"Perhaps Paradoxically"

The concept of interpretation is all here: there is no experience of truth that is not interpretative. I do not know anything that does not interest me. If it does interest me, it is evident that I do not look at it in an uninterested way.

Gianni Vattimo, "Toward a Nonreligious Christianity," After the Death of God,

 ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (Columbia University Press 2007)

It will seem like I'm nitpicking, but there is a valid argument here, and a mistaken analysis as well; and the distinction helps explain where Pete Buttigieg is (arguably) going:

A preference for chaos on the far right is connected to God in ways Democrats can barely talk about, much less comprehend, whether it’s the fundamental disconnect around evangelical support for unfettered gun rights or the right’s rejection of environmental protection or immigrants’ rights. But the more morally discordant Trump’s policies and politics are, the more he is seen as fighting for religious rights. This is not a claim that all or even most religious belief is nihilist—it is just a recognition that there is a deeply nihilist strain in some religious quarters, one that dovetails perfectly with the impulse to “blow it all up.” Part of this is simple tribalism. Tom Scocca is right that “owning the libs” is surely its own philosophy and reward. But the darker, and surely more frightening, narrative at work here is that the disruption of earthly institutions, the fomenting of chaos as the precursor to the next thing to come along, has a decidedly religious valence to it. Democrats can try to ignore it, but ignoring it does not seem to diminish its power.

The real problem with the "evangelical" thinking that connects to "unfettered gun rights" and "rejection of environmental protection or immigrants' rights" is not the nihilism.  That's a problem in Christianity at certain turns.  The history of Christian Europe contains more than a few examples of groups that were culturally as Christian as any at the time, insisting "the end" was coming, and being perfectly nihilistic in their insistence on their prophecy.  So this is nothing new today, but neither is it in connection with all the past.  The difference now is the group espousing Christian nihilism (let's call it) is ostensibly in control of the government, rather than a rogue group with no sanction from officialdom (of course in the days when Christianity was the state church, be that Catholic or Anglican, rogue groups were more clearly defined.  Especially in America the "mainstream" of Protestantism has, in the last century or so, become harder and harder to define.),  But is Christian nihilism in fact Christian?

No, it isn't.  And I don't mean that in a way that opens the "No True Scotsman" fallacy (itself a fallacy of reasoning, but let that go).  I mean the believers identified in that quote above have completely replaced the God of Abraham with a false idol of their own manufacture.*  Nothing new there, either; the stories of this happening among the children of Abraham goes back to before they were even Israelites, much less Jews.  Cecil B. DeMille made great hay of it in "The Ten Commandments."  Jesus berated the Pharisees for putting burdens on people in the name of God, rather than lifting their burdens as the law of Moses required (no, your notion of the thundering meanie of the "Old Testament" is not right; not in any sense of the word.  And don't try to tell me you've "read" the Old Testament.  If you think God is a Hairy Thunderer, you haven't even read the Hebrew Scriptures the way the Eunuch did whom Philip met in the Acts of the Apostles).  There isn't any passage of scripture that can even be vaguely used to support a "God-given right" for Americans to keep and arm bears.  Or bear arms, either.  Genesis 1 tells humanity to be stewards of the earth, not exploiters of its resources and living creatures.  And if you don't know what the prophets consistently said about the "alien" (as the KJV translates it), or immigrant in today's parlance, and how much they are echoing if not quoting the law of Moses, then you haven't read the Hebrew Scriptures at all.

Yes, this Jokeresque desire to "see the world burn" Lurhwick identifies does have "a decidedly religious valence to it."  But the heart of Christianity is not there, just some of the vocabulary, and mostly just the trappings of power the Church of Rome accrued over centuries and which Protestantism picked up and carried on for as long as it could.  Part of what's going on is simply ecclesiastical history, a continued effort to carry forward the banner of authority and power (and control) even as the culture that supported (and was created by) that authority, is now fundamentally changed.  It's a rear-guard action, in other words, a last gasp attempt to establish Gilead (although Margaret Atwood got all of that fundamentally wrong, IMHO).  Which seems to mean its power will diminish, if we just wait; but that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that Pete Buttigieg could be trying to say what Andrew Bacevich tried to say (although Bacevich never ran for public office, so who remembers him now, or cares?), that Jeremiah Wright was trying to sa, (although Obama was forced to disavow him), what Reinhold Niebuhr was saying which earned him the cover one week on Time Magazine, as "America's Theologian."  There is an alternative to Christianity as hucksterism and handmaid to power and the powerful.  The latter is the media-accepted paradigm of religion, where "American Christianity" equals "religion," and "American Christianity" equals the hucksters and liars and preeners and charlatans who claim no more authority than a TV audience and name recognition, an authority they lose the minute the best-sellers stop coming (whatever happened to Rick Warren?  Where is Pat Robertson today?).  That paradigm leads to this misunderstanding:

It all appears to be of a piece: reinserting faith values into Democratic politics, but also reclaiming, perhaps paradoxically, the very idea of religious faith as a civilizing, democratic value that can lie at the core of democratic governance.

What, exactly, is remotely paradoxical about Christian teachings as a political force in America?  Is Dr. King so quickly reduced to a plaster saint who had no more than a dream?  Who was not an ordained minister who preached and led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?  Is the abolitionist movement which finally ended slavery in America so easily divorced from the religious roots it carried until it was no longer needed?  Have we so quickly buried the story of the Amistad, where the religious beliefs of John Quincy Adams led him to defend the claims of liberty of the slaves on that ship?  Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Reinhold Niebuhr; do these names not ring a bell?  (Answer:  "No, not at all.  Did they have TV shows or write best-sellers?"  Well, to be fair, Merton did.)  "The very idea of religious faith as a civilizing, democratic value" is a paradox?  Is The City of God that old and arcane a text?  Are we really that ignorant of the past, and consider ourselves superior in our blankness?  I honestly think sometimes the difference between Donald Trump and most of the rest of us is one of degree, not kind.  He is our funhouse mirror, and we react so strongly to him because we see our reflection in our POTUS.  Is that "perhaps [paradoxical]"?  Or is that part of the reality of history we are all enmeshed in?

*I would argue the "Christian nihilists" of old also replaced God with a false idol, but my focus is the group identified by Dahlia Lithwick and Pete Buttigieg.  It still doesn't connect the two:  the past groups wanted to escape the world; the present group wants to control it.