What He did talk about, Buttigieg says, includes “defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works.” Hence his claim about how Christianity dovetails with progressivism.

It is a heartfelt argument. It is also partisan nonsense, a politicized distortion of both the Bible’s words and its silences.

To see what’s wrong with it, consider that the argument could just as easily be, and was, deployed against William Wilberforce and other Christian abolitionists. Notoriously, the Bible nowhere explicitly condemns slavery.

It does, however, teach that God has made human beings in His image. Christian thinkers, using the power of reason they believed God gave them, reflected on that teaching over the centuries and concluded that the Christian conscience could have no truck with the institution.