When Warnock inveighs against politicians who “pick the pockets of the poor” to “line the pockets of the ultrarich,” that doesn’t make him anti-capitalist. He’s making the charge that certain policies and policymakers willfully ignore the concerns of the most defenseless among us and insisting that our nation can do better. Saying “nobody can serve

The Bible is replete with the scathing indictments of those who wept over oppression. Recall Jeremiah: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor” (Jeremiah 22:13); and Amos, decrying those who “trample on the heads of the poor as on the

in the prophetic tradition, hope comes from our ability to confront the worst of ourselves as a nation, progressing toward our better selves, not from sentimentality or naive optimism

But the ease with which these attacks are deployed reflects an ignorance about the progressive Black church tradition: Preachers such as Warnock may strike the comfortable as offensive, but their critiques aren’t unpatriotic screeds. Rather, they proclaim a deep love for, and thus a deep disappointment in, a country that too often fails to affirm t