Raphael Warnock’s Lifelong Education in Black Liberation Theology and Radical Politics

As he looked into the crowd at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, the Reverend Raphael Warnock acknowledged that this eulogy was a difficult task, even for him.

A trained preacher and the senior pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – Martin Luther King Jr.’s church – Warnock had likely presided over hundreds of funerals by that point in his career. But this funeral, on a Monday in early May 2018, was different. It was the funeral for his mentor, James Hal Cone, the founding father of “black liberation theology” who had personally requested that Warnock deliver his eulogy.

Warnock praised Cone for his scholarship, for his passion, and for his fire. While most academics write and speak, “Dr. Cone roared.” Cone, he said, was “the best classroom teacher I ever had.”

“I learned so much from him about how to think,” said Warnock, dressed in a black and red robe, “how to interrogate and unmask the unacknowledged cultural biases and racist, sexist, and classist assumptions of dominant discourse.”

Warnock, 51, is now one of two Democratic nominees for U.S. Senate in Georgia looking to knock off Republican incumbents in a January 5 runoff. If both Democrats win, their party will take control of the Senate and consolidate elected power in Washington, D.C.

Warnock’s opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler, has painted him as a “radical’s radical.” During Sunday’s debate, she repeatedly referred to him as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.”

As evidence of Warnock’s radicalism, critics have pointed to sermons and statements in which he has defended socialism as simply “things we have in common,” called gun-rights legislation dumb, declared that “nobody can serve God and the military,” likened Israeli tactics to those used by “apartheid South Africa,” and compared police officers to gangsters, thugs, and bullies.

Warnock has generally responded that he’s been taken out of context, that his critics have selectively plucked passages out of uncontroversial sermons and twisted their meaning. In Warnock’s view, he’s a mainstream Democrat standing up for “ordinary people.”

But Warnock has not shaken his connections to Cone, whose books are filled with jarring racial language, criticism of white society and white churches, and calls for revolution, violent if need be. Almost from the beginning, Cone intentionally infused his theology with Marxist principles.

“Together, black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society,” he wrote in a 1980 paper for The Institute for Democratic Socialism.

Warnock is a student of Cone’s black liberation theology, for which he has written he has “profound appreciation.” His 2006 doctoral dissertation at Union Theological Seminary in New York focused on the relationship between black theology and black churches, with Warnock concluding with a call for the relationship between the two to be stronger.

The dissertation became the basis of Warnock’s 2013 book, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety and Public Witness.

In his dissertation, obtained by National Review, Warnock wrote that he first started reading Cone in high school, after stumbling upon one of his books at the library.

“Little did I know then that he would become my academic advisor and intellectual mentor,” he wrote of Cone, who also was on Warnock’s dissertation committee.

Warnock’s campaign did not respond to a series of questions from National Review for this story. 

While it is not fair to attach Cone’s beliefs and radical statements directly to Warnock, understanding what black liberation theology is, where it came from, and the man behind it is instructive as a way to better understand the genesis of Warnock’s worldview and politics.

Black liberation theology is the pond Warnock has been swimming in for decades. And he’s been swimming with the biggest and most influential fish in the pond.

Developing Black Liberation Theology

“Christ is black, baby.”

It was a radical declaration. Whether or not 1960s white America wanted to hear it, to Cone, Christ had “big lips and kinky hair” and “all the features that are so detestable to white society.”

“Where there is black, there is oppression,” he wrote, “but blacks can be assured that where there is blackness, there is Christ who has taken on blackness so that what is evil in men’s eyes might become good. Therefore, Christ is black because he is oppressed.”

Cone wrote those words in his still-influential 1969 first book, Black Theology and Black Power. Himself a survivor of the Jim Crow South, Cone wrote his book in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and in the midst of urban riots. He was frustrated by what he saw as silence among white theologians to “the enslaved condition of black people” and the complicity of white churches in slavery, Jim Crow, and the perpetuation of racism in America.

He acknowledged writing from the perspective of “an angry black man, disgusted with the oppression of black people in America and with the scholarly demand to be ‘objective’ about it.” He wondered if Christ had a message for blacks “smothered under white society.”

Blacks in America, he believed, were in “desperate need for a black theology.” So, he got to work developing one, borrowing perspectives from several traditions, from the civil rights movement, from King and from Malcolm X. He overtly tied this black theology to the rising black-power movement, which he called the most important 20th-century development in American life.

The language he used remains shocking. White people – or “whitey” – were categorically “oppressors,” and he wanted to strip the gospel of its “whiteness” so that “its real message will become a live option for radical advocates of black consciousness.”

