Raphael Warnock

Raphael Gamaliel Warnock (born July 23, 1969) is an American Baptist pastor and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Georgia since 2021.

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.

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.

He then earned Master of Divinity, Master of Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Union Theological Seminary, a school affiliated with Columbia University.

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.

While Warnock was pastor at Abyssinian, the church declined to hire workfare recipients as part of organized opposition to then-mayor Rudy Giuliani's workfare program.

The church also hosted Fidel Castro on October 22, 1995, while Warnock was youth pastor.

There is no evidence Warnock was involved in that decision.

Warnock and 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.

He was reelected to a full term in 2022, defeating Republican nominee Herschel Walker.

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.

In January 2001, Warnock was elected senior pastor of Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

He and an assistant minister were arrested and charged with obstructing a 2002 police investigation into suspected child abuse at a summer camp the church ran.

The police report called Warnock "extremely uncooperative and disruptive".

Warnock had demanded that the counselors have lawyers present when being interviewed by police.

The charges were later dropped with the deputy state's attorney's acknowledgment that it had been a "miscommunication", adding that Warnock had aided the investigation and that prosecution would be a waste of resources.

Warnock said he was merely asserting that lawyers should be present during the interviews and that he had intervened to ensure that an adult was present while a juvenile suspect was being questioned.

A member of the Democratic Party, Warnock has been the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church since 2005.

Warnock stepped down as the church's senior pastor in 2005.

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.

With Warnock's win and Jon Ossoff's victory in the concurrent regularly scheduled election, Democrats won control of the Senate for the first time since 2015.

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.

On January 30, 2020, he announced his candidacy in Georgia's 2020 United States Senate special election, seeking to unseat incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler.

No candidate received a majority of the vote on election day, so Warnock faced Loeffler again in a January 5, 2021, runoff election, which he won by more than 93,000 votes.

During the 2020–21 United States Senate special election in Georgia, his campaign refused to say whether Warnock attended the event.

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 commenters 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.