How Warnock’s church highlights the key to Georgia’s Senate race

ATLANTA — Walking into Ebenezer Baptist Church is like joining the reunion of a Black Southern family — and exactly the type of people Sen. Raphael Warnock needs to mobilize in his race for reelection in Georgia.

Refrains of, “How you doing, baby?” echo throughout the sanctuary of the historic, onetime spiritual home of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as church members mill around. A sea of Sunday best stands out: bright colored-blazers, tailored suits and large, intricate church hats bobbing among wooden pews with crosses etched into the sides.

One thing that’s absent as the congregation waits for the service to start: political talk. Not before they get their fill. The closest they come adds up to the nicest “no” a reporter can get: “You can ask the reverend if it’s okay, baby.”

“The reverend” is Warnock. When he walks out onto the stage just before 9 a.m. He's wearing a dark suit with the faintest pinstripe, striped purple tie and black shoes — Sunday best.

The crowd doesn’t react at all. It’s a sharp juxtaposition to what the senator, locked in a tight race for arguably the most watched and most important Senate seat in the country, is greeted with the other six days of the week on the campaign trail. There are no signs here, no cheers or selfies — just his flock waiting to hear the Word.

Throughout the hour-long service, Warnock the preacher is in his element behind the lectern. He rides the applause and the calls of “yes Lord!” and “say that, Reverend!”

But Warnock is a man in two worlds: the spiritual and the political. The connection with his congregation in the first role is clear during the service. It’s in his other role — as U.S. senator — that some Black political strategists worry that Warnock has not elicited the reaction he’ll need from Black voters in order to earn a full term in the chamber.

Locked in a tight reelection battle, his campaign and allied groups have spent tens of millions of dollars attacking Republican Herschel Walker’s alleged personal failings — reports that he has played little-to-no role in some of his children’s lives, the well-documented history of domestic abuse allegations against him, and recent accusations that in 2009, he paid for a then-girlfriend’s abortion. (POLITICO has not independently verified that reporting, which Walker has denied.)

“There could be a misstep here in trying to disqualify Walker so much and not to requalify what Warnock has actually done,” one Democratic pollster told POLITICO. “[Voters] get it. They understand Walker is the big bad wolf. They like Warnock. But they don't have anything really good to say. They don't know what he's been doing.”

There is plenty that Democrats see as disqualifying in Walker: One ad highlights claims from his ex-wife that he held a gun to her head.

“Their sole focus on [Walker] as an individual is not working,” LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the voting rights groups Black Voters Matter based out of Atlanta, told POLITICO. “He's a Black man. A Black man being flawed, a Black man not having integrity. A Black man, not taking care of his children. Ain't that what they think about us anyway?”

Brown believes that Democrats’ time would be better spent centering Warnock, because voters’ feelings about Walker have solidified. If Warnock’s campaign is going to be on the attack, she and others say, it needs to portray Walker as emblematic of larger trends in the Republican Party.

At Ebenezer, Rev. Warnock preached compassion, about a God “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

And though the congregation may not want to broach politics with a reporter, the two Warnocks are clearly working in concert. Thinly veiled political speech was lightly sprinkled throughout the sermon. For church members, it’s not new — politics is no novelty in the church where Martin Luther King, Jr. once preached.

Warnock’s “preaching always had a bit of politics in it,” one long-time church member said after service. “So people may think, ‘Oh, he’s just doing that.’ But he always has.”

Warnock mentioned the importance of fighting climate change and used health care policy as a metaphor to describe God’s promises. “See verse two and hear Him say, ‘Child of God, you are the blessed beneficiary of a comprehensive health care plan,’” Warnock said. “He heals preexisting conditions. That's what sin is. It is a preexisting condition.”

The service lasted for about an hour, and Warnock ended with a plea to the congregation to pray and vote.

“I ain’t tell you to vote for me,” Warnock said. “Vote for whoever you want to vote for. Just vote — and pray for your pastor.”

The Rev. Warnock made a swift exit. Minutes later, Sen. Warnock was sitting in a pink convertible at the Atlanta Pride Parade with Georgia’s other senator, Jon Ossoff. The shirt and tie were gone, replaced with a black shirt with a rainbow-hued “W” — his campaign logo — on it. The switch was official, putting overt politics back on the menu.

That’s true for his congregants as well. As they say goodbye after services, they don’t see the split between Warnock’s two important jobs. For them, their church’s legacy is directly tied to politics. The civil rights movement was driven by — and organized in — churches like this one throughout the South. There’s simply no disconnecting them from each other: the political and the religious are intrinsically linked here.

“We say ‘separate church and state,’ but we know that everything that we have has come from the church, and all the things that we have that are good have come from the church as a people,” says Peggy Lucas, who's been worshiping at Ebenezer since 1978. “We’ve always been involved in the political.”

Brunette Bolton, a 42-year vet of Ebenezer, agrees. She says Warnock has never had to choose; that since he was elected to the Senate, he’s “never really been absent from duty.” For her and many others in the church, Warnock serves as a symbol of what a good Christian looks like: fighting for the least among them and spreading the Gospel.

And while they prop up and defend Warnock, they are also on the offense, attacking Walker, without prompting. But the good church folk will only do it implicitly.

“People will vote for party over policy and decisions that's going to impact people,” Bolton says. “It makes no sense whatsoever to have a person who's unqualified and unethical, has no knowledge of that position, does not know what to do — would not know what to do. It's just kind of sad.”

Georgia’s Senate race has remained close for months, with Warnock holding a slight — but far from sure — advantage. Those at Ebenezer know it’s because the same issues playing out nationally are felt more acutely here.A recent Quinnipiac pollshowed Georgians ranking inflation as their top issue, with a 29-point lead over the next one, abortion. Twelve percent of Democrats ranked inflation as their top-five issue, while 73 percent of Republicans put it as theirs.

“Georgia is not immune from everything that's happening in the country,” says Ed Jennings, an 11-year member of Ebenezer’s congregation. He watched with worry earlier this year as gas prices went up and the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda in D.C. went through what Jennings calls a “pause period.”

“We've had a challenging economy and the basic issues for Black people are no different than anybody else. If I'm paying $4 at the gas station, that's a problem for me,” Jennings says. “We're now down around here to around $3. You're seeing a resurgence in legislative wins, new energy around Dobbs that has kicked things into a new level where things are not where they were.”

Jennings is hitting on two points that strategists in the state also repeat: first, opposition to Walker may not be enough to motivate some Black voters in light of economic turbulence and the events of the last two years. Second, that despite being his flock’s favorite to win the Senate race, Warnock still still has to mold that energy into votes for him.

And, they point out, Warnock will need both sides of himself to pull it out.

During his service that day, the jobs of politician and preacher melded most fully when it comes to kissing babies on stage. Three newborns, dressed in layers of white and lace are being “blessed” today. Warnock holds them up to the sky, dedicates them to God and gives them a peck on the forehead.

It’d be almost too on the nose — if you weren’t used to a Baptist church.