Mayor Pete vs. AOC on Religious Left Values

Rolling Stone says the religious left should welcome Pete Buttigieg’s ‘public embrace of Christianity,’ but AOC’s ‘love thy neighbor’ politics reflects the Catholic Worker roots of democratic socialism.

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CORALVILLE, IOWA – Alex Morris’s fawning interview in Rolling Stone magazine, “The Generous Gospel of Mayor Pete,” doesn’t need to be deconstructed line by line to know it’s a Sadducee in sheep’s clothing.

The title alone is a red flag to anyone familiar with Buttigieg’s means-tested, consultant-approved approach to the Democratic primary, which is anything but generous, cutting closer to the prosperity gospel or social Darwinism than liberation theology.

Morris all but admits his subject’s centrism in the introduction, writing that Buttigieg’s biblical “fluency” and “Christian values” are “welcome correctives to both Republican religious branding and Democratic religious reticence.” This is code for political moderation. Similarly, Buttigieg summarizes his faith as “liturgically conservative and theologically a little more open”—in this context, surely the religious equivalent of saying, “I’m socially liberal but economically conservative.”

This is the third-way triangulation of Bill Clinton, not Jesus of Nazareth. It’s the same stale old neoliberal bread we’ve choked on before, wrapped in shiny new packaging and carried by a self-proclaimed altar boy who once declared war on the homeless.

The convenient, politically expedient take on Christianity erases the most important part of the social gospel taught in both the Catholic and the Episcopal churches Buttigieg was raised in. Recall the Advent reading of the Canticle of Mary, the Magnificat: He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, And has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich He has sent away empty (Luke 1:46-55).

In direct contrast, Buttigieg refuses to even fully disclose the names of the economic royalty he regularly dines with; perhaps he requires a callback to King Herod, who executed John the Baptist during a fancy dinner party on the lavish whim of his spoiled niece (Matthew 14:1-36). Which one of Wall Street Pete’s top bundlers demanded he bring them Medicare for All’s head on a silver platter?

Pete Buttigieg’s political platitudes might be ambiguous, but the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t written by a technocrat.

Articulating a nominally liberal Christian faith that pushes back against the religious right’s anti-woman homophobia is one thing. But using the same claim of religious wokeness to simultaneously shield the rich from being soaked, as he also does, is not only wrong; for the religious left, it’s blasphemy.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus withdrew to the countryside after he heard the news of John’s execution. Large crowds followed him, so he healed their sick and fed the masses, dividing everything equally so that five loaves of bread and two fish were enough for all. In his Rolling Stone interview, Buttigieg briefly claims the needs of the poor are at the core of Christianity, but he mostly muddies the holy water, saying: “there’s simply no way that a literal understanding of Scripture can fit into the Bible that I find in my hands … Jesus speaks so often in hyperbole and parable, in mysterious code.”

This isn’t remotely true. Pete’s political platitudes might be ambiguous, but the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t written by a technocrat. Jesus clearly told the rich man to give all of his wealth to the poor (Luke 18:22). Economic policy without uplifting the poor has no more place on the religious left than an identity politics without class has a place on the secular left.

Criticizing President Donald Trump and the GOP’s hypocrisy for screaming abortion while locking refugee kids in cages isn’t enough to claim the mantle of the religious left either. The Buttigieg brand of neoliberal Christianity is an unacceptable Constantine compromise with empire.

In Matthew 23, Jesus called the Scribes and the Pharisees “hypocrites” who “do not practice what they preach” and “shut up the kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces, neither going in nor allowing others to go who want to.” That describes Pete Buttigieg and his money-changers pretty well.

FORTUNATELY, the authentic religious left can rejoice—because there is an honest expression of Emanuel economics manifested by the Catholic democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the populist Jewish firebrand she supports for president, Bernie Sanders.

Though missed by much of the mainstream media, AOC’s visit to Iowa with Sanders in early November was significant for many reasons. Together, the two drew more than 6,500 Iowans to three events in two days.

At the last stop, in Coralville, Iowa, on November 9, AOC also coined a new phrase: “the politics of love thy neighbor.” This term may be the most overlooked contribution to the political discourse in 2019, a lightning-in-a-bottle line that highlights AOC’s natural ability to communicate with a new audience mostly unfamiliar to her.

