Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) compared former President Donald Trump’s supporters — particularly evangelical Christians — to segregationists and slavery advocates during a recent interview, suggesting that they must be answering to a different God.
Warnock joined host David Remnick for a lengthy conversation that aired over the weekend on “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” and Warnock insisted that the political fight against Trump was also a “moral and spiritual” battle.
It was Remnick who raised the question about pro-Trump evangelicals and what he called a “movement” among them to call for becoming a “Christian Nation with laws instituting Christian principles.”
“The enormous number of people of earnest faith, who look at someone who lives the way he does, who’s now been convicted of multiple felonies, how do you analyze that?” Remnick asked.
Warnock responded by suggesting that evangelical Trump supporters were no different from the Christians who had at one time supported either slavery or segregation.
“Well, there were a number of Christians, a whole lot of Christians, who were pro-slavery. And, there are a whole lot of Christians who were pro-segregation,” Warnock explained, adding, “There’s a recurring line by Martin Luther King Jr in his letter from the Birmingham jail. He says it a few times, and in his speeches — he says, ‘I am so disappointed in the American church. What kind of people worship there? Who really is their God?’ That’s the question for this moment. ‘Who really is their God?’ Particularly when we’ve been told by a lot of folks on the far right for years that their focus is family values.”
Warnock went on to attack evangelicals for their position on “matters of private morality,” such as sex and gender issues.
“And those same people now are lined up behind Donald Trump,” Warnock kept hammering the point. “A man who has, had several marriages who found himself caught up in the crosshairs of, his decision to having an affair with a porn star, and these same folks who raised these issues around family values and private morality are the ones who are speaking as if he is the Messiah of God. I think the question that Doctor King asked all those years ago is especially relevant at this moment: ‘Who really is their God?’”