Rolling Stone has devoted 2,200 words to a brief Q&A interview with Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, and it should surprise nobody that interviewer Alex Morris is a fan. On the bright side, the interview likely dabbles in more theology per square inch than Rolling Stone has published since its last lengthy interview with Bono.
On the less bright side, the chat is nearly obsequious because Morris presents Buttigieg as a promising solution to Democrats’ long-bewailed failure to outperform Republicans in playing the God card.
Worse, what Rolling Stone’s headline calls “The Generous Gospel of Mayor Pete” is weighed down with motives-bashing and presumptions about people’s interior lives. He refers repeatedly to conservatives’ hypocrisy, as though there is no other explanation for their making political decisions after facing a Hobson’s choice.
Morris quotes the now-iconic speech in which Buttigieg addressed Vice President Mike Pence’s purported problem with the mayor. This was a conflict wholly of Buttigieg’s making, unless it is now apostasy to disagree with the biblical interpretations of Mayor Buttigieg, or to make political choices that bother him.
Morris observes that “the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be cast as not just [areligious] but also anti-religious,” but the candidate she perceives as the antidote attacks the beliefs and character of any Christians who have supported President Donald Trump.
Even Blaise Pascal, one of the subtlest theologians in Christian history, falls afoul of Morris, and Buttigieg does nothing to suggest there may be more to the man than one of his arguments for believing in God:
Being a Christian myself, I feel like I come to Christianity with a little bit of the reverse of Pascal’s wager, where I’m like, if I’m wrong about Christianity, I don’t want to have made decisions based on my faith that hurt other people.
Yeah, it’s a smart way to think about it. I mean, part of it maybe has to do with if your faith has a lot to do with doubt, which I think is very rich in the Christian tradition. Obviously not everybody sees it that way, yet Scripture is full of things that I think touch our sense of doubt and call us to that kind of humility. I never thought about it that way, but I like that reasoning.
You can borrow it.
OK [laughs].
The closest the interview comes to a breakthrough moment is at its conclusion:
What can progressives do to wrest the branding that’s happened of the Republican Party being the party of the Christian faith? I mean, when I was growing up, I was told explicitly that if you don’t vote Republican, you’re not Christian.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of conditioning we’ve got to overcome. I guess I would say that, frankly, I think we’ll find salvation in Scripture itself, and in the idea of human compassion too, because even if you have a different view of Scripture than I do, we have the same, I think, understanding of what compassion is.
And if you find that what you’re being told politically cuts against the idea of compassion, sooner or later that’s going to lead to a reckoning that just might invite people to reconsider their political commitments. It’s just that you have to invite people there rather than drag them there, and that can be the hard part, I think, for us on the left. But we all are, I think, really on the eve of a reckoning that could lead to something really good in this country.
It’s wonderful that Buttigieg affirms his belief in compassion. Seeing him exercise it more often, rather than roaring against cartoon versions of his perceived adversaries, would be more convincing than an in-kind donation clad in the vestments of a Rolling Stone interview.
Photo of Pete Buttigieg outside at the 2019 Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 9 by Lorie Shaull/Flickr
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