Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is hanging in there, despite his thin résumé and a mess of a city that he is currently in charge of.  He sits at 8.3 percent in the latest Real Clear Politics national average, trailing the three elderly white, heterosexual millionaires — Biden, Sanders, and Warren.

He is pushing his Christian faith as a means of distinguishing himself from his fellow candidates of the secular left.  As Rolling Stone described:

Since the early stages of his presidential campaign, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has made his Christian faith a cornerstone, explicitly attacking the idea that "Christian" and "Republican" are synonymous terms, and eloquently questioning the motives of religious leaders who choose policy over morality and who have become Donald Trump's faithful apologists on the national stage.

"But we should call out hypocrisy when we see it. And for a party that associates itself with Christianity to say that it is OK to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages, [that party] has lost all claim to ever use religious language again."

He certainly talks a good game.  But talk is cheap in politics, especially during a campaign.  What other Christian nuggets of wisdom has Mayor Pete shared with his faithful flock?

For Christmas, one of Christianity's most holy days, he tweeted out the following.

At least he closed with merry Christmas, rather than the politically correct "happy holidays."  But in a few characters of text, the Christian mayor of South Bend Indiana got so much else wrong.

Did Jesus come to the world in poverty?  That depends on the definition of poverty.  For woke progressives, poverty is an iPhone 8 rather than the iPhone 11, no Netflix subscription, and cereal for breakfast rather than avocado toast.

Jesus's father Joseph was a carpenter, which 2,000 years ago placed him solidly in the middle class.  Current-day carpenters, as of 2017, earned a median annual salary of $45,170, with the top ten percent topping out north of $80,000 per year.  In the Trump economy, these numbers are probably higher, but clearly in the middle class.

Joseph, an engaged but not yet married man at the time, would be far from the poverty level, at least by today's standards.  In 2019, the poverty level for a single-person household was $12,490 per year, far less than the median earnings of a carpenter.

If anything, carpenters are part of the forgotten middle class in America, at least forgotten by Democrats — but remembered by President Trump, which is why he is sitting in the White House and will likely remain there for the next five years.

Strike one on Mayor Pete and his Christian knowledge.  What's strike two?

Was Jesus a refugee?  If you ask the House oracle and Bronx bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the answer is yes.  On Twitter, she claimed, "Christ's family were refugees too."  She and Mayor Pete are on the same page.  Perhaps she can be his running mate if he wins the Democrat nomination.  Never mind that she is too young to serve as vice president, since in this day and age she can identify as a 35-year-old, even if she is only 30.

What exactly is a refugee?  According  to the United Nations, "[r]efugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country."

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Mary and Joseph did not flee their country; they remained within it during their journey.  There was no war, violence, conflict, or persecution.  Instead, there was something that many consider comparable and a staple of Mayor Pete's and his fellow Democrats' playbook: taxes.

The bureaucratic deep state in Rome decreed a census to make sure everyone was counted and "paid his fair share" of taxes.  Bernie and Pocahontas would have felt quite comfortable as a Roman emperor in those days.

From the Bible, Luke 2:1–7:

About that time Emperor Augustus gave orders for the names of all the people to be listed in record books.

Everyone had to go to their own hometown to be listed. So Joseph had to leave Nazareth in Galilee and go to Bethlehem in Judea. Long ago Bethlehem had been King David's hometown, and Joseph went there because he was from David's family.

Mary was engaged to Joseph and traveled with him to Bethlehem. She was soon going to have a baby, and while they were there, she gave birth to her first-born son. She dressed him in baby clothes[d] and laid him on a bed of hay, because there was no room for them in the inn.

It's the government's fault that a very pregnant Mary and her fiancé Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem, for the progressive imperative of being recorded on some registry in order to pay their taxes.  This was simply a preview of life 2,000 years later, with gun registries and confiscatory taxes.  But they certainly weren't refugees, simply pawns in a long-ago bureaucratic state.

Mayor Pete didn't claim in his tweet that Jesus was homeless, as many others have.  In fact, there is a homeless advocacy website called Jesus Was Homeless.  Yet actually he wasn't, as the Bible explains above.  Neither was he a refugee, nor in poverty.

So the mayor of a medium-sized Midwestern city, who fancies himself presidential, doesn't understand Scripture.  What about a holy man, a cardinal of the Catholic church, one of a group of 214 charged with selecting the pope?

New York's Timothy Cardinal Dolan wrote a Christmas New York Post op-ed claiming, "The Son of God was homeless; his earthly parents were immigrants and refugees."  Not quite, but why should the Bible stand in the way of scoring political points?

Obviously, Cardinal Dolan learned well from his boss, the pope, who doesn't practice what he preaches.  Pope Francis tells his followers, in a message directed to President Trump, "Political leaders risk becoming prisoners of the walls they build."  Yet the pope is oblivious to the massive walls surrounding the Vatican and the fact that the Vatican has taken in only 20 refugees.

But reality won't stop modern liberals from rewriting history to suit their political goals.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many of her fellow Democrats claim to be devout Catholics, praying for the president and for America on a daily basis, yet they have no qualms about full-term abortion.  What happened to "thou shalt not kill"?

Leave it to the Democrats to rewrite the Bible to suit their political needs, just as they have redefined gender for the same purpose.  We've gone from Christmas being "joy to the world" to just another cheap political ad.

Brian C Joondeph, M.D. is a Denver-based physician, freelance writer, and occasional radio talk show host whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, and other publications.  Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, and QuodVerum.