Raphael Warnock

Give Raphael Warnock credit for timing. In his new book, “The Crooked Places Made Straight: Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America,” the Democratic senator from Georgia singles out voting rights as one of the country’s most pressing political and moral issues. It’s a matter that, following the Supreme Court’s recent blow to the Voting Rights Act and the resulting rush to redraw districts in the name of partisan gerrymandering, has turned for many into a full-blown crisis.

Warnock’s emphasis on the moral underpinnings of politics comes naturally. In addition to being a senator, he’s also the senior pastor at Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was once among his predecessors in the pulpit. Given Senator Warnock’s high standing with both the church and the state, he’s well suited to talk about another hot-button topic, which is the influence of Christianity on politics and the public sphere. He and I spoke about that, as well as about what’s behind the attack on voting rights, what certain Republicans get wrong about religion, and his own family’s story.

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You have called the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on voting rights “Jim Crow in new clothes.” But I want to know about your personal relationship with voting rights, because your parents and grandparents grew up in the Jim Crow South. Can you tell me what voting rights means to you from a family perspective? My mother grew up in Waycross, Ga., literally picking somebody else’s cotton in the 1950s, and because of the arc of progress in this country over the last 60 years, I often say the hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton got to pick her son to be a United States senator. So this story of fighting for voting rights doesn’t feel distant to me. We’ve only been a democracy in a real sense since 1965. What we are witnessing in real time is an assault on those basic voting rights. I think that the Supreme Court has committed violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system. And as someone whose parents lived through that ugly history, I take deep offense.

According to the logic underpinning some of the Supreme Court’s decisions lately, your being elected as senator is evidence that the Voting Rights Act, as conceived, is no longer as necessary. What’s your response to that? Well, the folks who say that don’t know how I got here. Even in my last runoff, state officials in Georgia looked at the anatomy of my victory in the runoff, which is itself a vestige of the Jim Crow South. They cut the runoff in half in terms of the number of weeks. Then as we were going into the runoff that weekend, state officials said, “Sorry, you can’t vote that first weekend of the runoff.” They were referencing an old law in Georgia that said you can’t vote the first weekend if it’s a few days after a holiday. The holiday was Thanksgiving. They said their hands were tied. So I decided to untie their hands and sue them. It took a court decision and two appeals so that students who were home that weekend — young people, working class, poor people who were disproportionately Black and brown — could turn out and vote. About 70,000 people voted [on Saturday]; I won by 100,000 votes. This is how voter suppression works. It’s the ways in which you begin to chip away at people’s access, which again, disproportionately impacts Black people, brown people, poor people. That’s how you swing an election. Chief Justice John Roberts put forward this theory that we no longer need the protections of the Voting Rights Act. That’s what he said in 2013. But what has happened in the years since that awful decision in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder? Yes, I’m sitting here, but the racial turnout gap has actually grown wider since 2013. Roberts has long felt that we didn’t need the Voting Rights Act. He despises the Voting Rights Act.