Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 2020 presidential hopeful and South Bend, IN, Mayor Pete Buttigieg predictedRepublicans would face a “reckoning” for “beating other people on the head” with “their interpretation of their faith.”

Host Joe Scarborough said, “I always tell people, just look at the red letters in the New Testament. What does Jesus talk about? Right? He talks about Matthew 25. He talks about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, bringing hope to the hopeless, visiting those in jails, and says when you do that to the least among these, you do this to me. And by the way, that’s what Jesus says to his disciples. You want to know how to get to heaven? Let me tell you, and he tells the parable about the sheep and the goats. You see that, and then the story of the Good Samaritan — Jesus saying yes, you have to love your neighbor. And let me tell you who the neighbor was, he was a foreigner, detested by the Jews, and Jesus challenged them. Combine those two things, and I just must ask, how do we have the policies that we have, not only at the border but across this country and across this world by people who claim to believe the red letters in the New Testament?”

Buttigieg said, “That is one of the mysteries that is truly beyond my power to understand. I really think that there has to be a reckoning about this. Look, we all have very different, obviously, for as long as there has been faith and politics, there have been different understandings on the right thing to do and how these things fit together, but for the party and the movement known for beating other people on the head with their faith, or their interpretation of their faith, it makes no sense to literally vote to take food away from the hungry, to essentially be practicing the very thing that not just the Christian scriptural tradition, but so many others tell us we’re not supposed to do, in terms of harming other people. I do think there’s going to be a reckoning over that. Because there are a lot of people sitting in the pews hearing political conservatism all around them, wondering whether that really matches what we’re being told to do.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN