IIt would be charitable to mention the ongoing attacks of the white religious right on Rev. Raphael Warnock, starting from the moment he launched his successful attempt to become the first black US senator from Georgia. unchristian
Most recently, Georgia Baptist minister and Donald Trump loyalist Doug Collins, ever claimed Warnock’s position as a “pro-choice pastor”“Is an oxymoronic” lie from the bed of hell, “the senator blamed for condemning Georgia’s new voting restrictions – but not the racist law itself – for MLB’s decision to move its All-Star Game out of the state crying that Warnock “woke up” “spreading liesAbout the legislation. Just a week ago a now deleted tweet from Warnock’s account — which stated that the “significance of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are a Christian or not, through a dedication to helping others, we are able to save ourselves ”- so furious, highly online white evangelicals that they spent the holiest day in the Christian calendar pronouncing judgment, where they “labeled” Warnock as one.heretic,” a “narcissistic heretic,” and a “real hereticIn charge of the indictment was Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Trump’s botched Rebellion and supporter of the racist Kamala Harris birther lie. Beyond branding Warnock a “hereticEllis spoke out the real ideological truth underlying the attacks on the senator in Georgia.
“He should drop Pastor in front of his name,” Ellis tweeted about Warnock, a doctoral graduate of Columbia University’s theological seminary. ‘People who don’t know Jesus pretend he was a loving philanthropist … If Warnock’s Church were truly biblical and Christian, he wouldn’t be a pastor. His theology and practice are inconsistent with the Bible. She was supported by lover of weapons and Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, who likened the senator’s faith to some sort of “moralism of social justice‘In which’ Jesus is not a savior but a ‘liberator’ – and not from sin, but from ‘systems’ … Jesus / Christianity is a tool for their politics and social activist causes, which they like to categorize as “helping others” (what they usually mean are government programs). “
Warnock’s Church, which Ellis dismisses as insufficiently divine, is the Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, one of the oldest black churches in the country and the former pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. to on the nose those white Republican evangelicals who publicly claim that delegitimizing black voices does and believes God’s work “All lives are importantIs a Christian rejection of claims made by black humanity – and that, of course cite selectively the radicalized MLK of white consolation and apathy – not only attack MLK’s pastoral heir, but the black church writes grandly and the theology that flows from it.
Those attacks are at the heart of the fundamental conflict between white Evangelical Christianity in America, which is both 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 follows the development of White American Christianity and demonstrates the fundamental central position of White supremacy in the early White Christian Church. He highlights the divisions between both Northern and Southern Methodists and Baptists in 1845 over the issue of black slavery, the Catholic Church’s tradition of brutal global colonialism “ justified by the belief that white Christians were God’s chosen means of “ civilizing ” the world. , and the indigenous genocide of this country’s white settlers. Across the different denominations, those churches in America – including those advocating against slavery – embraced a gospel of white supremacy and black subordination.
As the dominant cultural force in America, Jones writes, the white Christian church has been responsible for setting up and supporting a project to protect white supremacy and oppose black equality. This project has framed the entire American story. The theological core of American Christianity has been profoundly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy … not only among Evangelicals in the South, but also among major Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast. ”
“White evangelicals are the political quasi-religious heirs of the pre-war church,” I was told by Joseph Darby, senior pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and chairman of the city’s NAACP branch. “The pre-war Southern Church said slavery was moral because they taught black people about Jesus and gave them a zealous life. You had people who called themselves 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 people and you have to be careful with them because they can be a dangerous kind of people.” So there is a cultivated racism that still drives white Evangelical Christianity to a large extent. “
The black church was born to fight for freedom, and freedom is indeed the only reason for existence.
White slaves not only imposed Christianity on those who enslaved them, but also presented the Bible as documentary evidence that black slavery was ordained by God. The counterpart to this white Christian theology of black humiliation was the black church, which emerged to become what Henry Louis Gates describes as a “redeeming force to shine a line on the hypocrisy at the heart of their slavery.”
Enslaved black people, both covertly and by remodeling the twisted gospel they had been given, forged a Christianity that offered “ human dignity, earthly and heavenly liberty, and sisterly and brotherly love (as) the Black Church and the religion conceived in her. embrace acted as the engine of social transformation in America, from the pre-war abolitionist movement through the various phases of the fight against Jim Crow, and now, in our present century, to Black Lives Matter, ”Gates writes.
And as Warnock writes in his book The divided spirit of the black church, “The black church was born to fight for freedom, and freedom is indeed the only reason for existence.”
“The whole ethos of the black church is different. Most black churches originated as a way for black excellence, black identity, a place for black people to worship freely, work freely and build the way some plantation preachers preached, ”Pastor Darby told me. “Even though the people wanted them to preach that they would be blessed in the great by and by, they went to Exodus, and the story of Moses, and that laid the foundation of what James Cone called“ Liberation Theology ”- that God is closest to the oppressed, and that God is actively working to deliver the oppressed. If we love God, we must do the same. So that’s woven into the black church. There is a rejection of rugged individualism and the sense that we have to make sure everyone is okay And if that means fighting for justice and fairness and equality then you should do it It’s not about ‘the sweet little by little’ it’s about what you’re going to do while you’re here . “
Warnock was a mentee of Cone’s, and he has described black theology as “ a new and self-aware form of God-talk, a sophisticated apology for a belief formed in slavery and in defense of a black liberation trajectory that continues to testify against the sins of one. nation that is both presumably Christian and deeply racist. “
Indeed, white Christianity retains the attitude of its founders. A 2018 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that most white Christians across the board – 53 percent of white Evangelicals, 52 percent of white Catholics, and 51 percent of white Protestants – believe that “ socioeconomic differences between black and white Americans are due to a lack of effort from black Americans. Those groups also likely supported the Muslims’ travel ban, thinking that “recent murders of black men are isolated incidents.” White evangelical Protestants were the only group to say that the US “will in the future become a non-white nation largely will be negative “.
This is the crux of the difference between Warnock’s faith and that of the white evangelicals who criticize and question the religious validity of the black theology he embraces. They embrace a religious ideology that is fundamentally selfish, one that actively works against political change to ensure the preservation of white power, even if it pretends to be apolitical. It casts off a Christianity that claims economic, racial, and social equality as religiously un-American, and may not knowingly acknowledge that they affirm the ongoing anti-black and capitalist means that motivate their own faith.
When they try to slander the Jesus of the Black Church as “ a mild-mannered philanthropist ” and a “ liberator, ” they prove Jones’ thesis that “ for almost all of American history, the Jesus called by most white congregations was not just indifferent used to be. to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things. “
It’s kind of a self-centered religion that’s involved in politics, that God and weapons thing.
As the MLK who refuse to quote them in its 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail wrote, “ I’ve seen white clergy standing on the sidelines and contemplating pious irrelevances and sanctimonious trivialities ” while harming the most vulnerable and a version promoting Christianity that not only lasts, but justifies that damage.
“One of my seminary professors said something a long time ago 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 sins of the flesh than on sins of the spirit because they were all old men who could no longer participate in sins of the flesh . So those became the worst sins, but they became less invested in the morality of how we treat other people. “
“That’s how you can get caught up in opposing abortion, fighting transgender toilets or transgender sports teams, because there are twisted morals,” added Darby. What about that part about loving your neighbor as yourself? Where can I find the part that says ‘You will own an AR-15 so you can hit if necessary’? It’s kind of a self-centered religion that’s involved in politics, that God and weapons thing. That they must be the ones who are politically right, and that they must be the ones who are politically right. For example, you may have questions about Barack Obama’s faith, but you can almost make Donald Trump your Messiah. That’s Evangelical Christianity. “