rape and incest to pederasty and bestiality (under your implicit presupposition that “fornications” is not specific enough) and other subsets of sins.
But requiring a explicit statement that something is specifically wrong is simply not how you determine what is taught, and the fact that Christ specified that it was male and female joined together in marriage (Mt. 19:4–6 - referencing Gn. 1:27; 2:24) leaves all other unions to be fornication.
(But I know you agree with all this.)
It is the distinctive Catholic tradition that are not manifest in the only wholly inspired substantive authoritative record of what the NT church believed (including how they understood the OT and gospels, which is Scripture, especially Acts thru Revelation) which is a problem.
No abortion, divorce, homosexuality, female clergy - all clearly laid out in Scripture.
But what a person or church does and fosters is the basis for determining what they believe, and you all were in worse moral condition at times in the past.
Cardinal Ratzinger observed,
"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution.“
"It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/)
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