IIt would be charitable to call the continuous attacks of white religious law on the Rev. Raphael Warnock, from the moment he successfully launched his bid to become the first black American senator in Georgia, only unchristian.
Most recently, Georgia’s Baptist minister and Donald Trump’s loyalist Doug Collins, who once supported Warnock’s position as “pro-election pastor”“It’s an ‘oxymoronic lie in the bed of hell,'” he blamed the senator’s condemnation of Georgia’s new voting restrictions – but not the racist law itself – for MLB’s decision to relocate the All-Star game from the state, lamenting that ” woke up “Warnock”spread lies“About the legislation. Just a week ago, a tweet now deleted from Warnock’s account – which stated that “the meaning of the Passover is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are a Christian or not, by being committed to helping others, we are able to save ourselves. ”- Heavily white evangelicals who spent the holiest day of the Christian calendar pouring out judgment, labeling Warnock as“heretical, “A”heretical narcissist,” and a “current heretic. The prosecution was led by Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Trump’s failure Rebellion and supporter of the racist mind Kamala Harris. Beyond the Warnock brand a „heretical“Ellis expressed the ideological truth behind the attacks on the Georgian senator.
“He should wipe the reverend in front of his name, Ellis.” posted on Twitter about Warnock, a doctoral student at Columbia University’s theological seminary. “People who do not know Jesus pretend to be a weak philanthropist … If Warnock’s church were truly biblical and Christian, he would not be a pastor. His theology and practice are incompatible with the Bible. ” It was supported by passionate about weapons and Christian podcast Allie Beth Stuckey, who compared the senator’s faith to a kind of “the moralism of social justice“In which” Jesus is not a savior, but a “deliverer” – and not of sin, but of “systems” … Jesus / Christianity is a means to their policy and social activists end up, whom they like to classify as “helping others” (which usually means government programs).
Warnock’s Church, which Ellis rejects as insufficiently pious, is Baptist Ebenezer of Atlanta, one of the oldest black churches in the country and the former pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. also on the nose that white Republican evangelists who publicly state that delegitimizing black votes is God’s work and believe, “All lives matter“It is a Christian rejection of the claims of black humanity – and which, of course, selectively cite MLK de-radicalized of white comfort and apathy – attacks not only the pastoral heir of MLK, but the great black church and the theology that springs from it.
These attacks are essential to the fundamental conflict between white evangelical Christianity in America, which is both clogged and deeply protected by the white supremacist capitalist status quo, and the traditional black Christian church, a place of transformative racial justice.
In his book White too long: the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity, Robert P. Jones pursues the development of white American Christianity, demonstrating the fundamental centrality of white supremacy to the early white Christian church. He points to the split between Northern and Southern Methodists and 1845 Baptists on the issue of black enslavement, the Catholic Church’s tradition of brutal global colonialism “justified by the belief that white Christians were God’s means of” civilizing “the world, and the native genocide of the colonizers. of white settlers in this country. Beyond denominations, those churches in America — including those that advocated against slavery — supported a gospel of white supremacy and black subordination.
“As the dominant cultural power in America,” writes Jones, “the white Christian church was responsible for building and supporting a project to protect white supremacy and resistance to black equality.” This project framed the whole American story. The theological core of American Christianity was well structured by the interest in protecting white supremacy … not only among evangelicals in the south, but also among Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast. ”
“White evangelists are the quasi-religious political heirs of the pre-war church,” Joseph Darby, pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and president of the city’s NAACP chapter, told me. “The church in the south of the antebellum said that slavery was moral because it taught black people about Jesus and gave them a hard life. You had people called Christians who owned human beings. How do you justify that? Well, you justify it by saying, “They’re not really people like us. They’re a different kind of person and you have to be careful with them, because they can be kind of dangerous people.” So there has been a cultivated racism that still largely drives white evangelical Christianity. ”
“The black church was born fighting for freedom, and freedom is really its only reason to be.”
White slaves not only imposed Christianity on those they held captive, but claimed the Bible as documentary evidence that black slavery was divinely ordained. The counter-character of this white Christian theology of black degradation was the black church, which emerged to become what Henry Louis Gates describes as a “redemptive force to shine a line on hypocrisy in the heart of their bondage.”
