Will the Real Christian Please Stand Up?

The Democrat and junior senator from Georgia, Rev. Raphael Warnock, stepped in a bucket of sludge this week when asked about a fellow politician’s faith. On a podcast hosted by The New York Times, Warnock took the bait and immediately signed up to assess House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) Christian walk.

For the record, Warnock is a minister who preaches at the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached until his death. At one point in the podcast, the Georgia senator was asked about a passage in the Bible addressing how to respond to the poor as a Christian. He went immediately to a gospel: “For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home” (Matthew 25:35 NLT).

Claiming he is a Matthew 25 Christian, Warnock then punctuated his point with Matthew 25:40: “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!'” Then, taking specific aim at Johnson, the senator followed that up with, “I don’t understand how you read that, say a long prayer, hold hands with your fellow legislators and then cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. I have to ask whether the religion is more performative than substantive.” Ouch.

But that wasn’t all. Warnock continued:

“I think the speaker has a certain agenda and a certain view. Part of the obligation of a person of faith is to ask yourself: ‘What are you actually worshiping? What are you actually committed to?’ Are you committed to the poor? Are you committed to the despised and the rejected? Would Jesus agree with the actions of ICE in this moment, in which we’re seeing organized cruelty on our streets, masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, separating families, terrorizing whole communities of people, whether they’re documented or not, whether they are citizens or not? What is it in the Gospel, I would ask my colleagues, that says that this is right?”

Johnson is a self-described evangelical Christian. Once the House Speaker got wind of Warnock’s comments, he immediately called for a man-to-man pow-wow. No one knows what was said behind closed doors, but Johnson must have taken a moment to tell Warnock that just because his position on legislation differed from the senator’s did not mean his faith was merely performative.

Johnson likely sees the full compendium of outcomes if legislators choose to leave dangerous illegal immigrants in our cities and towns. Who will protect the women and children – some of whom have been killed in cold blood or sexually assaulted and raped? Perhaps Johnson doesn’t think it’s morally right to take from one group and give to another. And who’s to say the Louisiana lawmaker isn’t bothered about leaving Medicaid spending alone when the projections are that it will be bankrupt and immoral to leave such a heavy debt for our children and grandchildren to solve?

The speaker could have raised a variety of issues with Warnock’s interpretation of the scriptures. The Georgian clearly did not corner the market on exegetical analysis. It’s tricky business to sum up another’s faith as irreconcilable with the scriptures while touting your own understanding of the biblical texts as accurate.

However, in the end, Johnson took the high road by calling for a private meeting so the two men could iron out their theological differences. Both emerged from their tete-a-tete apparently without rancor. When asked how it went with Johnson, Warnock offered via Politico: “The stakes are too high for us to be engaged in political fencing around here and not have authentic conversations at a human level about why you believe what you believe, and so I left hopeful that we might have more of that kind of conversation.”

More real conversations and less judgment might just be the best way to proceed in a Christian manner.