Buttigieg vs. Pence
Liberals have been yielding the high ground on religion for far too long. Maybe that's going to stop.
There are two ways to seek people's political support: You can lay out policy proposals to address the problems that concern them — like Medicare for All or a plan to cancel student debt — or you can show them that you're on their side by taking on the people that threaten or intimidate them.
It's not an either/or, of course. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has no trouble taking on the bankers who illegally foreclosed on your house while at the same time laying out policies that would stop them from foreclosing on someone else. Ultimately, a politician's willingness to fight for you in the public square will come to nothing if he or she doesn't also enact substantive changes after taking office.
But if you doubt the power of a pure I'll-stand-up-to-your-enemies message, you need look no farther back than 2016. Candidate Trump's policy proposals were often an incoherent mess. He said he'd replace ObamaCare something "fantastic" and "wonderful" that would take care of everybody. The government would pay for it, but it would neither raise your taxes or impinge on your freedom. (That's not a synopsis of his program; that's the whole program.) His foreign policy was both bellicose and promised an end to the endless wars. He was in favor of both LGBT rights and the religious right. He would simultaneously cut taxes, increase defense spending, and repay the national debt. He promised to build a wall, while his supporters argued among themselves about whether the wall would be literal or metaphorical.
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But whatever he might propose, and however he might contradict that proposal the next time he opened his mouth, one part of Trump's message was clear, and remains clear today: If you feel threatened by immigrants of color, by people who don't speak English, by scientists who think they're smarter than you, or by advocates of "political correctness" who tell you that you can't say this or do that any more, then Trump has your back. If you're sick of liberals calling you "racist" or "sexist", well, Trump glories in being called those names, and strikes back at the accusers twice as hard.
A week ago yesterday, in his own soft-spoken way, Pete Buttigieg did something similar: At the annual champagne brunch of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, he took on Vice President Mike Pence by name, and challenged the religious right not just politically, but morally and religiously. When his words got national attention and Pence answered (dishonestly), Buttigieg did not back down.
The message was clear: He's not intimidated by Mike Pence, so you don't need to be either. And if the "Mike Pences of this world" think that they own religion or Christianity or words like morality and freedom, then Pete Buttigieg has news for them.
The speech. His 19-minute speech is worth listening to in its entirety, if you have the time. He is talking to a friendly audience of those who fight for LGBTQ rights, so it may not be as immediately courageous as, say, Catholic JFK's speech to the protestant ministers of Houston. But in an era when everything is recorded, everything gets out, and your words live on forever in hard drives all over the world, it is quite striking.
We often hear the term "gay pride". Buttigieg's speech is a clear and simple assertion of gay pride. He's not claiming to be better than straight people, but he's also not apologizing for his sexuality or hoping that critics will ignore it. He is proud of his life, proud of his marriage, and proud of the spouse he married. He will not keep Chasten hidden and hope that his opponents will be gracious enough not to bring him up. Instead, Buttigieg talks about meeting Chasten, and adds:
One of the best things about these last couple months has been watching America meet him too, and start to fall for Chasten just like I did.
But he then goes on to talk about his struggle to accept his sexual orientation.
When I was younger, I would have done anything to not be gay. When I began to halfway realize what it meant that I felt the way I did about people I saw in the hallways in school or the dining halls in college, it launched in me something I can only describe as a kind of war. And if that war would have been settled on the terms that I would have wished for when I was 15, or 20, or frankly even 25, I would not be standing here. If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water.
It is a hard thing to think about. It's hard to face the truth that there were times in my life when if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.
The room is completely silent at this point. What he is presenting is the religious right's fantasy: that homosexuality is curable, and that 15-year-olds like Buttigieg could be offered the chance to sign up for some kind of conversion therapy (which is now illegal in 16 states, partly because it doesn't work, and partly because forcing a child into such therapy is believed to increase the risk of suicide). The fantasy says that these men will be grateful later, when they look back on a life that includes wives and naturally-conceived children. But Buttigieg represents the polar opposite of that fantasy: Looking back on his life, he is grateful that he didn't get that choice.
The real reason it's so hard to think about is that if I had had the chance to do that, I would never have found my way to Chasten. The best thing in my life, my marriage, might not have happened at all. … How dark the thought, that the man that I admire and care about, and love sharing with the rest of the country, and even more importantly, can't wait to share one day with raising children, might not have been part of my life at all. Thank God there was no pill. Thank God there was no knife.
And "thank God" is not just figure of speech. It segues Buttigieg into religion, and into the moral issue of marriage equality.
It's a moral issue because being married to Chasten has made me a better human being, because it has made me more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware, and more decent. My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man. And yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.
He explains exactly what "closer to God" means to him.
You may be religious and you may not. But if you are, and you are also queer, and you have come through the other side of a period of wishing that you weren't, then you know that that message, this idea that there's something wrong with you, is a message that puts you at war not only with yourself, but with your Maker.
And speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that's the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you've got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my Creator.
The response. This is a story and an argument that many straight Americans have never heard: Accepting your sexual orientation or gender identity or some other aspect of yourself (that you didn't choose and can't un-choose) can be part of a journey of coming to terms with God.
