Secular liberals have a serious problem with any commingling of church and state…at least when the church in question opposes their most precious and permissive causes, like the right to abort babies, and the right to subsidized contraceptives, and the right to invent your own genders and pronouns.
But when a church gives off a whiff of “progressive” ideology or theology, well, that’s a different matter entirely. Religion then becomes a qualification, not a disqualification.
This was encapsulated in a tweet by Sam Stein of the Daily Beast: “Why are Raphael Warnock’s faith and sermons fair game for attack, but Amy Coney Barrett’s religious views not?” Reverend Warnock, now a Democratic candidate in the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, is hailed by the secular media as an inheritor of not only Martin Luther King’s “iconic” Baptist church, but his leftist causes.
This is a curious stance for Stein, since he wrote an alarm-bells article last month claiming Barrett had signed a local newspaper ad protesting the “barbaric legacy” of Roe vs. Wade. Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review found that this claim was inaccurate, that she only signed a statement supporting an end to “abortion on demand.”
Stein surely feels other adjectives should be used for legal abortions, like “therapeutic,” and “empowering,” and for serious Orwellians, “life-saving.” But with an election looming, Senate Democrats felt pressure to avoid their innate desires to perpetuate the florid press angle that traditionally Catholic Barrett was some kooky “handmaid” in a creepy religious group.
Now that Georgia has the only Senate races left for the media to cover, our “objective” media firmly placed any criticism of Warnock in the “Republicans Pounce” category. On November 1, before the fall campaign ended, New York Times reporter Richard Fausset calmly acknowledged the radical “social gospel” of Warnock.
His mentor was Dr. James H. Cone, the Marxist father of “black liberation theology,” and he publicly defended another Cone-head, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons proclaiming “God damn America” and preaching after 9/11 that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
On Fox News in March of 2008, Warnock proclaimed “We celebrate Rev. Wright in the same way that we celebrate the truth-telling tradition of the black church.” A lot of media people said silly things like that about Wright’s hateful “truth-telling.”
Republicans also “pounced” on Warnock’s hot take on Trump: “America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness!” And Warnock’s 2011 sermon that “nobody can serve God and the military.” If that’s about violence, he hasn’t claimed nobody can serve God and Planned Parenthood.
But ABC, CBS, and NBC have shown no interest in these extreme sermons. The majority of the Senate hangs in the balance, and Martin Luther King’s supposed heir is granted the customary partisan protections.
These journalists hate it when white Baptists or Catholics allegedly try the patience of God by supporting Donald Trump, but black churches ripping on the “worship of whiteness” and how America deserved 9/11 somehow never strains the bonds of Christian charity. This only underlines that most reporters are not religious people, and just see religion as something employed to manipulate voters. It’s considered virtuous if it manipulates voters toward the “right side of history.”