by Mary Margaret Olohan
Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock once preached that Christianity started as a “socialist church,” video footage of a 2016 worship service showed.
Warnock, a reverend headed into a January runoff election against Republican Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, preached at a November 2016 “worship experience” at Ebenezer Baptist Church that the early church “operated” through socialism.
“The early church was a socialist church,” Warnock said. “I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early church was much closer to socialism than to capitalism. Go back and read the bible. I love to listen to evangelicals who stand on the bible. Well they had all things in common, they took everything — I’m just preaching the bible — they took all of their things and they had all things in common.”
“But even the folk who say they just follow every word of the bible, they’re not about to do that. But if we would just share what we have, everybody can eat, everybody ought to have water, everybody ought to have health care. It’s a basic principle,” Warnock said.
The pastor also emphasized that the rich “ought” to give more in order to “level the playing field.”
“And I don’t mind telling you that those who have more ought to give more,” he said. “The strong are to bear the infirmities of the weak. And in the nation and in the church, to whom much is given, much is required. We need to level the playing field. To be concerned about the poor does not make you a socialist, it actually makes you a Christian, and it means that you believe that everybody is a child of God.”
In his 2014 book, “The Divided Mind of the Black Church,” Warnock also praised Marxism, writing that Marxist principles have “much to teach the black church.” Loeffler called on Warnock to “renounce socialism and Marxism” during the candidates’ early December debate, but Warnock evaded her questions and instead expressed his support for a “free enterprise system.”
.@ReverendWarnock REFUSES to denounce Marxism and socialism.
He refuses to denounce these dangerous & radical worldviews because he agrees with them. #gapol #gasen pic.twitter.com/lot1YARzDX
— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) December 7, 2020
Warnock’s support for abortion has also sparked a backlash among conservatives and Christians who argued that the terms “pro-choice” and “pastor” contradict one another.
A group of black, mostly Georgia-based pastors condemned Warnock’s statement that he is a “pro-choice pastor” in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation Sunday.
“Unborn Black, brown and white lives are so much more than clumps of cells, burdensome inconveniences, or health problems,” the letter said. “They are sacred human persons endowed by God with inalienable dignity and worth. We implore you to uphold the Biblical defense of life and to fight against the systemic racism of abortion.”
Warnock did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
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Mary Margaret Olohan is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
