ATLANTA (AP) – In 2008, when Barack Obama was on fire for a sermon delivered by his former pastor years earlier, the presidential aspirant distanced himself from the preacher’s fiery words that channeled the anger of black Americans for racism.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock defended Jeremiah Wright. “When preachers tell the truth, very often that bothers people,” he told Fox News.
Now Warnock is the politician running for office and the one being attacked for his sometimes passionate words from the pulpit. And again, these would mean that you have to spend for these processes. Warnock, 51, says his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, one of two January 5 races that will determine control of the Senate, is an extension of his years of progressive activism as head of the ‘church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
Warnock calls for bail reform and end to mass imprisonment; a living wage and job training for a green economy; expanded access to voting and health care, and student loan forgiveness It is a blatantly liberal platform that can energize Democrats it needs to vote in elections.
But it also carries risks. His opponent, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, has shattered his rhetoric and proposals as “radical,” socialist and outdated with Georgia residents. Georgia voters are likely to hear more from President Donald Trump, who announced Saturday that he would return to the state on Jan. 4, the eve of the runoff, to gather support for Loeffler and his fellow Republican senator from the United States. United States, David Perdue.
It is a line of attack that could influence moderate suburban voters in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in 20 years.
“I’m a pastor running for political office, but I don’t think he’s a politician,” he told The Associated Press. “Honestly, I don’t know anything that’s authentic.”
Warnock would join a small group of other ministers in Congress, including at least one other black pastor, Representative Emanuel Cleaver. He said his model was King, “who used his faith to activate 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 to fight for peace and economic and racial justice.
Warnock has taken on this mission. In 2007, he warned that the U.S. could “lose heart” in a speech condemning President George W. Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq. At the Georgia Capitol in 2014, he was arrested while protesting the refusal of state Republicans to expand Medicaid. After the assassination of George Floyd by police in May, he exposed the country’s struggle with a “virus” he called “COVID-1619” for the year some of the first slaves arrived in America. of the English North.
His campaign is largely drawn from his early years. Warnock grew up poor in public housing in Savannah, Georgia. He cites his father’s small business transporting old cars to a local steel yard to withdraw from his attacks on free enterprise.
He attended Morehouse College and earned a doctorate. in theology from the Theological Seminary of the Union, funding his training with the help of student loans and federal scholarships. His older brother Keith, one of 11 siblings, served more than 20 years in prison for a first drug-related crime and Warnock has used his case to defend criminal justice reform.
“I know what it’s like to fight. He knew what it was like to dispense, “said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Georgia, about Raphael Warnock, whom he supports.” He is able to speak where there are many people. “
Warnock knew at first that he wanted to enter the ministry. His father was also a preacher and recruited his young son to help him read the fine print of a biblical reference book because he refused to get prescription glasses. Warnock recalled that he gave his first sermon, “It’s time for my father’s business,” at 11 p.m.
Their social activism is part of a tradition of resistance in many black churches that developed from the struggle against racial inequality. Black pastoralists have called the country’s conflicting racial history in terms that can be annoying to outsiders.
In his scrutinized sermon, Wright denied the black countries’ mistreatment of the country with the exclamation, “God damn America.” Loeffler has used the clip in an ad accusing Warnock of defending Wright’s “hate.”
Loeffler has also used excerpts from Warnock’s own sermons to argue that he is against the police and the military. In a clip, Warnock says no one can serve “God and the military.” Warnock, who has two veteran brothers and whose father served in World War II, said he preached from a biblical text and tried to teach a lesson on how to prioritize God and lay a moral foundation for life. .
Loeffler has used another clip to accuse Warnock of denigrating police. But his observation about “the police power that appeared in a kind of gangster and thug mentality” in this sermon was a specific reference to police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, which the U.S. Department of Justice investigated after a White police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, in 2014.
“He’s actually made sure we know who he is in his own words,” Loeffler said in a debate in December. “Those are not my words.”
Warnock accused her of lying “about Jesus.”
Cleaver said the attacks on Warnock’s sermons through out-of-context lines are “sadly unfair” and show no understanding of the role of a black preacher.
“I’m sick of everything they try to do,” he said.
In the December debate, Loeffler also questioned Warnock about his arrest in 2002 on suspicion of obstructing a child abuse investigation at a Maryland camp run by the Baltimore church he was running at the time. Warnock said he was trying to make sure the youths had lawyers or relatives present when authorities questioned them. The charges were dropped.
Warnock’s estranged wife accused him earlier this year of running over his foot during an argument, but police said he found no visible signs of injuries and did not charge Warnock with a crime.
The effort to paint Warnock as a radical is similar to the strategy Republicans used with some success against other Democrats in downward voting races this year. But it also echoes the attacks made by the segregationists against King and supporters of the civil rights movement. This could help get the state’s large African-American population to vote in the second round next month.
Warnock is right to continue to focus on its living wage platform, expanding health care options and voting rights, said the Rev. William Barber II, president of the Rape Repairers, a nonprofit group which fights poverty and discrimination.
“You don’t win by being a Republican,” Barber said. “You win by raising people from below.”