Pete Buttigieg opened up about his faith in a recent interview and explained why he thinks his liberal positions are not at odds with Christianity.
Responding to charges that he was “picking and choosing” what the Bible teaches about certain issues, Buttigieg told Rolling Stone, “Well, I think for a lot of us — certainly for me — any encounter with Scripture includes some process of sorting out what connects you with God versus what simply tells you about the morals of the times when it was written.”
“And to me, that’s not so much cherry-picking as just being serious, because of course there’s so many things in Scripture that are inconsistent internally, and you’ve got to decide what sense to make of it,” Buttigieg continued, adding, “Jesus speaks so often in hyperbole and parable, in mysterious code, that in my experience, there’s simply no way that a literal understanding of Scripture can fit into the Bible that I find in my hands.”
The 37-year-old South Bend, Indiana, mayor reiterated his stance that the Bible potentially justifies abortion up to the point of birth because “there’s so many parts of the Bible that associate the beginning of life with breath.”
Buttigieg’s liberal Christianity has been challenged by his evangelical brother-in-law, pastor Rhyan Glezman, who called him “a modern-day Pharisee” and urged him to “repent” of claiming the Bible supports abortion. “God places a very high value on all human life,” Chasten Buttigieg’s brother told the Washington Examiner in September. “Everyone is created fearfully and wonderfully in the image of God with intrinsic value. That doesn’t start at the first breath; it starts when we enter our mother’s womb.”
“[Pete] Buttigieg is a person who’s making up their own rules and regulations and, basically, if we don’t celebrate and endorse their interpretation of Scripture, our religion is fallible. And that’s just not true,” Glezman added.
Buttigieg is currently polling fourth in the Democratic presidential primary, and he has recently polled first in Iowa, which is the first primary state.
