US Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat from Georgia, arrives onstage to speak on the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on August 19, 2024. | Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty
My father once preached a sermon titled, “Does Your Conduct Match Your Holy Calling?” I know about it because even though I was very young when it was delivered, he talked about it often. The COGIC pastor that he is, he meant individual sin. But me, agnostic and non-churgoing, the sermon title remains with me. And what it taught me then, and still today, is that sometimes there are gaps between what we say and what we do, though we should try—in earnest—to make those things consistent.
Some gaps are innocuous. Like saying you’ll have a salad for dinner and stopping at a fast food spot instead. It matters, but not on a scale that is measurable beyond the individual. But there are other inconsistencies that are much more consequential.
If you sermonize about peace as a preacher but daily in your work and practice contribute to ongoing harm and violence as a politician, the difference matters. And it’s not a difference, primarily, of personal piety and failure. It is a difference that produces destruction and death for others at an immeasurable scale.
I was reminded of my father’s sermon this week when I watched Sen. Raphael Warnock‘s speech delivered to the Democratic National Convention (DNC). I was reminded, too, that I’d met him when I was a student at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, studying Black Theology in 2008. He delivered a sermon for the Black Church Studies organization there and discussed growing up Pentecostal. He, too, had to have learned that personal piety would be expressed in how one behaves, that what they say has to match what they do.
Listening to his speech, curiosities emerged.
He talked about how voting is a prayer—”a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children and and our prayers are stronger when we pray together.” He spoke about the diversity of US voices—there is the “increasingly diverse electoral [system]” which should “get to determine the future of this country.” There is a problem of lies he pinpoints—”The lie and the logic of January 6 is a sickness. It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws all across our country.” And there is a hope for healing — “And the question is, who will heal the land?”
He asks us, Americans, to “stand up in this moral moment,” to make our cases for justice and equity, to make our voices heard so that we can make sure all kinds of people, and their children, and their children’s children—including Israeli and Palestinian kids—will “be ok” and inherit a prosperous future.
Sounds good. But there are questions. There are inconsistencies. There are troubles.
Senator Warnock pointed out the hypocrisy, the flagrant absurdity, of Donald Trump holding a Christian Bible, “endorsing” it. He interjected, “He should try reading it.” It is certainly true that he should. But the biblical passages Warnock included in his speech gave me pause. Not because of what they said but because of what his record–not as a pastor but as a senator–is.
He quotes three passages: “Do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “In as much as you’ve done it unto the least of these, you have done it also unto me.” But does the conduct match the call? Not of Trump but of himself?
Warnock is not just a preacher delivering a sermon to a congregation on a Sunday morning or a weeknight revival. He is a senator with political capital and power to move the direction of legislation in this country. And when immovable, justice demands moral, ethical and public dissent.
Is it true that President Biden has been “fighting for it for more than a half-century,” an America which, “provides a path for ordinary people and gives every child a chance,” and in which he “always put the people first”?
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was sponsored by Biden as a senator, a patently racist bill that exponentially increased incarceration rates for Black, brown and poor folks in the U.S.
Before that, Biden also worked with segregationists, sponsoring a bill as a freshman senator in 1975 that would help to keep schools racially segregated, limiting the power of courts to use busing for desegregation purposes. And in 1991, when Anita Hill made claims of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas during his nomination process to the Supreme Court, it was Biden who was the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, a deeply sexist and demoralizing experience for Hill as a black woman.
To rightly criticize the lies of Donald Trump while trafficking untruths and misleading statements for the Democratic Party is to undermine the spirit of Warnock’s message.
He mentioned both Israeli and Palestinian children in his speech, saying they both should have fruitful and productive lives. But the call he makes for justice and equity is undermined by his senatorial practice. In addition to receiving upwards of $920,000 from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC since 2020, he voted favorably on the bill that cut UNRWA funding and he continually votes ‘yes’ for sending aid and weapons to Israel, provisions that have increased harm and displacement of Palestinians, children included. While some of us watched Warnock’s speech on our phones, others of us watched the ongoing atrocities in Palestine.
Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank, are ethnic cleansing.
Warnock stated, “We can heal a planet in peril. We can heal the land.” But what do these words, about a planet and its impending peril, mean when Tortuguita, an indigenous, non-binary queer activist that was murdered in Atlanta by Georgia State Troopers as they protested, defending the Atlanta forest against the construction of the police training facility, colloquially called Cop City? A senator for Georgia, yes, but also a pastor in the same city, the South River Forest will be impacted, and the Black and brown community that surrounds it, harmed.
At a time when places globally are experiencing record heat in various cities and states, delivering a speech claiming that his party wants to heal the planet contradicts the actions of lawmakers.
If Trump can, and should, be publicly called to task for his complicity in inciting harm and violence, can Warnock more forcefully, intentionally and consistently criticize Georgia police and the construction of Cop City? Warnock lamented voter suppression of the republicans without acknowledging the same tactics are being used by his party, in the city in which he pastors, against Atlantans seeking to vote for a referendum to stop its construction.
Sermons and speeches that sound good can soothe and give cause for celebration. But in his case, and so many others at the DNC, the content doesn’t match the things people have done, and continue to do and vote for. More is required of us.
Ashon Crawley is and author and Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.
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