The Hypocrisy of Republican Attacks on Raphael Warnock's Sermons
The Hypocrisy of Republican Attacks on Raphael Warnock’s Sermons
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Loeffler and her Republican allies have seamlessly transferred their 2020 general-election attacks on Joe Biden as a “far left” extremist to Warnock (and to his ally Jon Ossoff, who faces incumbent Republican David Perdue in another January 5 Senate runoff in Georgia). But there’s something special about the attacks on Warnock: They utilize material from his sermons at Ebenezer and positive comments he has made about another Black minister, the very controversial Jeremiah Wright of Chicago.
Now before even looking at the specifics, my immediate reaction echoed this sarcastic question from Sam Stein: “Why are Raphael Warnock’s faith and sermons fair game for attack but Amy Coney Barrett’s religious views not?”
The question arose after Loeffler ran an ad resurrecting a highly edited clip of Warnock at the pulpit in 2011
Anyone with basic biblical literacy would recognize Warnock’s words, even ripped out of context as they were, as reflecting a teaching of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other.”
That particular scriptural reading aside, Jesus consistently taught that placing anything on the same plane as fidelity to God — tribe, country, even family — is a betrayal. So that would apply to “the military” as well. It doesn’t mean the military (or the country) is not worth honoring, but simply that nothing should compete with love for God. It’s an extremely orthodox reading of the Gospel.
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But the Black church isn’t the only exponent of the prophetic tradition: It’s also a mainstay of Evangelical Protestantism generally. And it is precisely the tradition that conservative white Evangelicals have appealed to in their headlong rush into partisan politics during the past 40 years. When they attack legalized abortion and feminism and “moral relativism” and marriage equality and all the other offenses to the patriarchal “family values” they identify with godliness, they, too, are calling down divine wrath on the wickedness they perceive as consuming their society. Like Wright, they presume to speak for God to a wicked nation full of apostates. But they also presume to speak for Americanism, too. So while the Franklin Grahams and James Dobsons and Paula Whites of the Christian right are perfectly willing to “damn” the Americans who disagree with their views (or even with their interpretations of the Gospels), they don’t think of those they damn as real Americans. So they can have their patriotism and their rebellious prophecy, too.
[link:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/the-hypocrisy-of-attacks-on-raphael-warnocks-sermons.html|
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