To Open The Sky

Discord in the House of the Lord

4 November 2024

Sen. Warnock: Voters in Georgia will deliver a win for Harris (MSNBC, 4 November 2022)

The Rev. Raphael Warnock is pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached. In addition to serving in the House of the Lord, Rev. King, was the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later became a prominent leader in the civil rights movement until he was shot dead in Memphis in April 1968.

Rev. Warnock also fills a dual role. He ran against incumbent Senator Kelly Loeffler in 2020 and finally defeated her in a runoff election in 2021. Running at the same time in a regular election, Jon Ossoff defeated incumbent David Perdue. These victories gave Democrats control of the US Senate.

What is noteworthy here is not that Raphael Warnock is a man of God, but that he does not regard his Christian faith as calling him to put Biblical precepts above his oath to the Constitution. That is the dilemma faced by Christian churches in the Ubited States today. It became paramount, in my view, the day Trump started his 2015 campaign for the presidency. A group of evangelical Christian pastors eagerly embraced Trump, holding him up as an imperfect man chosen by God to fulfill a larger mission for the church.

Imperfect Trump undisputedly is. The words he utters on the campaign trail, as well as his actions throughout his career, show him to be far different from a follower of the teachings of Jesus. But the Christians who support him represent a far worse danger. They overlook his faults in a quest to make America a nation governed according to Christian principles. To put it bluntly, they mean to establish a theocracy.

There's no need here to describe what living in that sort of nation would mean, and little time to explain why it would be burdensome for many. Focus on the First Amendment provision that reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If annulled — which is what the evangelicals want — it would turn life in this country upside down.

Below I link to reports that show how much influence Christian nationalism has acquired. Three candidates for senate: David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, and Herscel Walker, all took the stage to back former president Trump at his macon, Georgia rally yesterday." That was Sunday, 3 November 2024 -- the next to lst day of the campaign. (Walker exhorted the crowd to vote for Donald Trump Jr before correcting himself.) Fortunately, mainstream Christian churches, and leaders like Rev. Warnock, understand this danger and oppose the Christian nationalist movement.

Incident 1: in 2020, William Kopp, a pastor at Stuarts Draft Baptist Church in Virginia, delivered a scathing sermon about former President Trump. He faced immediate backlash from his congregation and is now a former pastor. He and his wife moved to North Carolina.

Congregation replaced pastor after this controversial sermon about Trump (CNN, 5 November 2022)

Incident 2: In April this year, Rev. Loran Livingston, the senior pastor of Central Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, criticized the Trump-endorsed "God Bless the USA Bible" this month as both blasphemous and disgusting. The Morning Joe panel discusses.1

Evangelical pastor in North Carolina calls 'Trump Bible' blasphemous (MSNBC, 30 April 2024)

Incident 3: In an 18 October 2024 broadcast, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan reports on the concerns Ben Marsh, Pastor at Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, NC, has about the rise of Christian nationalism, as represented by the message aligning Christians with Trump being spread across the country by preacher and Christian singer Sean Feucht — and by the Bible Trump is hawking.

Pastor reacts to Trump Bible: "It breaks my heart" (CNN, 18 October 2024)

These three incidents are only a small part of the Christian nationalist movement. I present them here because time is short and because they are vivid examples. In my view, this is another rason not to vote for Trump.

The Founding Fathers understood the dangers of a state religion such as England had at the time of the American Revolution. Those dangers are on display today — in both a host of ordinary citizens who naively support Trump, and in the actions of powerful people behind the scenes, as this ProPublica report explains.

Below are a few more references on Christian nationalism, and why this country was not founded as a Christian nation as Trump supporters like to claim. (Some of them take a while to get through.)

References

1. My review of The Grouchy Historian (Ed Asner explains how Christian preachers felt about the Founding Fathers.)
2. Opus Dei, Leonard Leo, and Project2025 | a strategy of division (The Deep Dive Project, 15 July 2024)
3. Preacher, prophet, messiah: Trump cult takes on religious overtones at RNC (Alex Wagner, MSNBC, 19 July 2024)
4. A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That's Just the Start. (Ava Kofman, ProPublica, 2 October 2024)
5. Texas Rep. Talarico reminds Christian nationalists of something (Jordan Uhl, The Young Turks, 3 November 2024)