This is what she said to open her speech in Coralville:

Having this be my first time in Iowa, I’ve learned and experienced firsthand the incredible amount of warmth and kindness there is in this state. Just this morning actually, I went out and knocked doors—because that’s the work, OK—and I was out knocking doors in Des Moines and it was really amazing. First of all, having knocked a lot of doors in New York City, knocking doors in Iowa is a much nicer thing. In New York they’re like, ‘I don’t want to change my cable.’ They’re like, ‘leave me alone.’ But in Iowa, you know, you just knock on a door and people are just open to a conversation.

And it’s really amazing and it’s beautiful and it’s a testament to the culture, the neighborly culture you all have here. And I think it’s incredibly important because building on that culture is what this campaign is all about. It’s the kind of culture we’re trying to transform within our country. It’s a culture of loving thy neighbor. A politics of loving thy neighbor.

To me, that’s what policies like Medicare for All are all about. They’re about loving thy neighbor. To me, ending police brutality in America is loving thy neighbor. To me, ending a brutal policy of caging children and their parents is about loving thy neighbor. To me, a living wage is loving thy neighbor. And to me, a Green New Deal is loving thy neighbor, our children, and our planet.

Somewhere along the two-hour drive east on Interstate 80 that Saturday afternoon, AOC must have reflected on her experience door-knocking for Bernie in Beaverdale, a Des Moines neighborhood visibly anchored by Holy Trinity Catholic Parish and School.

Her adeptness at using recent experience to help explain the goal of the Sanders campaign—to turn Iowa’s “culture of neighborliness” into a national “politics of love thy neighbor”—is the kind of political astuteness and commanding oratory that showcases just how talented of a rhetorical force she really is. It’s also a reminder of just how much her Catholic faith continues to inform her worldview, something she’s written and spoken about many times.

The modern surge of democratic socialism has been influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement, “a philosophy so old it looks new,” according to co-founder Peter Maurin. After all, the Sanders campaign slogan “Not Me, Us” and its newly ascendant catchphrase “Fight for someone you don’t know” are just reinterpretations of the biblical commandments to “love thy neighbor” and “welcome the stranger.”

Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was raised Catholic, went to private school, and first cut his teeth as an editor for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper. Day reported for influential communist newspapers in New York City’s Greenwich Village before converting to Catholicism.

In an obituary of Day for In These Times, Harrington explained how Day’s Catholic Worker showed “that Catholicism could be genuinely radical,” praising it for sparking “the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, the Catholic interracial movement, the Catholic peace movement and practically every other left tendency in the church.” He dedicated his most important book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, to Day. She was named in Harrington’s biography The Other American on the very first page as one of his most important influences.

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Harrington eventually renounced his Catholic faith—calling it an act of “pious apostasy”—and pointedly criticized the limitations of the Catholic Worker’s “Little Way” to help explain his turn toward a new vision of mass popular socialist politics.

Dorothy Day was arrested for women’s suffrage, but she never voted. She famously said “the greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart,” as her alternative to armed struggle, class war, and electoral politics. Maurin’s three-point program ended not with cyborg socialism but in a back-to-the-land agrarian society of farming communes, where worker-scholars and scholar-workers used “appropriate technology” to re-create the means of production rather than seizing the factories and nationalizing industry.

But these differences don’t change the fact that Dorothy Day was one of Harrington’s most important mentors, as she also was to Cesar Chavez and scores more of the 20th century’s most important organizers and activists. Her influence into the 21st century stretches from Occupy Wall Street to DSA to AOC.

“The name Dorothy Day has not been used in the United States Congress terribly often,” Bernie Sanders told The Washington Post in 2015, after Pope Francis urged a joint hearing of both chambers to emulate her life and works of mercy. “She was a valiant fighter for workers, was very strong in her belief for social justice, and I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history,” Senator Sanders continued. “This would be one of the very, very few times that somebody as radical as Dorothy Day was mentioned.”

If AOC’s vision of “a politics of love thy neighbor” bears fruit, it won’t be the last time Dorothy Day’s legacy is served in the halls of Congress.

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