The enslaved black people, both secretly and by reshaping the distorted gospel, gave them, forged a Christianity that offered “human dignity, earthly and heavenly freedom, and fraternal and fraternal love (as did the Black Church and the religion practiced in her hug). as an engine that determines social transformation in America, from the pre-war abolitionist movement to the various phases of the fight against Jim Crow and now, in our current century, to the Black Lives Matter, ”as Gates writes.
And as Warnock writes in his book The divided mind of the Black Church“The black church was born fighting for freedom, and freedom is really its only reason to be.”
“The whole ethos of the Black Church is different. Most black churches have emerged as a way to have black excellence, black identity, a place for black people to worship freely, to work freely, and to build on the way some plantation preachers have preached. ” said Rev. Darby. Even though people wanted them to preach that they would be blessed in the “great ones from time to time,” they went to Exodus and the story of Moses, and this laid the foundation for what James Cone called “Theology of Liberation.” – that God is most closely related to the oppressed and that God is actively working to deliver the oppressed. If we love God, then we must do the same. So this is woven into the Black Church. There is a rejection of harsh individualism and a feeling that we need to make sure everyone is OK. And if that means fighting for justice, fairness and fairness, you have to do it. It’s not about “sweetness from time to time,” it’s about what you’ll do while you’re here. ”
Warnock was a mentor of Cone and he described black theology as “a new and conscious form of speaking about God, a sophisticated apology for a faith formed in slavery and in defense of a black liberal trajectory that continues to testify against the sins of a nations that are both putative and deeply racist ”.
Indeed, white Christianity retains the attitudes of its founders. A 2018 study by the Research Institute for Public Religion found that the majority of white Christians worldwide – 53 percent of white evangelicals, 52 percent of white Catholics and 51 percent of white Protestants – believe that “socioeconomic disparities among black and white Americans is due to the lack of effort of black Americans. These groups were also most likely to support Muslim travel bans and believe that “recent killings of black men are isolated incidents.” White evangelical Protestants were the only group to say that the United States “becoming a non-white majority nation in the future will be largely negative.”
This is the core of the difference between Warnock’s faith and that of white evangelists who criticize and question the religious validity of the black theology he espouses. They embrace a religious ideology that is fundamentally selfish, one that works actively against political change to ensure the maintenance of white power even if it claims to be apolitical. He throws out a Christianity that demands economic, racial, and social equality as an anti-American religion, probably does not consciously acknowledge that it confirms the anti-black and capitalist devices that motivate their own faith.
When they try to malign Jesus of the Black Church as “a gentle philanthropist” and a “deliverer,” they prove Jones’ thesis that “for most of American history, Jesus evoked by most white congregations was not indifferent to inequality. racial status quo; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural order, divinely worked by things ”.
“It is a kind of egocentric religion, which is wrapped in politics, what God and weapons.”
As the MLK he refuses to quote wrote in his 1963 letter from Birmingham Prison, “I watched the white church stand on the sidelines and utter pious irrelevances and holy trivialities,” while hurting the most vulnerable and promoting a version of Christianity that not only remains, but justifies that evil.
“One of my seminary teachers said something backwards that made perfect sense,” Darby told me. “He said that the church fathers who shaped our concept of sin tend to place more emphasis on the sins of the flesh than the sins of the spirit, because they were all elders who could no longer partake of the sins of the flesh. So, they have become the worst sins, but they have been less invested in the morality of the way we treat other people. ”
“That’s how you can get caught up in the opposite abortion, fighting transgender toilets or transgender sports teams, because there is this distorted morality,” Darby added. “What do you say about loving your neighbor as yourself? Where can I find the part that says, “You’ll have an AR-15 so you can beat if need be”? It is a kind of egocentric religion, which is wrapped in politics, what God and weapons. That they must be those who have political justice and are the arbiters of those who have political justice. That way you can have questions about Barack Obama’s faith, but you can make Donald Trump almost your Messiah. This is evangelical Christianity. ”