It would be charitable to repel the white religious right’s ongoing attacks on Rev. Calling on Raphael Warnock, from the moment he launched his successful bid to become the first black American senator from Georgia, non-Christian.
Most recently, Georgia Baptist Minister and Donald Trump loyalist Doug Collins, who once claims Warnock’s position as a “pro-choice pastor‘Is an oxymoronic’ lie out of bed ‘, accusing the senator of condemning Georgia’s new voting restrictions – but not the racist law itself – of the MLB’s decision to oust its All-Star Game from the state to move, and cry that Warnock is ‘awakened’. ‘lies spread”On the legislation. Just a week ago, a tweet that has now been removed from Warnock’s report – which states that the “meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are a Christian or not, by dedicating ourselves to helping others, we are able to save ourselves ”- so angry online evangelists, who were very much present online, that they spent the holiest day in the Christian calendar has and judgment and Warnock ‘n’heretic, ” N ‘narcissistic heretic, And ‘n’real heretic. “The head of the indictment was Jenna Ellis, a Trump attorney who failed. coup and proponent of the racist Kamala Harris birther lie. Beyond branding Warnock a “heretic, ”Ellis expressed the true ideological truth underlying the attacks on the Georgia senator.
“He must erase Reverend before his name,” Ellis tweeted about Warnock, a doctoral student at Columbia University Theological Seminary. ‘People who do not know Jesus pretend to be a gentle philanthropist … If Warnock’s church were truly biblical and Christian, he would not be a pastor. His theology and practice are not in line with the Bible. She was backed by rifle enthusiast and the Christian podcast, Allie Beth Stuckey, who compared the senator’s faith to a kind “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 for their political and social activists end up, which they would like to categorize as ‘helping others’ (what they usually mean are government programs). ‘
The IDP hopes that this issue will adorn the pastoral image of Warnock
Warnock’s church, which dismisses Ellis as insufficiently God-fearing, is the Ebenezer Baptist of Atlanta, one of the oldest Black churches in the country and the former pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. also on the nose that white Republican evangelists who publicly claim that the delegation of black voices do and believe in God’s work “All Lives MatterIs a Christian refusal against the allegations of black humanity – and which of course selectively quote the decradicalized MLK of white comfort and apathy – attacks not only the pastoral heir of MLK, but also the black church scripture and the theology that results from it.
These attacks are at the heart of the fundamental conflict between white evangelical Christianity in America, imbued with and deeply protective of the white supremacist capitalist status quo, and the traditional Black Christian church, an area 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 white American Christianity, which shows the fundamental centrality of white rule to the early white Christian church. He highlighted the rift between North and South Methodists and Baptists in 1845 over the issue of black slavery, the Catholic Church’s tradition of cruel global colonialism “justified by the belief that white Christians were God’s chosen way of” civilizing the world. “, and the indigenous genocide of the country’s white colonists. In various denominations, the churches in America – including those who 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 was “responsible for the construction and maintenance of a project to protect white rule and resist black equality.” This project set up the whole American story. The theological core of American Christianity has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white rule … not only among Gospels in the South, but also alongside major Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast. ‘
“White evangelists are the political quasi-religious heirs of the antebellum church,” Joseph Darby, senior pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and president of the NAACP chapter in the city, told me. ‘The southern church in the antebellum said that slavery was moral because they taught black people about Jesus and gave them a zealous life. You have had people calling themselves Christians who own people. How do you justify it? 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 was a cultivated racism that still largely drives white evangelical Christianity. ‘
White slaves not only imposed on Christianity those who had them in slavery, but also the Bible as documentary proof that black slavery was divinely ordained. The opponent of this white Christian theology of black disintegration was the Black Church, which arose what Henry Louis Gates described as a ‘redemptive force to shine a line over the hypocrisy at the core of their slavery’.
Addicted black people, both secretly and by cultivating the cultivated gospel given to them, forged a Christianity that offered ‘human dignity, earthly and heavenly freedom, and sisterly and brotherly love (such as) the Black Church and the religion his embrace, acted as the engine driving social transformation in America, from the antebellum abolitionist movement through the various phases of the struggle against Jim Crow, and now, in our present century, to Black Lives Matter, “as Gates writes .
How the Black Church embraces the tragic history and the fervor of the faith
And as Warnock writes in his book The Divided Mind of the Black Church“The black church was born to fight for freedom, and freedom is indeed the only reason to be.”
‘The whole ethos of the Black Church is different. Most black churches were established as a way to have black excellence, a black identity, a place for black people to worship freely, to work freely and to build on the way some plantation preachers preached ” Rev. Darby told me. ‘Although people wanted them to preach that they would be blessed in’ the great and great ‘, they went to Exodus and the story of Moses, and this laid the foundation of what James Cone called’ Liberation Theology ‘- that God is at his best with the oppressed and that God is actively working to liberate the oppressed. If we love God, we must do the same. It is therefore intertwined in the Black Church. There is a rejection of robust individualism, and a feeling that we need to make sure everyone is in order. And if it means fighting for justice, fairness and equity, you must do it. It’s not about ‘the sweet at and through’, it’s about what you’re going to do while you’re here. ‘
Warnock was a mentee of Cone, and he described black theology as a new and self-conscious form of godliness, a sophisticated excuse for a belief in slavery and in defense of a black liberation trajectory that still testifies against sin. of a nation that is both Christian and deeply racist. ‘
White Christianity indeed 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 evangelists, 52 percent of white Catholics and 51 percent of white Protestants – believe ‘socioeconomically’ differences between black and white americans are due to effort by black americans. “These groups also most likely supported Muslim travel bans and believed that ‘recent murders of black men are isolated incidents’. White evangelical Protestants were the only group that said the US would become a majority non-white nation in the future would be mostly negative. ‘
This is the crux of the difference between Warnock’s faith and that of the white evangelists who criticize and question the religious validity of the black theology he advocates. They embrace a religious ideology that is fundamentally selfish, actively working against political change to ensure the maintenance of white power, even if it is pretending to be apolitical. It is a Christianity that demands economic, racial, and social equality as religiously un-American, and may not consciously acknowledge that they affirm the continuing anti-black and capitalist instruments that motivate their own faith.
When they try to denigrate the Jesus of the Black Church as a ‘gentle philanthropist’ and ‘liberator’, they prove Jones ‘thesis that’ the fact that Jesus enchanted most white congregations is not just the whole of American history. was not indifferent to the status quo racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordered order of things. ”
As the MLK, which refuses to name them, wrote in its 1963 letter from a Birmingham prison: ‘I watched white churchmen stand on the sidelines, uttering pious irrelevances and sacred trifles’, while addressing the most vulnerable doing evil and promoting a version of Christianity that not only remains, but justifies the damage.
“One of my seminary professors said something back that made perfect sense,” Darby told me. ‘He said that the church fathers who formed our concept of sin tend to place more emphasis on the sins of the flesh than on the sins of the spirit, because they were all old people who no longer belonged to the sins of the flesh. could not participate. So it has become the worst sins, but it is less invested in the morality of how we treat other people. ‘
“This is how you can get caught up in the opposition of abortion, against transgender toilets or transgender sports teams, because there is this skewed morality,” Darby added. ‘How about sharing your neighbor’s love with yourself? Where can I find the passage that says, ‘You must own an AR-15 so you can strike, if necessary’? It is a kind of self-centered religion wrapped in politics, the thing of God and guns. That they should be the ones who are politically right, and that they are the arbitrators of whom are politically right. This is how you can have questions about Barack Obama’s faith, but that you can almost make Donald Trump your Messiah. This is evangelical Christianity. ”
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