Sen. Raphael Warnock is a man in two worlds: the spiritual and the political.
Eugene Daniels/POLITICO
The service lasted for about an hour, and Warnock ended with a plea to the congregation to pray and vote.
“I ain’t tell you to vote for me,” Warnock said. “Vote for whoever you want to vote for. Just vote — and pray for your pastor.”
The Rev. Warnock made a swift exit. Minutes later, Sen. Warnock was sitting in a pink convertible at the Atlanta Pride Parade with Georgia’s other senator, Jon Ossoff. The shirt and tie were gone, replaced with a black shirt with a rainbow-hued “W” — his campaign logo — on it. The switch was official, putting overt politics back on the menu.
That’s true for his congregants as well. As they say goodbye after services, they don’t see the split between Warnock’s two important jobs. For them, their church’s legacy is directly tied to politics. The civil rights movement was driven by — and organized in — churches like this one throughout the South. There’s simply no disconnecting them from each other: the political and the religious are intrinsically linked here.
“We say ‘separate church and state,’ but we know that everything that we have has come from the church, and all the things that we have that are good have come from the church as a people,” says Peggy Lucas, who’s been worshiping at Ebenezer since 1978. “We’ve always been involved in the political.”
Brunette Bolton, a 42-year vet of Ebenezer, agrees. She says Warnock has never had to choose; that since he was elected to the Senate, he’s “never really been absent from duty.” For her and many others in the church, Warnock serves as a symbol of what a good Christian looks like: fighting for the least among them and spreading the Gospel.
And while they prop up and defend Warnock, they are also on the offense, attacking Walker, without prompting. But the good church folk will only do it implicitly.
“People will vote for party over policy and decisions that’s going to impact people,” Bolton says. “It makes no sense whatsoever to have a person who’s unqualified and unethical, has no knowledge of that position, does not know what to do — would not know what to do. It’s just kind of sad.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock’s books are displayed in a case at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.