GetReligion
Saturday, March 29, 2025

Georgia

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Did that New York Times profile of the Rev. Raphael Warnock go the distance?

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Did that New York Times profile of the Rev. Raphael Warnock go the distance?

There’s a black Baptist pastor running for the Senate on Tuesday in Georgia; a Baptist who’s in a dead heat for a very contested seat.

“Baptist” can mean a plurality of things, even in the Deep South.

Truth is, this Baptist, one Rev. Raphael Warnock, is a complicated man. In a series of four articles about the major contenders for Georgia’s two Senate seats, the New York Times profiled Warnock in a largely uncritical piece that put the man’s take on Christianity front and center.

The marriage problems and domestic violence allegations went toward the bottom of the piece. His religious credentials rose to the top. Which is not a bad thing but oddly, the other three pieces didn’t say a thing about those candidates’ faith and –- this being the Bible Belt -– one can assume they do attend a house of worship somewhere, especially the Republicans.

In fact, one of the other candidates (Kelly Loeffler, a Catholic) attacked Warnock last month for some of his liberal Christian beliefs. Loeffler got some bad PR on that unwise move.

Another candidate, Jon Ossoff, is Jewish and the fourth, David Perdue, is Methodist. So you got a liberal Baptist, a conservative Catholic, a Methodist and a Jew. Even USA Today understood what a field day on the religion beat this election fight is.

But we will start with the Times:

Mr. Warnock is betting that the time is ripe for a Black Baptist preacher in robes trimmed with kente cloth, who speaks of police brutality and voter suppression from one of the world’s most famous pulpits. While he has built a résumé that piles credential on top of credential, he has not hesitated to share personal experiences like being suspected of shoplifting and having an incarcerated brother.

Republicans have tried to paint him as a dangerous radical, noting his denunciation of white privilege, his defense of Black pastors who have criticized the United States and his support of abortion rights. Incidents from his past have come under greater scrutiny, including an arrest for which the charges were later dropped and an incident last year where his now ex-wife called the police after a conflict outside her home.

As the story moves on, Warnock is first identified as Pentecostal, then as an “evangelical” and then as an intern at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.


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2020 vote again: Various religion factors still baffle news-media pros and the Democrats

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Against all odds – and against the information in polls – Donald Trump-era Republicans had a pretty good year in ballot boxes.

A norm-bashing president won 47.6% of the popular vote, came fairly close in the Electoral College, and apparently carried 24 of the 50 states. The GOP has a good shot at a Senate majority, with the two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5. Gains in the U.S. House give it 48% of the seats. The party added to its majority among governors and its crucial grass-roots advantage in chambers and seats in state legislatures.

Pondering such results, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni confessed that mainstream media colleagues "keep being blinded by our own arrogance" while "extrapolating from our own perceptions."

You think? Among the varied factors shaping U.S. politics, Democrats and the media often muff religion's influence in the flyover turf between the Delaware River and Sierra Nevada mountains and reaching south to the border.

Job One for pundits and political consultants will be figuring why Joe Biden carried 63% of Hispanics as a whole, but Trumpublicans ate into their Democratic margins in Florida and Texas.

A Washington Post 1,800-worder depicted the remarkable red shift along the Texas border with Mexico — but merely hinted at the impact of religious networking and such issues as abortion, including Protestants as well as Catholics. GetReligion has been covering that trend for four years of more. Here’s two sample posts: “Concerning Hispanic evangelicals, secret Trump voters and white evangelical women in Georgia” and “New podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020.”

One MSM figure who gets it is Richard Just, editor of the Washington Post Magazine, who has been exploring his Reform Judaism more seriously in recent years. He wrote Oct. 28 that "religion is fundamentally a mystery" and a profound source of "existential uncertainty" that can "value, even celebrate, contradictions" and thereby overcome the nasty divisiveness that imperils American democracy.


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Thinking about Georgia, while looking at some 2020 religion numbers from Ryan Burge

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Did you enjoy a day or two away from political Twitter? Me neither.

So let’s move on to Georgia, where voters in greater Atlanta and then the rest of Georgia are going to be hearing the voice of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) quite a bit in the next few weeks.

All together now, here is that Schumer quote from a celebratory street party in New York City: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

Because of its unique election rules requiring a 50% win in key contests, Georgia currently has two open U.S. Senate seats — which means that Schumer and his colleagues can control the next U.S. Senate (with the tie-breaking vote of soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris) by taking both of them. Thus, Georgia is suddenly on everyone’s mind.

That includes folks at the New York Times political desk, who are asking the obvious question: What is causing Georgia to move from the forces of darkness to the world of love and light? Trust me, that’s pretty much the tone of this analysis feature that is not labeled an analysis feature. The overture is spot-on perfect, from a New York-centric point of view:

MARIETTA, Ga. — It took a lifetime for Angie Jones to become a Democrat.

