Raphael Warnock’s “American covenant” and where his vision for a Micah 6:8 nation goes off the rails

Raphael Warnock delivered a real stemwinder last night at the Democratic National Convention. Speeches like this remind me of why I felt compelled to argue in 2018 that the early civil rights movement provides the best historical model for evangelicals, and the country as a whole, to replace a politics of fear with a politics of hope, a politics of power with a politics of humility, and a politics of nostalgia with a politics grounded in American history. I still believe that.

Watch:

Notice the way Warnock keeps referencing the phrase “heal the land.” This appears to be a veiled reference to 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

This verse has become a major part of American political discourse over the last twenty or thirty years, but it has mostly been used by Republicans. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed like Jerry Falwell could not deliver a public address of any kind without citing it. Falwell believed that the United States was in a special covenant with God. If America turned to God (and for Falwell that meant ridding the nation of abortion, homosexuality, pornography, etc.), God would bless the country. If not, America God would turn his back on the country and fall into a state of immoral chaos. 2 Chronicles 7:14 became the basis for the so-called “jeremiad,” a rhetorical device that called American Christians away from sin and back to God. It is as old as the New England Puritans.

In my recent Commonweal piece on evangelicals and American identity I wrote:

After a prayer and several songs, [megachurch pastor Greg] Laurie opened up the Bible and started preaching. He quoted 2 Chronicles 7:14, a recent favorite of the Christian Right: “If my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” Vice President Mike Pence often ended his coronavirus press briefings with the phrase “heal our land.” He also sometimes fused the words of this Old Testament passage with the Pledge of Allegiance. On the National Day of Prayer in May 2020, for example, he asked Americans to pray that God would “heal our land, this one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” In the summer of 2023, Evangelical presidential candidate E. W. Jackson held a “2nd Chronicles 7:14 Patriotic Rally to Secure America’s Future” in Richmond, Virginia. 

In 2016, Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore (now editor of Christianity Today) addressed the Christian Right’s misuse of this verse. “2 Chronicles 7:14 isn’t talking about America or national identity or some generic sense of ‘revival,’” Moore wrote. “To apply the verse this way, is, whatever one’s political ideology, theological liberalism.” For Moore, Evangelicals’ use of this verse is less about New Testament Christianity and more about American civil religion.

Warnock, a Baptist minister, also believes in what he calls “The American Covenant.” But he does not say that this is a covenant with God, as the Christian nationalists do. Rather, Warnock appeals to American civil religion. It almost sounds like he prepared for his speech by reading Yale sociologist Philip Gorski’s book American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. Warnock takes biblical ideas such as “healing the land” and “covenant” and applies them to the United States. The rhetorical strategy is the same as Falwell and today’s Christian Right, but the American sins are different. For Warnock, America has fallen off a moral cliff during the Trump era and now it is time for its citizens to seize the “moral moment” and restore its covenant with the the founding generation by embracing American ideas of liberty, freedom, and justice for all. “Who will heal the land?” Last night Warnock the Baptist minister became Warnock the prophet of civil religion.

At the 6:00 mark, Warnock uses Trump’s appeals to the Bible to springboard into the communitarian or civic humanism part of the speech. If Trump read the Bible, Warnock says, he would encounter (at least) three verses:

Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Mark 12:30-31: “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

Matthew 25: 40: “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Remember, this is a political speech. Warnock is marshalling these verses in service of an American vision. Democrats might prefer the way Warnock uses the Bible over the way the Christian Right and conservatives use it, but he is still using scripture to advance a political vision. He wants America to act justly, love kindness, walk humbly, love neighbors and care for the least of these. This is his understanding of America as a “Christian nation,” if you will.

And around the 7:15 mark, Warnock suggests that the current high priest of this national vision is Joe Biden. The praise for the high priest rings out with chants of “Thank you Joe, thank you Joe, thank you Joe.” And now Kamala Harris is taking over the duties. She is now responsible, according to Warnock, for making America more just, kind, humble, loving, and caring (and, to quote her running mate Tim Walz, “joyful”).

At about the 9:50 mark, Warnock moves into a part of the speech that, in my view, does not seem intellectually consistent. He explains why women should have the right to an abortion. It is a decision between a woman and her doctor, he says. The United States government should not be “in the room” when a woman is deciding to have an abortion. This, of course, is pro-choice boilerplate language. But unlike the other “rights” Warnock mentions immediately following his remarks on abortion–workers rights, voting rights, the rights to affordable housing, the right to healthcare–the right to an abortion also involves a living human being in the mother’s womb.

As I have said multiple time at this blog, I am pro-life. I am also a realist. Now that Roe v. Wade is gone, the right to an abortion will be decided by the states. This means that there will be a whole bunch states–even some so-called “red states”–that will keep it legal. Abortion is not going away anytime soon. So instead of trying to ban the practice, why can’t we work harder at trying to reduce the number of abortions? Many of the Democratic Party’s social policies can help us to do just that. And why can’t the rhetoric of the Democratic Party focus more on reducing abortions than on celebrating the right to have one? Let a woman choose, but lift up women economically–especially poor women–so that they will choose life. And talk about this in public. As Warnock knows, such a view has a long history in the historically pro-life Black church.

Here, at least to me, is where the intellectual inconsistencies emerge in Warnock’s speech. He ends with another appeal to communitarianism, neighbor-love, and caring for the “least of these” and the vulnerable. His illustration is the COVID-19 pandemic. Warnock says:

A contagious, airborne disease means that I have a person stake in the health of my neighbor. If she’s sick, I might get sick also. Her healthcare is good for my health. I am just trying to you that we are close in our humanity as cough. I need my neighbor’s children to OK so that my children will be OK. I need all of my neighbor’s children to be OK. Poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia and the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza…to be OK. Because we are all God’s children. And so let’s stand together. Let’s work together. Let’s organize together. Let’s pray together. Let’s stand together. Let’s heal the land.”

Warnock and his friends are all about neighbor love, doing justice, and loving mercy, until it comes to the unborn. When the baby in the womb enters the discussion, they abandon their rhetoric of the “collective,” the “we,” the “let’s,” and become American individualists again– champions of “rights” at the expense of others. This is one of the main reasons why I reject the claims, often made by the Right, that the Democratic Party is “socialist.” If the Democratic Party was actually socialist, its members would say more about reducing abortions as way of strengthening the nation’s collective spirit. They would not allow an old Lockean view of individual rights to trump their civic humanism.

I know nearly all socialists and most Democrats disagree with me here, but I think we have enough science to know that a baby in the womb is a living human being. Aren’t these human beings deserving of protection–especially by politicians who preach sermons about the “least of these,” as Ralph Warnock does? Again, I am not calling for a national ban or even a state ban on abortion. I am instead calling for a recognition among the Democratic Party that taking a life in the womb is not always a good thing and we should think about ways of bringing such a practice to an end.