Yes, he weekly ensconces himself behind one of the most historic pulpits in America - that at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King held forth for years.
But I'd advise his congregants to go elsewhere for their Sunday-morning spiritual nourishment. Warnock is peddling some very toxic snake oil.
Perhaps you have heard about his since-deleted Easter tweet:
On the holiest holiday on the liturgical calendar, Warnock wrote:
The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.
He's got a track record of this kind of dog vomit. He has spewed the nonsense about health care and water being rights (which it's impossible by definition for them to be) during a sermon:
In a sermon delivered in 2016 in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock chided that “evangelicals who stand on the Bible” but reject socialism need to “go back and read the Bible.”
Warnock told his flock:
The early church was a socialist church. I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early church was much closer to socialism than to capitalism. Go back and read the Bible. I love to listen to evangelicals who stand on the Bible. Well, they had all things in common. They took everything – I’m just preaching the Bible – they took all of their things and they had all things in common. But even the folk who say they just follow every word of the Bible, they’re not about to do that. But if we would just share what we have, everybody can eat, everybody ought to have water, everybody ought to have healthcare. It’s a basic principle.
And I don’t mind telling you that those who have more ought to give more. The strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak. And in the nation and in the church, to whom much is given, much is required. We need to level the playing field. And to be concerned about the poor does not make you a socialist; it actually makes you a Christian, and it means that you believe that everybody is a child of God.
Here we see on full display the perverting of the Christian charge to take care of those in need, conflating it with redistribution at the point of government's gun.
There are five big reasons why he's way off base with such a conflation:
First, the Bible affirms the right to private property. This passage clearly states that each Christian supported the needy with “the things he possessed.” Socialism by definition denies the right to private property and nationalizes all economic activity.
Second, the Apostle Peter underscored the voluntary nature of Christian tithing. Just a few verses later, he upbraided Sapphira, who sold her land but held back part of the proceeds: “Was it not your own? And after it was sold, was [the money derived from the sale] not in your own control?” Christians freely give their alms to poor out of love, personally tailoring their intervention to the recipient’s need. Socialism forcibly confiscates other people’s property and distributes it to the well-connected through one-size-fits-all government programs. Even Warnock’s predecessor, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – who had a complicated view of what he deemed “socialism” – describedthe one overriding reason that he rejected Marxism: “Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.” History shows that socialists often feign concern for the poor in order to seize church property for their own ends.
Third, Christian charity is administered through the church, not the government. “A close look at that passage will reveal that not only is it not socialism, but it is antithetical to socialism,” said a far greater preacher than Warnock, the late Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy, who spoke at the Acton Institute’s first annual dinner. “You’ll notice that they brought the money and they laid it at the feet of – Caesar? Pontius Pilate? No, they laid it at the feet of the apostles.”
Socialism regards all intermediary institutions that stand between the individual and the government as anathema. Marxism, Rev. Kennedy said, teaches that the federal bureaucracy must become the “provider for the needs of people, so they will worship the state” – a statement since verified by social science. Researchers led by Adam Kay of Duke University discovered that church and state have a “hydraulic relationship”: The more people put their faith in one institution, they less they trust the other. His research team concluded, “The power and order emanating from God can be outsourced to the government.” Further scholarship reveals that socialism, with its unattainable promises of an earthly utopia, often gradually displaces Christians’ belief in God. (See “How socialism causes atheism,” the cover story of the Summer 2019 issue of Religion & Liberty.)
Fourth, the Bible illustrates how holding all things in common can introduce conflict even into a tiny community of faithful Christians administered by the Apostles themselves. Shortly after Christians chose to share their private property, disputes broke out along nationalist lines. “There arose a complaint against the Hebrews by the Hellenists, because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution” (Acts 6:1). If a small, relatively homogenous community of Spirit-filled Jewish believers led by actual saints cannot avoid dissension, can a diverse nation of 328 million people that shares no religious or moral common ground fare better?
Fifth, if Jesus intended “socialism” to be the universal way of life “in the nation and in the church,” there’s scarce evidence for it from Christian history. Not a single verse of the Bible commands Christians to pass specific economic legislation or to compel other people to give a cent of their money against their will. And world history is devoid of a 2,000-year-old Christian socialist state – an odd state of affairs, since Jesus said, “The gates of Hell shall not prevail” against His Body. If a socialist government is an integral part of God’s plan, then it failed – and not merely once, but over and over again.
I'm not wont to digress here, but his views on Israel are worth examining, too.
However, I do think this blast from his past is relevant here:
Warnock’s contention that embracing the welfare state “makes you a Christian” is far from the only time his church activity has raised eyebrows. Fidel Castro spoke at Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1995 when Warnock served as its youth leader. Warnock evaded questions about whether he attended the speech. He greeted Castro’s death with a Bernie Sanders-like appreciation of Castro’s “complex” legacy before accusing America of holding “political prisoners.” Dozens of black pastors called Warnock out for saying that abortion represents “human agency and freedom.”
During the weeks between the November election and the runoff for both Georgia Senate seats, I was faced with the central dilemma of our times. It would have been good for those seats to go Republican, just to keep the Senate from being precariously tied as it came to be. But I was well aware that the Republican candidates, Perdue and Loeffler, were half-baked yay-hoos who got on board with Trump's big lie about the presidential election being a fraud. There was no value to Perdue and Loeffler except their votes.
But at least we wouldn't have had a charlatan motivated by a socialist worldview sitting in the Senate.
This concludes today's episode of "Why Post-America Can't Have Nice Things."
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