The religious right will tell you that accepting homosexuality means rejecting God. (In a Fox News piece responding to Buttigieg, Log Cabin Republican Rob Smith says precisely that: "those on the left … have been very successful at convincing a generation of young gays and lesbians to reject God in favor of their cult of intersectionality and identity politics.") It will tell you that gays want to tear down Christianity, and that the point of same-sex marriage is to undermine marriage in general. But Buttigieg is saying the exact opposite: Accepting how you were made is part of accepting God's creation.
Buttigieg is challenging not the politics of the religious right, but its morality and its theology. This isn't just about the Constitution or the law, it's about what it means to be in right relation with God.
You can tell how threatening Buttigieg's message is to the Mike Pences of the world by how hard they try not to hear it, and to pretend that Buttigieg said something else. Pence himself responded with this non sequitur:
I hope that Pete will offer more to the American people than attacks on my Christian faith or attacks on the President as he seeks the highest office in the land. He'd do well to reflect on the importance of respecting the freedom of religion of every American.
But Buttigieg didn't "attack" anybody's Christian faith. He challenged Pence's interpretation of it. In particular, there was no attack on Pence's "religious freedom". No one, least of all Buttigieg, is preventing Pence from believing whatever he wants, from trying to convince others to agree with him, or from living his faith. [1]
But you know what prominent conservatives did next? They attacked Buttigieg's Christian faith. Erick Erickson, for example, described progressive Christianity as "hypocritical farce" and "corrupt and flawed". The Episcopal Church that Buttigieg belongs to "is no longer a Christian institution".
Buttigieg did not back down to Pence, saying:
I don't have a problem with religion. I'm religious too. I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people. … I'm not interested in feuding with the Vice President. But if he wanted to clear this up, he could come out today and say that he's changed his mind, that it shouldn't be legal to discriminate against anybody in this country for who they are.
Some very old arguments. Buttigieg's challenge brings up several longstanding theological issues that conservative Christians would prefer to sweep under the rug. Though different, they all revolve around the notion that (in spite of the purported changelessness of Christian doctrine) the image of God that was taught centuries ago is something most people just can't believe in today. [2]
One of those issues is predestination, the idea that God's omniscience included knowledge of the destiny of the souls He was creating. [3] From the beginning of time, a few souls were predestined for Heaven and the vast majority for Hell. This belief turns God into a monster, because He created most of humanity for no other purpose than to torture them for all eternity.
Current religious-right teachings about gender and sexuality contain echoes of this monstrosity. If LGBTQ people in their many varieties are not choosing a lifestyle, but in fact are discovering an inner nature that has been theirs from birth, and if that nature either damns them to eternal torment or permanently cuts them off from sex, children, and the kind of deep relationship that Buttigieg describes making with Chasten, then something very similar to predestination is happening. [4]
An even larger and older issue goes back to the reformulations of the Axial Age, which never quite completed its mission: Is religion fundamentally about a list of rules and the rewards and punishments that enforce those rules? Or is it about becoming (in Buttigieg's words) "more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware, and more decent". If it is about rules, do those rules have to make sense, or is their very arbitrariness a measure of God's majesty? [5] In the Christian tradition, this issue is the heart of the New Testament arguments between Jesus and the Pharisees. But the modern religious right has forgotten Jesus and taken the Pharisee side: The rules are the rules, and if we have to be cruel to enforce them, that's just how it is.
And finally, there is the issue that religion itself can become a kind of idol: Rather than worshiping God, you can find yourself worshiping a scripture or a church or a set or rituals.
It's not surprising that the religious right doesn't want to talk about any of this.
We're not supposed to challenge them. Conservative Christians have gotten used to being able to define the playing field. When they involve themselves in political discussions, we are all supposed to accept as given that they are good, decent people who are just trying to live according to their faith. We are supposed to accept the moral and theological premises they offer, and yield to them all the powerful vocabulary and imagery of Christianity.
But they don't deserve that kind of consideration. They are offering us a God who is monstrous, and a religion that justifies discrimination and bigotry. They need to be called on that, not just because it's bad law and bad politics, but because it's bad religion.
I'm still waiting for a detailed set of policies from Buttigieg, and who knows whether I'll like it when I see it. But this part of the message he's gotten right.
[1] I won't go into this in detail today, because I already have here and here. What masquerades as "religious freedom" for conservative Christians is actually a demand for special rights. They want a special exemption from discrimination laws, because they're Christians. As the cartoon below demonstrates, it's laughable to imagine the rights that conservative Christians claim being applied generally, to issues other than their hobby horses of homosexuality, abortion, or birth control.
[2] I mean can't in a literal sense. If you can picture such a being at all, you will feel revulsion, not awe or wonder. If this is God, then maybe Lucifer was right to rebel.
[3] I'm describing God as "He" here, because in the theologies I'm describing, God is male. That's not something I do when I describe my own beliefs.
[4] In contrast to Buttigieg's coming closer to God, Chris Steadman describes (in the book Faitheist) going through a period of rage at a God who created him gay and then condemned gays to Hell.
In Evolving in Monkey Town Rachel Held Evans, whose path of spiritual growth has taken her out of Evangelicalism and into the Episcopal religion that Erickson finds so objectionable, recounts one of the first cracks in her childhood faith: Going on a mission trip to China, looking out a bus window, and realizing that a billion people out there were going to Hell. What kind of God would set the world up like that?
[5] Occasionally you'll hear the conundrum expressed like this: Do we worship God because He is good, or because He is God? In an earlier era, this question made sense, but today we are more inclined to ask: Why would we worship a God who is not good?
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