Rev. Raphael Warnock, one of two Democratic Party candidates for Senate in the upcoming Georgia runoffs, preached from his pulpit in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2017 that he “came to dismantle the value system” of the American “empire.”
Warnock criticized other Christians for being focused on “two or three issues” — to the exclusion, he claimed, of poverty. Commenting on the Bible’s admonition that the poor would always be “with you,” Warnock likened the U.S. to the evil Roman Empire of Herod’s day (1:14:45 to 1:16:05):
I want you to hear me now, because most of Christian America is focused on two or three issues. Meanwhile, the Bible spends most of its time talking about how to treat the poor, the struggling, and the stranger. And so, don’t misinterpret what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying you will always have the poor with you, not because God ordained it; not because it is what it is, and that’s the way it has to be; the poor are with you because of the evils and the excesses of the empire. And I came to dismantle the value system of the empire. I already told you that I came to preach good news to the poor, to open the eyes of the blind, and to set the captives free, and to preach the year of the Lord’s freedom. In other words, I came to dismantle the value system of the empire. But here’s the problem: the religious folk who should be fighting with me against the empire are in cahoots with the empire.
Warnock is running against incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.