ROCK HILL, South Carolina — Pete Buttigieg said that while it is unlikely that global powers will give up weapons in the near future, faith calls him to aim for a world without them.
“The commitment to peace that is such a core teaching of Jesus is also something that I think is a core goal of the right kind of American foreign policy,” the presidential hopeful told a panel of faith leaders and attendees at a faith round table on Sunday.
“It doesn’t mean that we ignore threats,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean that we unilaterally disarm. It doesn’t mean that we can move tomorrow toward a world with no weapons, although that is the world that we are called to envision. It does mean that we can take steps that will move us closer to that reality.”
Buttigieg, 37, is an Afghanistan war veteran, married gay man, and a member of the Episcopal Church. During the roundtable, leaders from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations in North and South Carolina asked him questions about how faith informs political decisions, particularly outside social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, discussed foreign policy while answering a question on what “the politics of Jesus” means to him.
“When it comes to our actions abroad, I think that in many ways, the question is how near can we approximate the radical teaching that we are to love our enemy,” he said. “I think the best we can come to it in our time is to see the humanity in our enemy and ask whether they must be our enemy.”
Buttigieg has called for a “higher standard for the deployment of U.S. military force” and to use “climate security as a key basis for diplomacy.”
