JoIt would be beneficial to call the continuous attacks of the white religious right against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, from the moment he launched his successful candidacy to become the first black senator in the United States of Georgia, simply antichrist.
More recently, Georgia’s Baptist minister and Donald Trump’s loyalist, Doug Collins, who once vindicated Warnock’s stance as a “pro-election pastor”“It’s an oxymoronic‘ lie from the bed of hell ’, which blamed the senator’s condemnation of Georgia’s new voting restrictions, but not the same racist law, for MLB’s decision to move its All-Star State game, shouting “woke up” Warnock “spread lies”About the legislation. Just a week ago a tweet now deleted of Warnock’s account — which stated that the “meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Whether you are a Christian or not, through the commitment to help others, we can save ourselves, ”white evangelicals so angry that they spent the holiest day on the Christian calendar issuing judgment, labeling Warnock as“heretic“A”narcissistic heretic“And one”real hereticAt the head of the prosecution was Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Trump’s failure Rebellion and advocate of racist lying Kamala Harris. Beyond the Warnock brand as “heretic“, Ellis expressed the true ideological truth underlying the attacks on the Georgia senator.
“I should suppress the reverend in front of his name,” Ellis said he tweeted on Warnock, Ph.D. at Columbia University Theological Seminary. “People who do not know Jesus show that he was a soft-spoken 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.” weapons enthusiast and Christian Podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, who compared the senator’s faith to a kind of “social justice moralism“In which” Jesus is not a savior, but a “deliverer”, and not of sin, but of “systems” … Jesus / Christianity is a means to his policy and concludes the social activist, who likes to classify as “helping others” (what they usually mean are government programs) ”.
Warnock Church, which Ellis rejects as insufficiently pious, is the Baptist Ebenezer of Atlanta, one of the oldest black churches in the country, and the former pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. too on the nose that white Republican evangelicals who publicly claim that to delegitimize black votes is to do God’s work and believe ”All lives matter“It is a Christian rejection of the claims of black humanity and that, of course, selectively quote the MLK de-radicalized of comfort and apathy of the white: they attack not only the pastoral heir of MLK, but the black church is important and the theology that springs from it.
These attacks are the core of the fundamental conflict between white evangelical Christianity in America, which is permeated and deeply protective of 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 traces the development of American white Christianity, demonstrating the fundamental centrality of white supremacy in the early white Christian church. Highlights the division between Methodists and Baptists of the North and South in 1845 over the issue of black slavery, the Catholic Church’s tradition of brutal global colonialism “justified by the conviction that white Christians were the means God chose for.” to civilize “the world,” and the indigenous genocide of the white colonizers of that country. In all denominations, those churches in America, including those that argued against slavery, advocated a gospel of white supremacy and black subordination.
“As the dominant cultural power in America,” Jones writes, “the white Christian church has been responsible for building and maintaining a project to protect white supremacy and resist black equality. This project has framed all of American history.” “The theological core of American Christianity has been completely structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy … not only among evangelicals in the south, but also throughout the major Protestants of the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast.”
“White evangelicals are the quasi-religious political heirs of the antebellar church,” Joseph Darby, senior pastor of Nichols Chapel’s AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, and president of the city’s NAACP chapter, told me . “The church in southern Antelope said slavery was moral because they taught black people about Jesus and gave them a working life. You had people who called themselves Christians and owned human beings. How do you justify it? Well, justify it by saying, “They’re not really people like us. They’re a different kind of person and you have to be careful because they can be a dangerous guy.” Thus, there has been a cultivated racism that still largely drives white evangelical Christianity. ”
“The black church was born fighting for freedom, and freedom is in fact its only reason for being.”
White slaves not only imposed Christianity on those they had enslaved, but they held the Bible as documentary evidence that black slavery was divinely ordained. The opposite of this white Christian theology of black degradation was the black church, which arose to become what Henry Louis Gates describes as a “redemptive force to draw a line about hypocrisy in the heart of the his servitude ”.
The enslaved black people, surreptitiously and remodeling the distorted gospel that had been given to them, forged a Christianity that offered “human dignity, earthly and heavenly freedom, and fraternal and fraternal love (as the ‘Black Church and religion practiced in its embrace) as the engine driving social transformation in America, from the antebellar abolitionist movement to the various phases of the struggle against Jim Crow, and now, in our current century , to 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 in fact its only reason for being.”
“The whole ethic of the black church is different. Most black churches were born as a way to exist black excellence, black identity, a place where blacks could worship freely, work freely and build the path that some plantation preachers preached, ”he told me. say the Rev. Darby. “Even though people wanted them to preach that they would be blessed in‘ the great ones little by little, ’they went to the Exodus and the story of Moses, and this laid the groundwork for what James Cone called‘ Theology of liberation “: God is closer to the oppressed and that God is actively working to deliver the oppressed. If we love God, we must do the same. Therefore, this is woven into the black church. There is a rejection in the hard individualism and a sense that we need to make sure everyone is okay. And if that means fighting for justice, fairness and fairness, we need to do it. It’s not about “the sweetness of so much in so far as “what you will do while you are here.”
Warnock was a mentor to Cone, and he described black theology as “a new and conscious way of speaking of God, a sophisticated apology for a faith formed in slavery and in defense of a black liberating trajectory that continues to bear witness. against the sins of a nation that is both supposedly Christian and deeply racist. ”
In fact, white Christianity retains the attitudes of its founders. A 2018 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the majority of white Christians (53 percent of white evangelists, 52 percent of white Catholics, and 51 percent of white Protestants on the mainline) believe that “The socioeconomic differences between black and white Americans are due to the lack of effort of black Americans.” These groups were also more likely to support Muslim travel bans and to believe that the recent killings of black men they are isolated incidents. ”White evangelical Protestants were the only group that said the United States“ becoming a mostly non-white nation in the future will be mostly negative ”.
This is the core of the difference between the faith of Warnock and that of white evangelists who criticize and question the religious validity of the black theology he advocates. They embrace a fundamentally selfish religious ideology, which actively works against political change to ensure the maintenance of white power, even at the time it purports to be apolitical. It emits a Christianity that demands economic, racial, and social equality as religiously anti-American, it may not consciously recognize that they confirm the anti-black, capitalist devices that motivate their own faith.
When they try to malign the Black Church Jesus as a “soft-spoken philanthropist” and “liberator,” they demonstrate Jones ’thesis that for most of American history the Jesus evoked by most white congregations did not to be simply indifferent to the racial inequality of the status quo; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordered order of things. “
“It is a kind of egocentric religion that is involved in politics, a thing of God and weapons.”
As the MLK, which refuses to quote in its 1963 Birmingham Prison Letter, wrote, “I have seen white men in the church stand aside and speak pious irrelevances and santimonious trivialities” while inflicting harm on the most vulnerable and promote a version of Christianity that not only fulfills, but justifies this evil.
“One of my seminar teachers said something back 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 old men who could no longer share in the sins of meat. Thus, those became the worst sins, but they were less invested in the morality of how we treat other people.
“This is how you can catch up against opposite abortion, fighting transgender toilets or transgender sports teams, because there’s that distorted morale,” Darby added. “How about a part of loving your neighbor as yourself? Where can I find the part that says, “You’ll have an AR-15 so you can hit, if necessary”? It is a kind of egocentric religion that is involved in politics, a thing of God and weapons. That they must be the ones who are politically right and are the arbiters of who is politically right. That’s how you can have questions about Barack Obama’s faith, but you can make Donald Trump almost your Messiah. That is evangelical Christianity. “