So, which is it? Are you a party of unreligious people hostile to religion and bragging about your moral superiority, or are you all ‘better’ Christians than traditional believers?
You ARE smart enough to realize you can’t have it both ways, right?
He thinks Republicans are relentless moralizers beating people over the head for having the ‘wrong’ values.
Maybe he’s forgotten about the CEO of Mozilla who lost his job over a perfectly legal donation.
Maybe he hasn’t noticed the relentless campaign to marginalize and demonize Chick Fil A — not because of anything they’ve been accused of doing, but of the beliefs, their owners dare to hold.
Maybe he hasn’t heard about the ‘Great Purge’ of right-of-center websites from Social Media, destroying countless lives and livelihoods (after milking them for a long time for their ad revenue, thank you very much).
Hollywood Actors, and politicians are publicizing ‘enemies lists’ of citizens who dared to support Republicans, and lifelong politicians have even been encouraging the public to harass others if they happen to encounter them in public spaces.
Preachers are openly shamed for praying for Republican leaders in the way the Bible explicitly COMMANDS them to.
Democrats build policies and programs on Americanized Caste systems of Victimhood based on Sex, Race and ethnicity — in contradiction to Biblical appeals that we are all one in Christ, and that identity supersedes any tribal identity of race, sex or class.
But Republicans are the hypocrites, you see. ‘Mayor Pete’ will tell you.
You know he’s way off course right from the beginning when he claims that ‘intransigence and obstruction have amounted to the central organizing principle of the Republican party’.
Remind me there Petey, I forget. Which party is it that has the term ‘Resist’ as their official motto for the Trump Presidency? But please… continue.
We’re not looking to turn him into a straw man here. What he does get right, to his credit, he does a pretty good job of.
He gets to the actual description of what Christianity looks like — allowing that he’s on a political program and explaining it to an audience that isn’t necessarily friendly to religious belief — he does an ‘ok’ job of describing the big-picture ideas. He explicitly affirmed the big ideas of the historical creeds, which is more than many other leaders would be willing to do.
Morning Joe starts preaching here in exactly the way most Leftists love to. He jumps on some favorite red-letter scriptures (meaning; the words of Jesus) and uses them to argue for political policy, as if Jesus was somehow a primarily POLITICAL figure.
In this case he cites Matthew 25 talking about the hungry, the homeless, those forgotten in prison followed by the Good Samaritan. You WILL notice Joe never mentions, for example, the Samaritan Woman in John 4 — with that awkward moment when he asks… bring your husband, and the ending ‘go and sin no more’ in which (among other things) Jesus brings attention to the fact that not every form of human sexual interaction is equally valid and true.
Oh, by the way, Joe. In the parable you’re using to flog Republicans, do you know who Jesus would be reminding you was YOUR neighbor? He’d point to the people YOU sneer at. In YOUR telling of that parable, it would be (can you guess?) Red States and MAGA hat wearers.
Oops. #Awkward
A funny thing about slinging the Word of God around like it’s a weapon to bludgeon ‘THOSE’ people with is that its light condemns the wickedness in ALL of our hearts, not just ‘those’ people. Since Joe loves those red letters so much, maybe he should read up about the one about the guy with a log in his eye. Let scripture search YOUR heart before you go looking to search someone else’s.
Back to the big idea about blurring the lines of personal conduct and public policy. Jesus made them entirely distinct.
“Whose face and inscription do you see? … Give unto Ceasar the things that are Ceasar’s, and give unto God the things that are God’s.”
Leftists fall into that same ‘Jesus preaches public policy’ trap EVERY SINGLE TIME… perhaps because there ARE no distinctions between the PUBLIC and the PERSONAL in leftist thinking. As the left’s famous slogan old slogan once said ‘the personal IS political’. It’s a bad habit they never managed to kick.
Joe continues to flash his ignorance with Pete and Mika giggling in anticipation of the question:
JOE: [Still speaking of the two parables] Combine those two things and I just must ask…(dramatic pause, with laughter from Pete and Mika) …how do we have the policies that we have? Not only on the border, but across this country and across this world by people who claim to believe the red letters in the New Testament.
BUTTIGIEG: That is one of the mysteries that is truly beyond my–
JOE: [interrupting and talking over him] now that is a mystery!
BUTTIGIEG: — my power to understand. I really think that there has to be a reckoning about this. Look. We all have very different — obviously — as long as there has been faith, and as long as there has been politics there have been different understandings on the right thing to do and how they fit together. For the party and the movement known for beating other people on the head with their faith, or their interpretation of their faith, it makes no sense to — we’ll LITERALLY vote to take food away from the hungry. To essentially be practicing the very thing that not just the Christian scriptural tradition but so many others, uh, tell us we’re not supposed to do in terms of harming other people.
And I do think there’s going to be a reckoning over that, because there are a lot of people sitting in the pews hearing political conservatism all around them wondering whether that really matches what we’re being told to do. Not to mention how we’re supposed to do it, right?
Oh really? Beating people over the head?
Do you mean like the fight you’ve been picking with Mike Pence, who, to our knowledge, hasn’t once said anything about Pete that wasn’t professional and respectful?
Do you mean the government bringing The Sisters Of Mercy to court to make them comply with a draconian Heath Care / Birth Control policy that explicitly violated their conscience?
Do you mean that time the Obama Administration made it their personal business to attempt to REVOKE the duly-granted religious asylum that had been granted by a sitting judge to a Christian family fleeing a German government that claimed an institutional right to severely punish any parents that usurped the State’s right to indoctrinate children by daring to HomeSchool?
Or do you mean the several times Democrats got caught applying an Unconstitutional religious test while opposing Republican nominees specifically because those nominees had certain religious affiliations that the Democrats did not approve of? (It’s a trend in the wider culture on the Left, too.)
As for the word ‘reckoning’ — since your party has branded itself the party of unbelief — you might want to be careful with throwing that particular word around. It has certain… unpleasant eschatological implications.
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