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    Raphael Warnock Is a Pastor and Politician Who Sees Voting as Prayer

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    Raphael Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, secured a full six-year term and a spot among Democrats’ rising stars.Follow our latest updates on the Georgia Senate runoff.He likened voting to a “prayer for the world we desire,” and called democracy the “political enactment of a spiritual idea,” that everyone has a divine spark.He invoked the legacies of civil rights heroes and “martyrs” who fought and sometimes died for the right to vote, even as he promised to pursue bipartisanship in pressing his policy ambitions.Exulting in his victory Tuesday night, Senator Raphael Warnock showcased the dualities that have defined his career in public life.He is a man of deep faith, the senior pastor at the Atlanta church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. And he is also a political tactician who has long believed that “the church’s work doesn’t end at the church door. That’s where it starts.”“I am Georgia,” Mr. Warnock said after winning Tuesday’s runoff election, nodding to both the hopeful and the dark aspects of the state’s past. “I am an example and an iteration of its history. Of its pain and its promise. Of the brutality and the possibility.”He is also now poised, some Democrats say, to be a more prominent national figure, as an ardent supporter of voting rights, a next-generation voice in the party — or, as Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey put it, a leader who can speak to “a lot of the hurt in our country.”“I don’t think America has fully discovered the leadership potential of Raphael Warnock, because he got elected and then was immediately in another election season,” said Mr. Booker, who has worked with Mr. Warnock on legislative issues including health equity matters, and who has campaigned for him. “He has the ability to do both the poetry and the prose of politics in a way that I think is rare.”Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, secured re-election on the strength of a strikingly broad coalition that reflected the party’s greatest political ambitions, winning a full six-year term after previously prevailing in a special election runoff.Mr. Warnock’s election night party on Tuesday in Atlanta erupted when his victory was projected.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesHe won over young progressives on college campuses and, polling before the runoff showed, Black voters across the board. He performed strongly in Atlanta’s racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, and secured support from some Georgians who voted for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, but split their tickets to back Mr. Warnock — reviving a crossover voting practice that some political observers had assumed was all but extinct.In significant part, that coalition was driven by opposition to Herschel Walker, the football legend nominated by the G.O.P. and backed by Donald J. Trump, whose Senate campaign floundered in the face of a barrage of allegations concerning his personal conduct, especially with women. His candidacy left some Republicans publicly concerned and privately apoplectic.But Mr. Warnock, who blended his image as a social justice-minded pastor with a sense of humor and an emphasis on bipartisanship, also showed how a Georgia Democrat could win in a difficult political environment, even as every other statewide candidate in his party collapsed.“‘Remaining the reverend’ was the phrase we used,” said Adam Magnus, Mr. Warnock’s lead ad maker. “It means remaining the unique person Raphael Warnock is. That is a combination of a moral sincerity, an empathy, a hard-working life story from where he started from to where he is now, and a relatability and a sense of humor.”Raphael Gamaliel Warnock was born on July 23, 1969, the 11th of 12 children, to a family of modest means. His father was a pastor who also “hauled junk, mostly abandoned cars,” offering the metal in exchange for cash, he wrote in his 2022 memoir “A Way Out of No Way,” while his mother took care of the family at home, later becoming a pastor.“She grew up in the 1950s in Waycross, Ga., picking somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech. “But tonight she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator.”He gave his first sermon at the age of 11, and was deeply inspired by the legacy of Dr. King, whose church — Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — Mr. Warnock now leads.Mr. Warnock is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Kevin D. Liles for The New York TimesMr. Warnock, a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, graduated from Morehouse College in 1991 before heading to New York City to study at Union Theological Seminary, staying in the city for about a decade.It was in New York, former classmates said, that he deepened his instincts to put the teachings of his faith into practice in the public square. He studied under, among others, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cone, a founder of Black liberation theology, which emphasizes the experiences of the oppressed.And at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Mr. Warnock became assistant pastor, he immersed himself in a world of Black civic and political activism. He was arrested at a protest for the first time in New York, objecting to the police killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant. His own brother was sentenced to life in prison, in a nonviolent drug-related offense involving an F.B.I. informant, a turn of events that shaped Mr. Warnock’s views of the criminal justice system. (His brother was released in 2020.)It was during his time in New York, Mr. Warnock later wrote, that the idea of running for Congress first occurred to him. But it would be years before he did so. Instead, he built a preaching career that eventually brought him to Atlanta, and to Ebenezer.As a pastor, Mr. Warnock condemned police brutality and racial injustice and championed expanding Medicaid. Encouraged by Georgia’s changing demographics, he wrote, he considered running for the Senate in the 2014 and 2016 cycles before seeking the seat vacated when Senator Johnny Isakson, a Republican, announced his retirement. He won after a January 2021 runoff that helped to deliver control of the Senate to the Democrats.In that contest, as in this year’s, Mr. Warnock leaned heavily into his identity as a pastor, making it harder for Republicans to cast him as a generic Democrat.