In the Bible, Jesus was sent to proclaim good news to the poor and to free the oppressed, and in the United States, in Cone’s view, the poor and oppressed were overwhelmingly black. Therefore, Christianity, he wrote, “is not alien to Black Power; it is Black Power.”

If Jesus in the first century was poor and Jewish, in 20th-century America he must be black.

“In America, blacks are oppressed because of their blackness,” he wrote. “It would seem, then, that emancipation could only be realized by Christ and his Church becoming black.”

Anthony Bradley, a professor of religious studies at The King’s College in New York City, said Cone’s treatment of “whiteness” as inherently oppressive and “blackness” as godly was symbolic. What was most alarming was his willingness to jettison traditional theological sources and to question the very theological foundations of many American churches.

“What people were initially alarmed by, and I think the reason he seemed to be so radical is that he was questioning whether or not the whites who were embracing a theology that had nothing to do with addressing issues of racism and oppression, he was wondering if they were Christians at all,” Bradley said.

Bradley said Cone saw in the world around him evangelical churches fighting integration and the civil-rights movement, and gospel preachers “using the Bible to justify racial segregation.”

“In his estimation, these people are devils. I mean, they’re evil,” Bradley said.

The white church’s involvement in slavery and racism in America “simply cannot be overstated,” Cone wrote in Black Theology and Black Power.

“As long as whites can be sure that God is on their side, there is potentially no limit to their violence against anyone who threatens the American racist way of life,” he wrote.

In his dissertation, Warnock echoed Cone’s language, writing that “white churches” have always been part of the analysis of black theology, “because of their complicity and active participation in slavery, segregation and other manifestations of white supremacy.” He quoted liberally from Cone’s work, including his claim that “the white church is the Antichrist.”

He wrote that “white evangelicalism has always privileged internal freedom while diminishing the importance of external freedom or dismissing it all together.”

“Of the American churches,” Warnock wrote in his dissertation, “the black church has clearly offered the most radical and sustained response to racism, what theologian James Cone calls ‘America’s original sin and its most persistent and intractable evil.’”

Calling for Revolution and Marxism

Black Theology and Black Power was more than just Cone’s theological statement. It also was his call for revolution, and a social-justice screed.

Cone acknowledged “the hate which black people feel toward whites” and excused it as “the black man’s strong aversion to white society” and a “healthy, human reaction to oppression.”

The urban unrest and rebellions across America should be interpreted “as an assertion of the dignity of all black people.” It isn’t racist, he wrote, for a black man “to think of white people as devils.” Rather, black racism “is a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings.”

While Cone wrote in Black Theology and Black Power that his book was not a handbook for conducting a revolution, he clearly was an advocate for “a radical black encounter with the structure of white racism, with the full intention of destroying its menacing power.”

On the question of violence, Cone wrote that the Christian must “ponder whether revolutionary violence is less or more deplorable than the violence perpetuated by the system.”

“If the system is evil,” he wrote, “then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.”

Cone’s early work was critical of white Christianity’s emphasis on individualism and capitalism as “unreal for blacks.” In the mid-1970s he broke his silence about his interest in using Marxism as a tool to bring about “a radical change in the economic order,” according to his 1980 paper, “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?”

Remaining silent on Marxism and socialism, he wrote, would be interpreted by Third World Christians “as support for the capitalistic system which exploits the poor all over this earth.”

Black church people, he wrote, need to “think about the total reconstruction of society along the lines of Democratic Socialism. We must be willing to recognize that a social arrangement based on the maximization of profit with little regard to the welfare of the people cannot be supported.”

In his dissertation, Warnock embraced Cone’s appreciation for Marxism as a tool. While critiquing the work of white Marxist scholars as flawed for trivializing the “black struggle against the obduracy of white capitalistic forces,” Warnock wrote that “the Marxist critique has much to teach the black church.”

“Indeed, it has played an important role in the maturation of black theology as an intellectual discipline, deepened black theology’s apprehension of the interconnectivity of racial and class oppression and provided critical tools for a black church that has yet to awaken to a substantive third world consciousness,” he wrote in verbose language typical of a doctoral dissertation.

Bradley said Cone, Cornel West, and other black liberationists in the 1970s were drawn to Marxism because its focus on the power struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat mirrored their focus on the struggle between white oppressors and oppressed blacks.

They rejected free markets and limited government because, in their estimation, that was the system that empowered Jim Crow, Bradley said.

