Raphael Gamaliel Warnock (/ˈrɑːfiɛl ˈwɔːrnɒk/ RAH-fee-el WOR-nok; born July 23, 1969) is an American Baptist pastor and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, Warnock has been the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church since 2005.
Warnock was the senior pastor of Douglas Memorial Community Church from 2001 to 2005. He came to prominence in Georgia politics as a leading activist in the campaign to expand Medicaid in the state under the Affordable Care Act. He was the Democratic nominee in the 2020 United States Senate special election in Georgia, and defeated incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler in the runoff election.[5] He was reelected to a full term in 2022, defeating Republican nominee Herschel Walker.
Warnock and Jon Ossoff are the first Democrats elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia since Zell Miller in 2000. Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate, and the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from a Southern state..
Early life and education
Warnock was born in Savannah, Georgia, on July 23, 1969. He grew up in public housing as the eleventh of twelve children born to Verlene and Jonathan Warnock, both Pentecostal pastors. His father served in the U.S. Army during World War II, where he learned automobile mechanics and welding, and subsequently opened a small car restoration business where he restored junked cars for resale. His mother picked cotton and tobacco in the summers in Waycross, Georgia, as a teenager and became a pastor.
Warnock graduated from Sol C. Johnson High School in 1987, and having wanted to follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr., attended Morehouse College, from which he graduated cum laude in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology.[17][18] He credits his participation in the Upward Bound program for making him college-ready, as he was able to enroll in early college courses through Savannah State University.[16][18] He then earned Master of Divinity, Master of Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Union Theological Seminary, a school affiliated with Columbia University.
Religious work
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Warnock began his ministry as an intern and licentiate at the Sixth Avenue Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, under the civil rights movement leader John Thomas Porter. In the 1990s, he served as Youth pastor and then assistant pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.
In January 2001, Warnock was elected senior pastor of Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland. On Father’s Day 2005, Warnock was named senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation; he is the fifth and the youngest person to serve as Ebenezer’s senior pastor since its founding. He has continued in the post while serving in the Senate.
As pastor, Warnock advocated for clemency for Troy Davis, who was executed in 2011. In 2013, he delivered the benediction at the public prayer service at the second inauguration of Barack Obama. After Fidel Castro died in 2016, Warnock told his church to pray for the Cuban people, calling Castro’s legacy “complex, kind of like America’s legacy is complex”. In March 2019, Warnock hosted an interfaith meeting on climate change at his church, featuring Al Gore and William Barber II. He presided at Representative John Lewis’s funeral at Ebenezer Church in July 2020.
On Easter Sunday 2021, Warnock’s Twitter account tweeted, “The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are a Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.” Some conservative Christians and political commentators criticized the tweet, including Benjamin Watson, Allie Beth Stuckey, and Jenna Ellis, who called it “heretical”. The tweet was deleted that afternoon, with a spokesperson for Warnock saying, “the tweet was posted by staff and was not approved” but declining to say whether it reflected Warnock’s beliefs.
