Raphael Warnock

I've been reading about the upcoming special election in Georgia. One of the Democratic contenders is Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr.'s former church.

One of the things about Warnock that has been in the news is the fact that he is pro-choice. The main reason this is newsworthy is that pro-life political/religious conservatives have for decades spread the lie that one can't be both pro-choice and Christian. That isn't the case now, and in the past it was even less so.

Randall Balmer, a priest in the Episcopal church, former editor of Christianity Today, and a professor of history at Columbia and Dartmouth, has written in the past about how the Religious Right became pro-life for political gain (The Real Origins of the Religious Right).

But what made me think of this today was a really detailed article in The Atlantic. Here's the beginning of it ...

How Raphael Warnock Came to Be an Abortion-Rights Outlier

When the Democratic Senate candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock tweeted that he was a “pro-choice pastor,” backlash arrived within minutes. Conservative commentators including Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson lined up to mock Warnock. A group of conservative Black ministers recently sent Warnock a letter asking him to reconsider his position. Representative Doug Collins, a Republican and an ordained Southern Baptist minister, called the tweet “a lie from the bed of hell.”

In this brief and explosive incident, one of the most significant dynamics of America’s abortion politics was laid bare: the seeming invisibility of pro-choice religious voices. It’s not that pro-choice faith leaders such as Warnock aren’t out there. It’s that, for decades, they’ve been losing the fight for the spotlight ...

Hope the Democrats win in Georgia!