Preacher brings activism, faith to Senate race

ATLANTA — In 2008, when Barack Obama was under fire for a sermon his former pastor delivered years earlier, the aspiring president distanced himself from the preacher’s fiery words that channeled Black Americans’ anger over racism.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock defended Jeremiah Wright. “When preachers tell the truth, very often it makes people uncomfortable,” he said on Fox News.

Now Warnock is the politician running for office and the one under attack for his sometimes impassioned words from the pulpit. And once again, he is not backing down. Warnock, 51, says his run for U.S. Senate in Georgia — one of two races on Jan. 5 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 is calling for bail reform and an end to mass incarceration; a living wage and job training for a green economy; expanded access to voting and health care, and student loan forgiveness. It’s an unabashedly liberal platform that may galvanize the Democrats he needs to turn out to vote in the runoff election.

But it also carries risks. His opponent, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, has blasted his rhetoric and proposals as “radical,” socialist and out of step with Georgia residents. Georgia voters are also likely to hear more about that from President Donald Trump, who announced Saturday that he will return to the state on Jan. 4, the eve of the runoff, to rally support for Loeffler and fellow Republican Sen. 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 who is running for political office, but I don’t think of myself as a politician,” he told The Associated Press. “I honestly don’t know anything to be other than 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 activate change in the public square.” In high school, he listened to the civil rights icon’s sermons and was particularly drawn to “A Knock At Midnight,” in which King exhorts churches to serve as the “critic of the state” and fight for peace and economic and racial justice.

Warnock has embraced that mission. In 2007, he warned that the U.S. could “lose its soul” in a speech that condemned 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 killing of George Floyd by police in May, he expounded on the country’s struggle with a “virus” he dubbed “COVID-1619” for the year when some of the first slaves arrived in English North America.

His social activism is part of a tradition of resistance in many Black churches that developed from the fight against racial inequality. Black pastors have called out the country’s troubled racial history using terms that can be discomforting to outsiders.

In his much- scrutinized sermon, Wright decried the country’s mistreatment of Blacks with the exclamation, “God damn America.” Loeffler has used the clip in an ad that accuses Warnock of defending Wright’s “hatred.”

Loeffler has also used snippets of Warnock’s own sermons to argue that he is against police and the military. In one clip, Warnock says that nobody 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 biblical text and trying to impart a lesson about prioritizing God and laying a moral foundation for life.

Cleaver said the attacks on Warnock’s sermons using lines with no context are “woefully unfair” and show no understanding of the role of a Black preacher.

“I’m just made sick over what they’re trying to do,” he said.

Warnock