As a young woman, she was the proud daughter of a conservative family active in Republican politics. Ten years ago, after a friend’s son came out as gay, Ms. Jones became an independent, though one who watched Fox News. After the 2016 election, Ms. Jones, a stay-at-home mother in Johns Creek, a pristine wealthy suburb north of Atlanta, became frustrated with her conservative friends defending President Trump through scandal after scandal.

And this year, she voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., after spending months phone banking, canvassing and organizing for Democratic candidates with a group of suburban women across Atlanta.

“I feel like the Republican Party left me,” said Ms. Jones, 54. “It very much created an existential crisis for me.”

I have family in Georgia and I’ve paid close attention to politics there since the mid-1970s (and almost moved there, from Illinois, in the early 1980s). The bottom line: Georgia may be turning into Illinois, a rural state dominated by a super-city and its suburbs (and the corporations and media therein).

Now, there is a crucial question missing from that Times overture, a question that millions of Georgians — Black and White — would spot instantly. The anecdote doesn’t tell us (a) where this woman goes to church, (b) where her conservative family went to church in the past or (c) where she is now refusing to go to church. If she has changed churches, that would be crucial.


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Concerning Hispanic evangelicals, secret Trump voters and white evangelical women in Georgia

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Life is strange. When I chose the “Groundhog Day” graphic for our 2020 election posts, I did so because I was trying to capture the numbing, “here we go again” nature of the day.

I had no idea that the 2020 results — whether President Donald Trump wins or not — would end up resembling the 2016 race to this degree.

Take Florida. As you may know, everyone in cable-news land last night was talking about Florida as the point of a spear — symbolizing the surprising numbers of Hispanics voting for Trump. It turned into one of the stories of the night. This was part of a rise (small, but significant) in Trump voters in a number of different categories linked to race.

Yes, note the Latino numbers. There may be several layers to that story.

For example, if you read GetReligion, then you know that we were convinced that the rise of Latino evangelicals (and Pentecostal believers) was one of the most important stories of the 2016 race, giving Trump crucial votes that put him in the White House.

Cue the “Groundhog Day” clock. Again.

But let’s note that political-beat journalists would have noticed this trend quicker if they had paid attention, not only to GetReligion (#DUH) but to some important religion-beat reporting elsewhere. Remember that New York Times story that we praised recently? See the post with this headline, “New York Times listens to Latino evangelicals: 'Politically homeless' voters pushed toward Trump.” That post includes a flashback to my 2016 thoughts on Latino evangelicals in Florida.

If you want more input on that issue, and others, please see this new piece by Clemente Lisi: “Election 2020: 3 Things We Learned About Faith And Voting” (at Religion Unplugged). He noted a crucial fact on the Trump campaign calendar:

It’s true that Latinos in general did help Trump (for example, Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County), the Hispanic evangelical vote mattered, as GetReligion recently pointed out. NBC News exit polling revealed that 55% of the state’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30% of Puerto Ricans and 48% of “other Latinos” backed the president.


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Kings Bay nuclear protestors: Was this civil disobedience or a matter of religious liberty?

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It’s hard to live in Oak Ridge, Tenn., without learning a thing or two about civil disobedience, especially demonstrations linked to nuclear weapons. No matter what goes on inside the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — in terms of energy, medicine, the digital future, etc. — this top-secret research facility will always be known for its role in America’s history of atomic bombs and beyond.

This leads to protests. Some of them cross the line into civil disobedience, which raises interesting historical, legal and even theological questions. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

There is a very similar story unfolding elsewhere in the Bible Belt, as seen in a recent report — “Judge denies nuclear protesters’ religious freedom defense” — from Religion News Service. Here is the overture:

(RNS) — A federal judge has denied a request by a group of Catholic peace activists to dismiss charges against them for breaking into a nuclear submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, last year to protest nuclear weapons.

The seven activists, individually and through their lawyers, used a novel defense, citing the Religion Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 federal law that says the government may not burden the faith practices of a person with sincerely held religious beliefs.

But Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, denied that defense and scheduled a jury trial for Oct. 21.

The activists, known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, face up to 25 years in prison each for trespassing on the U.S. Navy base, which houses six Trident submarines designed to carry nearly 200 nuclear warheads apiece. The seven, mostly middle-aged or elderly, will each stand trial on three felonies and one misdemeanor: destruction of property on a naval installation, depredation of government property, trespass and conspiracy.

Now, there are all kinds of questions I’d like to ask at this point.

First of all, I assume we are talking about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as opposed to the “Religion” Freedom Restoration Act that is mentioned here. RNS needs to make a correction.

But it would appear that the basic idea is that the protestors had a right to violate the law as an act of religious conscience. It would be interesting to know more the specifics of their claims.


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'No more faith-based than Satan himself': Houston Chronicle digs into health-sharing ministry

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Even before the Houston Chronicle’s investigative piece on a Christian health care cost-sharing ministry was published in print — at the top of Sunday’s front page — the newspaper got action.

To the tune of $129,000.

