Reverend Raphael Warnock, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia, criticized the U.K.’s vote to exit the European Union as “ethnocentrism and hate” and compared it to “Trumpism” in the U.S. in a recently unearthed 2018 sermon.
“Hate has gone viral,” Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, said of the 2016 Brexit vote.
“Nativism and ethnocentrism and bigotry [are] in high places on both sides of the Atlantic. Before there was Trumpism over here, there was Brexit over there,” he said, according to the New York Post. “Different contexts, same problem. Nativism and ethnocentrism and hate. Us against them.”
However, a number of Britons who advocated for leaving the E.U. did so out of the desire to see the U.K. develop its own trade policies and to stop sending money to less-developed areas of Europe.
While Londoners largely opposed leaving the bloc, residents of less-prosperous rural and post-industrial areas of England were more likely to support Brexit.
The 2018 sermon is the latest in a string of controversial sermons and behaviors that have been revealed ahead of the January 5 runoff election in which Warnock will face off against Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. The outcome of the race, along with a second Georgia runoff race between Republican Senator David Perdue and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, will determine party control of the Senate.
Warnock has come under scrutiny for his 2012 arrest for interfering with a police investigation into child abuse at a summer camp run by his former church in Maryland, as well as political comments made in other sermons, including that the U.S. must “repent for its worship of whiteness.”
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