Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and top-tier 2020
Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted a
Christmas message: "Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas." In 2019, those are apparently fighting words.Some conservative Christians protested that Joseph, the terrestrial father of Jesus of Nazareth, wasn't poor — though it's hard to see how a carpenter from an otherwise insignificant village in Galilee would be well-off — or faulted Buttigieg for not saying "Jesus" in his tweet. "But it was perhaps Buttigieg’s classification of Jesus as a refugee — a common line among the Christian left — that received almost immediate pushback from evangelicals," says The
Washington Post's Eugene Scott.The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh tied the criticisms together in one tweet, and he got some pushback from Jack Jenkins, a religion reporter with a master's degree in divinity from Harvard.> Hi! Religion reporter here.
> > Christians who argue Jesus was a refugee are typically referring to what happened AFTER Jesus was born, when Mary, Joseph, and the newborn child fled to Egypt.
> > This exegesis is easily Google-able. Or you could just, you know, read it in the Bible. https://t.co/DBL1by2maW> > — Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) December 26, 2019Walsh, who is Catholic, argued back that Jesus wasn't a refugee because Galilee and
Egypt were both part of the Roman Empire. Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who's nobody's idea of a theological conservative, explained in 2017 why Jesus and his family were clearly refugees, at least according to the Gospel of Matthew. And fellow Jesuit priest Jeremy Zipple noted that Pope Benedict XVI — nobody's idea of a liberal — disagrees with Walsh, as did Pope Pius XII.> What an absurd position to take. Here’s Pope Benedict XVI quoting Pope Pius XII on this question. https://t.co/V7WXrIPUJr https://t.co/7Ee8CziytK pic.twitter.com/XTUlm0lXda> > — Jeremy Zipple (@jzipple) December 26, 2019Jesus' citizenship status "has real implications for how Christians on both sides of the aisle conduct policy" and view President Trump's hardline, restrictive
immigration and refugee policies, Scott reports. And Buttigieg dropped his Christmas tweet into a tender moment for evangelicals being internally challenged to square their faith with their fealty to an unrepentantly flawed president. Read The Week's Bonnie Kristian on how evangelicals might fix this moral dissonance.More stories from theweek.com A more honest evangelical defense of Trump 5 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's holiday season 5 political clichés we should leave in the 2010s