Straddling Senate and pulpit, Warnock highlights religious left’s rise in the U.S. – By Rich McKay (Reuters) / January 10, 2021
ATLANTA (Reuters) – The Reverend Raphael Warnock will take the pulpit this Sunday morning at Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, just as he has for the past 15 years.
FILE PHOTO: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Raphael Warnock speaks to labor organizers and the media outside a labor union’s offices in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. January 5, 2021. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
But this time he’ll be speaking as an incoming U.S. Congress member – and the first Black U.S. senator from Georgia – at the church where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
“It’s unusual for a pastor to get involved in something as messy as politics,” Warnock acknowledged on the campaign trail. But he sees it as a continuation of the calling from the Lord that brought him to preach the Gospel. “I’m stepping up to my next calling to serve, not stepping down from the pulpit.”
Warnock’s runoff election victory on Tuesday over incumbent Kelly Loeffler, the wealthy former chief executive of Bakkt, a cryptocurrency trading platform, is the latest sign of the renewed politicization of the “religious left.”
