ATLANTA (AP) – In 2008, when Barack Obama came under fire for a sermon his former pastor delivered years earlier, the aspiring president distanced himself from the pastor’s fiery words that channeled black Americans’ anger at racism.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock defended Jeremiah Wright. “When preachers tell the truth, it often makes people uncomfortable,” he told Fox News.
Now Warnock is the running politician and is attacked for his sometimes impassioned words from the pulpit. And again, it does not deteriorate. Warnock, 51, says his entry into the U.S. Senate in Georgia – one of two January 5 races that will determine Senate control – is an extension of his years of progressive activism as head of the church where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
Warnock calls for bail reform and an end to mass incarceration; a living wage and vocational training for a green economy; comprehensive access to voting and health care, and student loan forgiveness. It is an unabashedly liberal platform that can boost the Democrats it needs to vote in the second election.
But it also entails risks. His opponent, Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, has dismissed his rhetoric and proposals as “radical,” socialist, and out of step with the people of Georgia. Georgia voters are also likely to hear more from President Donald Trump, who announced on Saturday that he will return to the state on January 4, the eve of the second round, to rally support for Loeffler and fellow Republican U.S. Senator David Perdue. .
It’s a line of attack that could sway moderate suburban voters in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 20 years.
“I’m a pastor running for political office, but I don’t consider myself a politician,” he told The Associated Press. “I honestly don’t know anything but authentic.”
Warnock would join a small group of other ministers in Congress, including at least one other black pastor, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. He said his model was King, “who used his faith to trigger change in the public square.” In high school, he listened to the sermons of the civil rights icon and was particularly drawn to “A Knock At Midnight,” in which King urges churches to serve as “critics of the state” and fight for peace and economic and racial justice. .
Warnock has embraced that mission. In 2007, he warned that the US could “lose its soul” in a speech condemning President George W. Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq. In 2014, he was arrested in the Georgia Capitol while protesting state republicans’ refusal to expand Medicaid. After George Floyd’s murder by police in May, he spoke of the country’s struggle with a “virus” he named “COVID-1619” for the year some of the first slaves arrived in England’s North America.
His campaign draws heavily on his early life. Warnock grew up in public housing in Savannah, Georgia. He cites his father’s small business that hauls old cars to a local steel mill to fend off attacks he is against free enterprise.
He attended Morehouse College and received a Ph.D. in theology from Union Theological Seminary, funding his education through student loans and federal scholarships. His elder brother Keith, one of 11 siblings, has spent more than 20 years in prison for a first drug offense, and Warnock has used his case to advocate for criminal justice reform.
He knew what it was like to wrestle. He knew what it was like to go without, ”said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia, of Raphael Warnock, whom he supports. “He can talk to where a lot of people are.”
Warnock knew early on that he wanted to enter the ministry. His father was also a pastor and enlisted his son at an early age to help him read the fine print in a Bible reference book because he refused to get prescription glasses. Warnock recalled preaching his first sermon at the age of eleven, “It is time for me to deal with my father’s business.”
His social activism is part of a tradition of resistance in many black churches that grew out of the fight against racial inequality. Black pastors have cited the country’s troubled racial history with terms that may be uncomfortable to outsiders.
In his much-researched sermon, Wright condemned the country’s mistreatment of blacks with the exclamation, “God damn America.” Loeffler has used the clip in an ad accusing Warnock of defending Wright’s “hatred”.
Loeffler has also used excerpts from Warnock’s own sermons to claim that he is against the police and military. In one clip, Warnock says that no one can serve “God and the military.” Warnock, who has two brothers who are veterans and whose father served in World War II, has said he was preaching from a Bible text and trying to teach a lesson on setting priorities for God and laying a moral foundation for life.
Loeffler has used another clip to accuse Warnock of belittling the police. But his comment about “ police force emerging in a gangster and thug kind of mentality ” in that sermon was a specific reference to police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, which the U.S. Department of Justice investigated after a white police officer Michael Brown, a Black teenager, 2014.
“He really made sure we know in his own words who he is,” Loeffler said during a debate in December. “Those are not my words.”
Warnock accused her of lying “to Jesus.”
Cleaver said that the attacks on Warnock’s sermons with no contextual rules are “woefully unfair” and show no understanding of the role of a black minister.
“I’ve just gotten sick of what they’re trying to do,” he said.
During the December debate, Loeffler also questioned Warnock about his 2002 arrest on suspicion of interfering with an investigation into child abuse in a Maryland camp run by the Baltimore church he was leading at the time. Warnock said he tried to ensure that young people had lawyers or family present when questioned by authorities. The charges were dropped.
Warnock’s estranged wife accused him of walking over her foot during an argument earlier this year, but police said they had found no visible signs of injury and they had not charged Warnock with a felony.
The attempt to portray Warnock as a radical is similar to the strategy that the Republicans used with some success against other Democrats in the vote this year. But it also reflects the attacks that segregationists have committed against King and supporters of the civil rights movement. That could help get the state’s large African American population to vote in next month’s second round.
Warnock is right to continue to focus on his platform of a living wage, expanded health options and the right to vote, said Reverend William Barber II, president of the Repairers of the Breach, a nonprofit that fights poverty and discrimination.
“You don’t win by being Republican,” said Barber. “You win by lifting people from below.”