Senator Raphael Warnock speaking at the DNC.Nate Gowdy
This week, at the Democratic National Convention, the speeches of Michelle Obama and the Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff (and maybe Lil Jon’s, if you want to call that a speech) stood out.
But there was one speech, in particular, that struck me: The sermon-like words of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).
Warnock has served as senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church for nearly 20 years. His election on January 5, 2021 was one of two pivotal, and highly covered, Senate races in Georgia. That made him a national figure, of sorts. But not exactly a household name. If you don’t know Warnock well, it’s worth remembering he is a pastor who invokes his Christianity as a foundation of his politics.
He clearly brings that power to the secular pulpit in his speech on the first night of the DNC, telling of the need to heal a nation that has long been broken. Michelle Obama might have done a bit of call-and-response. But it is hard to imagine anyone else pulling off calling Donald Trump a “plague,” as Warnock does, with such heft.
At first, I wondered if that was why I kept drifting back to Warnock’s speech, watching it a bit obsessively. I grew up in the South, and his mannerisms are so comforting it is hard to describe. But despite that bias—and a compulsive problem of continual re-watching generally—I also think there is a deeper reason for my fixation. On close examination, I think you can see that Warnock’s message is one the Democratic Party often avoids. In fact, his speech was a subtle subversion of DNC orthodoxy.
Warnock begins his speech by mentioning his mother. “She picked other people’s cotton and other people’s tobacco” in Waycross, Georgia, he explains. But now her son was on this stage. “This is my America,” Warnock says.
Usually, you hear this classic campaign line as: Only in America. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, said that “only in America” could middle-class kids like her and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota potentially make it to the White House.
By changing that phrasing, he implies that believing in such an America is a choice—one that is hard-earned and not easy for people like his mother, or so many Americans, who have been harmed by this country. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Georgia,” Warnock continues, speaking of his election win. “Thank you, America, for raising your voice and using your vote.”
The tone struck me. When is last time you heard a Democratic politician make thanking voters such a central part of their message? He leaves off the exhortations (“don’t boo, vote“; “do something!“) and, instead, casts a royal American we of gratitude for our collective participation in a political system with a horrific history that shut out so many people for so long.
In a party campaigning on democracy, he offers a simple message for what, on my hopeful days, I believe the ballot box means: “A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.”
Getting rid of Trump would not save us from the moral rot that paved the way for his presidency.
This does not say your civic duty is to vote. It does not say that everyone’s America involves a story of like Warnock’s. Instead, the senator from Georgia implies that we fight, despite how easy it would be to be cynical, with a relentless faith that maybe this America is possible. Thank you, he says to his congregation, for having a faith in democracy that is not always earned.
Warnock continues in this mode, hammering the word together. How we worked together throughout the last few years to create a better world. Instead of listing accomplishments by Democrats, he explains these wins as products of community engagement.
Then he shifts to his opponents. What America do they see? What is their America? Warnock begins to speak of what happened the day after his election, on January 6. He mentions the insurrection, fueled by myths. But, then, he goes deeper. Warnock says:
Behind the big lie was an even bigger lie. It is the lie that this increasingly diverse American electorate does not get to determine the future of the country. The lie and the logic of January 6 is a sickness. It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws all across our country. And we must be vigilant tonight because these anti-democratic forces are at work right now in Georgia and all across our country. And the question is, who will heal the land? And so here we are America. Are you ready?
It is worth pausing here, reading this again. Throughout so much of the Trump era, Democrats have said that the 45th president is a unique ill. That Trump’s power is something abnormal and dangerous for democracy. Warnock asks the nation’s liberals to go deeper. Getting rid of Trump would not save us from the moral rot that paved the way for his presidency. As you contemplate that idea from Warnock, there is still, in your mind, the story of his mother’s presence on election day three years ago. Her story looms behind the question Warnock poses to America: Who will heal the land?
The speech continues in a more typical fashion from here. Warnock lists accomplishments. He makes sure to keep up his pastor rhythm. (Words are repeated so much it’s hard to keep track—forward, he intones to the crowd.)
But then he ends, again, where he starts. He mentions a parent, his father, “a preacher and a junk man” who “lifted old broken cars and put them on the back of an old rig” during the week and then “lifted broken people whom other people had discarded” on Sunday.
“My dad discovered strength in the broken places. A power made perfect in weakness,” Warnock explains. “And so I’m convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb.”
This resonated so deeply with me: The idea that being called to action has to be wedded to the humility that comes with recognizing human frailty. (I can hear the lapsed Catholic in me yearning to go back to mass.)
The American story often presented in politics speaks of a triumphant, powerful nation where only we could do this. I don’t think that is true. But I do think there is this America, the one that Warnock invokes. In it, a broken place can be redeemed and healed if we all join hands. In that message, I find some half-belief—some hope—that Warnock reminded me still lingers around my cynical soul: that participating in politics, however futile, could actually lead to a better world. “Keep the faith,” the senator ends the speech. Thank you, he seems to say, for continuing to pay attention to politics—when so much would, rightfully, make you want to quit.