But the Marxism at the root of black liberation theology puts undue focus on the black underclass, and obscures the economic progress that black Americans have made, Bradley said.

“We don’t talk enough about that, and because of that we don’t talk about what do we need to do to create more black progress,” Bradley said.

In addition to being critical of its Marxist roots, Bradley also is critical of black liberation theology because he believes it perpetuates the idea that black Americans are nothing but poor and oppressed, and positions blacks to see themselves that way as a way of understanding why they matter to Jesus. It’s hard to maintain the black liberation theology narrative of oppression and also recognize black progress.

“It requires you to maintain that perspective on black identity for Jesus’s ministry and mission to be applied to blacks’ existence,” he said. “Because if blacks are not poor and blacks are not oppressed, then what’s the point of Jesus?”

In the early civil-rights era, black dignity was not based on victimhood and its relation to white oppression. Rather, blacks had an ontological dignity derived directly from God, he said.

“Therefore, the country should treat African Americans the same way they treat everybody else,” he said, “because we have dignity.”

Bradley said black liberation theology is primarily an academic discipline that is “not really relevant in terms of its influence in most black churches today.”

Alveda King, a pro-life activist and a niece of Martin Luther King Jr., said she disagrees with black liberation theology because “when we divide according to skin color, blackness becomes a god.” She said she believes Jesus is present in every community.

“The Bible says for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” she said. “That’s everybody in the world, regardless of social condition or skin color.”

Tipping His Hand

For many Americans, their first exposure to black liberation theology likely came in 2008, when sound bites of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright calling on God to damn America – for “killing innocent people,” for “treating our citizens as less than human,” and for failing “the vast majority of her citizens of African descent” – seemingly played on a loop on cable news. Wright was then-candidate Barack Obama’s pastor and a longtime acolyte of Cone’s.

Obama distanced himself from Wright. But in a March 2008 interview on Fox News, Warnock – still more than a decade away from his own political candidacy – said he was happy to honor Wright for his truth-telling and his commitment to social transformation.

“We celebrate Reverend Wright in the same way that we celebrate the truth-telling tradition of the black church,” Warnock said, arguing that Wright’s sermon was being taken out of context. “Jeremiah Wright is doing what he should do. He is a preacher and a prophet.”

While Warnock has been a proud student of black liberation theology and of Cone, his rhetoric about race and Marxism has not been nearly as extreme or strident as his mentor’s.

But while he has tried to portray himself as in the mainstream of his party, he has often tipped his hand over the years as to where he really stands on social and economic issues.

In 2009, as the nation debated what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, Warnock in a sermon made light of people “talking about socialistic medicine.”

“I really get upset when I hear Christians in the midst of this debate talking about socialism,” Warnock said, noting that the Book of Acts “says the Church has all things in common.”

“You don’t solve the problem simply by calling something ‘socialism,’” he said. “We don’t ask people to buy their own police protection, their own fire protection. . . . There are some things we have in common.”

On Sunday, during a portion of the debate when the candidates were allowed to ask each other questions, Loeffler accused Warnock of repeatedly praising Marxism and the redistribution of income in his teachings and writings. She asked if he would “renounce socialism and Marxism.” He did not. He also didn’t deny Loeffler’s charge.

“I believe in our free-enterprise system,” Warnock said, adding that his dad owned a small business and that his church created a financial-literacy center during the Great Recession.

In a 2013 speech – in language reminiscent of Cone – Warnock charged that white faith leaders who don’t agree with him about criminal-justice reform and the need to end mass incarceration are as much perpetuating white supremacy as slave owners and segregationists.

“If white theologians, pastors, and the churches they serve will not raise their voices in a serious way to the struggle of dismantling the ‘prison industrial complex,’ then they will have proven that they are every bit as much invested in the logic and privilege of white supremacy as their predecessors in the era of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation,” he said.

In his 2018 eulogy for Cone, Warnock focused on his mentor’s words — words that were “precise and penetrating.” Words that were “too hot to handle.”

While Cone may have moderated his words as he got older, he remained critical of white America. In a 2017 speech at Yale Divinity School, he called the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown “symbols of an American nightmare in the lives of black people.”

Warnock said Cone’s life work was truth-telling.

“And we need that today,” he said. “Truth-telling amid the mendacious character of hegemonic power as it destroys the earth, and tells lies about oppressed people, and lies about people of color, and lies about the poor, and lies about women, and lies about LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and lies about a white Jesus and a male God.”

“And if a nation keeps on telling lies about itself, it will eventually elect a liar-in-chief.”