Southern Christian Left Hopes to Give Democrats a Majority

Joe Biden’s victory in the state of Georgia in November was the big bang for the presidential election. Democrats now sincerely hope it’s not just a temporary win.

There are none He doubts that the state is changing, both politically and culturally. The state’s population has gotten younger. More blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and college students have moved here. The number of immigrants in the state has increased by 84 percent since 2010. The city of Atlanta in turn has been populated by well-educated liberals from the north, which also benefits Democrats.

The state of Georgia has long been associated with deep racism. As recently as 2001, the state flag was virtually identical to the southern flag during the Civil War, in which Georgia fought to preserve slavery.

Now Raphael Warnock, a descendant of slaves, could become the state’s first black senator.

Much of Raphael Warnock’s life has been focused on following in the footsteps of civil rights activist Martin Luther King.

Warnock grew in a million dollar show in Savannah, Georgia, with eleven siblings. Both parents were priests. As a good student at the school, he was offered places at various prestigious universities. He chose to study at Morehouse in Atlanta precisely because King studied there. He later became a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King was also a pastor.

For Warnock, as for King, the church became a platform for a political career.

Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, black churches in the southern states, and particularly progressive churches like the Ebenezer in Atlanta, have been at the center of the social life of black families and organizations. most important policies.

– The black church gave people a feeling of being valuable, a feeling of belonging, it gave us security. I don’t know how we would have survived without him, says Oprah Winfrey in “The Black Church,” a new book by Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In recent years The loyal support of the Christian right for Donald Trump has received a lot of attention, but there has also been a mobilization of the Christian left, especially in the south. There, churches have been given an important role in national protests against racism. During the early years of Trump’s presidency, churches often became purely physical free zones for the undocumented, where they could seek refuge from raids orchestrated by the border agency ICE.

During the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many religious leaders of the Black Church stepped forward and assumed more active political roles in various states, not least in Georgia.

But the political influence of the Black Church has also made it a welcome target for Republicans.

The progressive Christian tradition that Warnock runs, both as a pastor and as a politician, has its roots in the 1960s. Several left-wing Christian organizations were then formed, partly in response to criticism from black activists like Malcolm X, who was Muslim and rejected Christianity as a “white men’s religion.”

Instead, many of the black priests of the South wanted to show that it was possible to read the Bible in a way compatible with black liberation and civil rights activism.

Ironically, it is precisely Warnock’s Christian rhetoric that is now being severely attacked by his Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler.

In a wave of negative commercials, it is alleged that Warnock’s involvement in the Black Church made him a “radical extremist.

“Saving the Senate is about saving America from that,” Loeffler said in a political commercial, while Warnock is in the photo.

Black priests in the south accuses Loeffler of racist signal politics. Just before Christmas, 100 black priests wrote a joint appeal condemning Loeffler’s attacks on Warnock as an attack on “the entire black church.”

They wrote on appeal that Loeffler showed “contempt for black politicians and for the protests of the Black Lives Matter human rights movement against systematic racism.”

When Loeffler, owner of the Atlanta Dream basketball team, criticized the Black Life Matters movement during the election campaign, several of the team’s players protested wearing “Vote Warnock” T-shirts, voting for Warnock.

Warnock has also been accused of supporting Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former Chicago pastor who was caught in a blizzard during Obama’s 2008 election campaign, when he criticized the United States as a deeply racist country.

The personal attacks on Warnock are, in principle, verbatim with the attacks directed at Obama for his involvement in black churches twelve years ago.

Then Republicans described Obama’s involvement in the Black Church as proof that he was a radical instigator “with anti-colonial revolutionary ideas,” as former Republican President Newt Gingrich, also of Georgia, put it.

Warnock himself has responded to these attacks by shrugging his shoulders; in a political commercial, the campaign is a parody of the commercials, in which the voice of an overly dramatic narrator claims that Warnock “hates puppies”;

His campaign tries to keep the focus on the problems. Warnock advocates, above all, for higher minimum wages, an expansion of state health care programs for the poor, and reforms of the police and judiciary to combat discrimination.

Warnock has in recent years She worked for the New Georgia Project, the near-mythical campaign organization started by activist Stacey Abrams. They have been fighting for several years to make voting easier in the state and have actively organized, above all, black voters. It is believed that this organizational infrastructure decided the election of Biden in Georgia in November.

There is no question that Warnock can mobilize black voters on Tuesday. The question is whether it can also excite older voters in the affluent suburbs that also contributed to Biden’s victory.

In opinion polls against Kelly Loeffler, it’s a dead race.

Republican strategist Karl Rove, who plays a key role in the party’s campaigns in Georgia, wrote a memo this weekend warning that early forecasts for early voting would benefit Democrats.

Turnout is highest in districts where Democrats are strong, especially around Atlanta, Warnock’s hometown.

During the weekend before the election, the state was visited by Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who are trying to give the Loeffler campaign a final push. State television screens were filled with a new wave of commercials, in which Loeffler compared Warnock to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

– America has never seen a more dangerous and extreme politician than Warnock, says Loeffler in the film.