“He’s literally in Martin Luther King’s pulpit every weekend,” said Jason Carter, a Warnock ally and Ebenezer congregant who ran for governor in 2014. “He has credibility that is unshakable in certain contexts that allow him to run his own kind of a race.”In the 2020 Senate campaign, Republicans unsuccessfully tried to use Mr. Warnock’s career and past sermons to paint him as radically left wing. This year, they focused more on linking Mr. Warnock to President Biden. They also tried to make an issue of Mr. Warnock’s relationship with his ex-wife, with whom he has two young children.Mr. Warnock’s team emphasized character and fitness for office and cast the race as a choice, rather than a chance to vent at the party in power.And some Republicans conceded that Mr. Warnock effectively defined himself in a way that allowed him to both keep the Democratic base energized and to engage the middle.Republicans “did not neglect to argue that his voting record doesn’t match his moderate rhetoric, they didn’t neglect to mention that he votes with Biden,” said Brian C. Robinson, who was a spokesman for former Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican. “His brand was stronger. It was a shield that deflected accurate attacks.”Mr. Robinson called Mr. Warnock “the best performer I’ve ever seen in Georgia politics,” adding: “He’s up there with, as far as sheer talent, up there with Clinton and Obama.”Mr. Warnock also campaigned on his ability to work with conservative hard-liners like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.“I’ve spoken with more conservative Democrats who are really excited, I’ve spoken with very progressive Democrats on college campuses that are really excited,” said Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the 25-year-old elected in November to the House from Florida, who campaigned with Mr. Warnock on Monday. “That’s the future of our party.”Mr. Warnock’s victory will undoubtedly prompt questions about his own future, as the country awaits Mr. Biden’s decision on whether to seek re-election and Democrats chatter about which midterm stars could emerge as party leaders.“A lot of people want to move someone like him, they want to move him around the board like a chess piece,” Mr. Carter said. Asked if he thought Mr. Warnock had any ambitions beyond the Senate, he replied flatly, “I don’t.”“He wants to do a good job as a senator,” Mr. Carter said, “but his children, his faith, his church — those things are really, really important to him.”With a six-year term now his, Mr. Warnock sounded impatient to get started.“Let’s dance because we deserve it,” he told his celebrating supporters. “But tomorrow, we go back down into the valley to do the work.” More

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      As a ‘Seismic Shift’ Fractures Evangelicals, an Arkansas Pastor Leaves Home

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      FORT SMITH, Ark. — In the fall of 2020, Kevin Thompson delivered a sermon about the gentleness of God. At one point, he drew a quick contrast between a loving, accessible God and remote, inaccessible celebrities. Speaking without notes, his Bible in his hand, he reached for a few easy examples: Oprah, Jay-Z, Tom Hanks.Mr. Thompson could not tell how his sermon was received. The church he led had only recently returned to meeting in person. Attendance was sparse, and it was hard to appreciate if his jokes were landing, or if his congregation — with family groups spaced three seats apart, and others watching online — remained engaged.So he was caught off guard when two church members expressed alarm about the passing reference to Mr. Hanks. A young woman texted him, concerned; another member suggested the reference to Mr. Hanks proved Mr. Thompson did not care about the issue of sex trafficking. Mr. Thompson soon realized that their worries sprung from the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the movie star is part of a ring of Hollywood pedophiles.For decades, Mr. Thompson, 44, had been confident that he knew the people of Fort Smith, a small city tucked under a bend in the Arkansas River along the Oklahoma border. He was born at the oldest hospital in town, attended public schools there and grew up in a Baptist church that encouraged him to start preaching as a teenager. He assumed he would live in Fort Smith for the rest of his life.But now, he was not so sure. “Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.”A political moment in which the Supreme Court appears on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade looks like a triumphant era for conservative evangelicals. But there are deepening cracks beneath that ascendance.Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united have found themselves at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions. The disruption, fear and physical separation of the pandemic have exacerbated every rift.Many churches are fragile, with attendance far below prepandemic levels; denominations are shrinking, and so is the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian. Forty-two percent of Protestant pastors said they had seriously considered quitting full-time ministry within the past year, according to a new survey by the evangelical pollster Barna, a number that had risen 13 points since the beginning of 2021.Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, described a “seismic shift” coming, with white evangelical churches dividing into two broad camps: those embracing Trump-style messaging and politics, including references to conspiracy theories, and those seeking to navigate a different way.In many churches, this involves new clashes between established leaders and ordinary believers.Sometimes the breaches make headlines, like when Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist, left his denomination in 2021 after publicly criticizing evangelical supporters of former President Donald J. Trump and urging Christians to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. But more often, the ruptures are quieter: a pastor who moves to another church to avoid a major confrontation, or who changes careers without fanfare.Community Bible Church in Fort Smith, Ark., where Mr. Thompson was a pastor.September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Thompson landed back in Fort Smith after seminary in the early 2000s, Community Bible Church was an exciting place to work. Inspired by booming suburban megachurches like Saddleback in Southern California and Willow Creek in Illinois, Community Bible offered modern music, multimedia worship services and “seeker-sensitive” outreach to people who were not regular churchgoers.“My concern was spiritual vitality,” said Ed Saucier, the church’s founding pastor. “I wanted it to be fun and engaging and different on purpose.” Mr. Saucier rarely talked directly about electoral politics or public policy from the pulpit. It was easy to avoid. The church was mostly white and mostly conservative; congregants agreed on what they saw as the big issues, and there seemed to be little cause to prod on the small ones. “I applied some common sense,” Mr. Saucier said. “If I can’t make something better, maybe I should leave it alone.”The Intersection of Evangelicalism and U.S. PoliticsPolitical Rise: In the early 1970s, many evangelicals weren’t active in politics. Within a few years, they had reshaped elections for a generation.A Fervor in the American Right: Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger.Trump’s Pull: To understand the relationship between white evangelicals and Donald J. Trump, one has to go back to a 2016 speech in Iowa where he promised that “Christianity will have power.”A ‘Seismic Shift’: White evangelical churches that were once united are now fractured over the same issues dividing the Republican Party.His philosophy was not unusual. Despite their status as an influential voting bloc, most white American evangelicals have historically avoided the perception of mixing politics and worship. In many evangelical settings, “political” means biased or tainted — an opposite of “biblical.”“The one thing that I loved and was so refreshing about this ministry is there were no politics at all,” recalled Sara Adams-Moitoza, a longtime church member who owns a boutique shopping center in Fort Smith. “Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.”Mr. Thompson had always been interested in politics, but he was no activist. He saw himself as part of the contemporary evangelical mainstream, a movement that included people like the prominent New York pastor Tim Keller and the Bible teacher Beth Moore, who were theologically conservative and skeptical of becoming entangled with either political party.He still sees himself as a conservative. Mr. Thompson has voted Republican in almost every major election. He admires Mitt Romney and the Bush family and is conservative on issues of gender and sexual orientation, although he does not emphasize them often.When he took over as head pastor after six years as an associate, he was immediately popular with the congregation. One founding member, Jim Kolp, recalled a sermon that Mr. Thompson preached on the “fruit of the spirit,” based on a passage in the New Testament that lists attributes like gentleness and self-control, which show that the Holy Spirit is working in a Christian’s life. The sermon prompted Mr. Kolp to examine his daily habit of listening to Rush Limbaugh. “I’d never stopped and thought, ‘Does it meet up with the fruit of the spirit?’” Mr. Kolp said. “I leave listening to this man angry.” He stopped tuning in.But over the years, subtle gaps between Mr. Thompson and his congregation tore open, like a seam being tugged from both sides.“Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.”September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesIf he spoke against abortion from the pulpit, Mr. Thompson noticed, the congregation had no problem with it. The members were overwhelmingly anti-abortion and saw the issue as a matter of biblical truth. But if he spoke about race in ways that made people uncomfortable, that was “politics.” And, Mr. Thompson suspected, it was proof to some church members that Mr. Thompson was not as conservative as they thought.The discontent over Mr. Thompson’s approach started with the 2016 presidential campaign. The pastor wrote a blog post that did not critique Mr. Trump by name, but whose point was clear. “Many who thought Bill Clinton was the Antichrist now campaign for a man who would make Bill Clinton blush,” he wrote.When Mr. Thompson wrote in a 2020 blog post that “Black lives matter,” the friction in his church suddenly looked more like a crisis. He had been speaking and writing about racial issues with some frequency for years. He had hired Jackie Flake, a Black pastor, to lead a new branch of the church on Fort Smith’s racially diverse North