Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has made his Christian piety a minor theme of his presidential campaign — quoting Proverbs on the debate stage to critique Republican opposition to a minimum-wage increase, attacking conservative evangelicals over their “porn star presidency” and un-biblical approach to refugees, urging his party to court religious voters and take religion more seriously.

Buttigiegian integralism does not include, so far as I can tell, support for any policy that deviates from the progressive catechism; like certain fervent Republicans of the religious right, he appears to believe that God’s will has finally been perfectly instantiated in the platform of a single political party 2,000 years after the birth of Christ. But because Buttigieg is a smart guy — a Rhodes scholar, even — I assumed that his religious politics at least included some kind of intelligent-sounding explanation for his position on abortion, his support for his party’s absolutely-no-restrictions line.

Buttigieg offered such an explanation on the radio early this month. I want to quote it in full, because right and left have been arguing over what he meant.

Now, right now, [Republicans] hold everybody in line with this one kind of piece of doctrine about abortion, right, which is obviously a tough issue for a lot of people to think through morally. Then again, you know, there’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath, and so even that is something that we can interpret differently. … No matter where you think about the kind of cosmic question of where life begins, most Americans can get on board with the idea of, alright, I might draw the line here, you might draw the line there, but the most important thing is the person who should be drawing the line is the woman making the decision.

The immediate conservative interpretation of this quote was that Buttigieg was justifying pro-choice maximalism with Scripture, by citing the same Bible he quotes to condemn the G.O.P. on other issues to claim that human life begins with a baby’s first breath outside the womb. The progressive response was that no, he was saying instead that (to quote the noted theologian Wiggum of Springfield) the Bible says a lot of things, nothing it says on abortion is definitive, and so even a polity influenced by Christian piety should leave both believers and nonbelievers alone to decide the fetal personhood question themselves.

The progressive interpretation is probably the more accurate description of what was going through Buttigieg’s mind when he was answering the question. But the conservative claim that he believes that personhood is mystically imparted via the inhalation of oxygen is the more accurate description of his actual legal position, and the emerging orthodoxy of his party.