The dead-tree version of the story notes:

On Tuesday, the day this story appeared online, an Aliera claims director called Martinez and said the company had reversed its previous denials and would pay the entire claim.

But that decision does nothing to blunt the power of this hard-hitting piece of journalism, which presents the “ministry” profiled as — to use the words of the main source quoted — “no more faith-based than Satan himself.”

Christian health-care sharing is a topic we’ve covered before at GetReligion — here, here and here, for example. Elsewhere, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt wrote about the future of that approach back in 2017.

The Chronicle story does an exceptional job of detailing the concerns about Trinity Health-Share, Aliera Healthcare’s affiliated health-sharing ministry.

The opening paragraphs set the scene:


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New York Times scribe has big problem with 'New South' -- it's full of backward church people

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To be honest, I had shoved the Ginia Bellafante feature at The New York Times — “Abortion and the Future of the New South” — so far back into the “think piece” folder of guilt that I almost forgot that this “Big City” masterpiece still existed.

In this case, the term “masterpiece” is defined as a piece of first-person journalism that has to be in the running as one of the greatest summary statements of Gray Lady-speak ever put on paper.

I mean, Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher — a former Brooklyn resident — had already produced this truly fab summary statement of what’s going on here. Before we get to the latest response to the Bellafante opus — at Scalawag, hold that thought — let’s let Dreher kick off this thinker-fest:

I’m so sorry. Really, just very sorry. Here entitled Yankees like the NYT’s Ginia Bellafante thought the American South existed to give Millennial Brooklynites a place to reproduce Park Slope, but more affordably, and now we’ve gone and ruined it for them with our deplorable social and religious views.

Ah, right. All that icky religious stuff. That really messes things up for “Tess” and other relocated New Yorkers. Here is the essential Times-talk overture:

Tess wanted her own kingdom, and New York — forbidding, impossible — wasn’t going to let her build it. The start-up costs for the baking and catering business she envisioned were going to be too high; the rent on her apartment in Bed-Stuy was increasing. When she moved in it was $1,800 a month; just a few years later, it was approaching $3,400.

This young woman was a citizen of the New South now. Her business, Tess Kitchen, was thriving. Her New Orleans apartment, at $1,900 a month, had three bathrooms.

I called Tess on the day that the Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee backed legislation to prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat was detected. This came 24 hours after Alabama passed the most restrictive abortion law in the country, one that does not allow exceptions for rape or incest. That followed the passage of another restrictive abortion law in Georgia.

Living in a very liberal city in a very conservative state is a trick mirror. “You really forget that you are in the Deep South here,’’ she said.

Need more? It’s all about the word “backward,” you see. You see the people who are, to New York-raised reformers, still yearning for the “Old South” are still fighting the Civil War.


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Looking for a religion ghost in Jimmy Carter's current clout with Democrats and journalists

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This is really a great time — in terms of mainstream media coverage — to be a liberal or “progressive” evangelical.

If you needed proof of this thesis — other than the contents of op-ed pages and wire features — then look no further than the latest political/media comeback by former President Jimmy Carter.

I have followed Carter for decades (I was a Carter volunteer at Baylor University in 1975-76), which is understandable since it’s impossible to report on the role of “born again” Christians in American political life without paying close attention to what Carter believes and when he believed it. He inspired many, many “moderate” Baptists and other evangelicals to take politics seriously.

Here’s a question I have asked for several decades now: Name another American politician — Republican or Democrat — who was willing to cost himself support within his own party by taking a critical stance, of any kind, on abortion. To this day, Carter’s language on abortion makes his party’s leadership nervous (see his remarks last year at Liberty University).

But the former president has certainly evolved on other crucial doctrinal issues. What role has this played in his current popularity with Democrats and, thus, with the press?

Consider this recent feature from the Associated Press: “Jimmy Carter finds a renaissance in 2020 Democratic scramble.” Here is the totally political overture:

ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter carved an unlikely path to the White House in 1976 and endured humbling defeat after one term. Now, six administrations later, the longest-living chief executive in American history is re-emerging from political obscurity at age 94 to win over his fellow Democrats once again.


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'Christian' councilman in Ga. doesn't believe in interracial marriage; what's obvious follow-up?

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In today’s entry under the heading of "There’s (Almost) Always a Religion Angle,” let’s turn to the lead story on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution home page.

It’s an investigative piece on a small-town Georgia mayor under fire for allegedly withholding a candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black.

In the story from Hoschton, a 90 percent white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution reports:

According to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and interviews with city officials, Mayor Theresa Kenerly told a member of the City Council she pulled the resume of Keith Henry from a packet of four finalists “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this.”

The AJC’s investigation into the controversy revealed not only a deeply flawed hiring process, but also hard racial attitudes inside Hoschton’s government. All of this occurs as the city of fewer than 2,000 people just outside Gwinnett County is poised for dramatic growth with the construction of thousands of new homes.

So what’s the religion angle?


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