Side. In 2015, he got involved in a successful effort to change the “Johnny Reb” mascot at his old high school. But the phrase “Black lives matter” rankled some congregants.Mr. Kolp said he found the far-reaching conversations about racism spurred by Mr. Thompson too negative. America does have a history of racism, he said. But “if the slave trade had never happened, would they still be in Africa? Would they have the prominent positions?” he wondered about Black people. “And now our pastor’s talking about it, and we’re systemically racist because we’re white?”Mr. Thompson’s actual sermons were hardly scathing. At one point he asserted, “If you grew up in any way like me, there’s bigotry within you” and encouraged listeners to seek out perspectives other than their own.His friend Steven Dooly, a white former police officer with two Black children, sometimes urged him to speak even more directly on racial justice. But he knew Mr. Thompson was in a difficult position. “You’d hate to see a church fall completely apart over a few lines in a sermon,” he said.For many pastors whose conservatism matches their congregations, however, there is little cost to speaking out. Some conservative pastors now find that their congregations want not careful, conciliatory talk, but bold pushback to what they see as rising threats from the secular world.Steven Dooly, a former police officer in Fort Smith and now a juvenile case worker, supported Mr. Thompson as his congregation began to splinter.September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times“There’s a great separation taking place,” said Wade Lentz, pastor of Beryl Baptist Church in Vilonia, Ark., a few hours east of Fort Smith. “A lot of people are getting tired of going to church and hearing this message: ‘Hey, it’s a great day, every day is a great day, the sun is always shining.’ There’s this big disconnect between what’s going on behind the pulpit in those churches and what’s going on in the real world.”Mr. Lentz has seen his church grow as he leaned into topics like vaccine mandates, which he preached against in a sermon titled “We Believe Tyranny Must be Resisted.” In 2020, sensing “so much disruption in the world,” he started a podcast in which he explores political topics with a fellow “patriot” pastor.“This mind-set that Christianity and politics, and the preacher and politics, need to be separate, that’s a lie,” he said. “You cannot separate the two.”At Community Bible, just about everyone liked Mr. Thompson, but some could not understand why he picked the causes he did. “There are areas he should have backed off of,” said Johnny Fisher, one of the church’s founding members. “The best thing probably is to shut up and answer any questions that are given to you from the Bible.”The church stopped growing. Whole families were leaving; Richy Fisher, a pastor and consultant who prepared a report for the church in 2019, described membership as “hemorrhaging.” (Richy and Johnny Fisher are brothers.)Mr. Thompson was equally frustrated by the actions of some of his congregants. People he thought should have known better were endorsing online conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the results of the 2020 election. On his blog, he called for Christians to apply “research and discernment.” “When we share, promote, like and further things that are not true about others, we are violating the ninth commandment,” he wrote.Fort Smith’s mayor, George McGill, said his city was like many other places in the country: Issues including masks and vaccination have fractured relationships, and people doubt the leaders they once trusted. Mr. McGill, the city’s first Black mayor, saw Mr. Thompson as someone who spoke the truth. But within his community, antagonists “rose up against the very people God had put in place.”Southside High School changed its “Johnny Reb” mascot in 2015, a move Mr. Thompson was involved in.September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesMr. Thompson’s reputation did appear to be shifting. A local woman emailed her Bible study group in the summer of 2020, warning that he was promoting a “progressive Leftist agenda.” When Mr. Thompson invited her to meet with him, pointing out that he was a frequent guest of Focus on the Family Radio and hardly a leftist, she accused him of being beholden to “The Marxist Agenda” and “the BLM agenda.”When a job offer came last summer to become an associate pastor at a larger church in the Sacramento area, Mr. Thompson accepted.Mr. Thompson hoped that the church’s next leader could preach “the same truth” without the baggage that had accrued around him. But he also wondered how the next generation of pastors would lead. Seminaries are shrinking, and many in his own congregation seemed to view his theological training as the thing that turned him “liberal.” The next generation might have less training, and be more inclined to turn churches into “an echo chamber of what the people want.”Months after his departure, Community Bible was still figuring out its future. “We’re still bleeding some, but it’s under control,” Mr. Saucier, the founding pastor, said in December. The church’s interim leader is Richy Fisher; the church’s board recommended this spring that he take the role permanently, and a congregational vote will take place May 22.In the meantime, the people of Fort Smith have different choices than when Mr. Thompson arrived at Community Bible. Newer churches with flashier aesthetics have popped up in town. A branch of New Life, a multisite church with more than 15 locations across the state, is practically across the street.On a recent Sunday morning, the congregation at New Life heard a sermon drawn from the book of Daniel.“America is no longer a Christian nation,” the pastor said, setting up a message about resisting the broader culture’s pressure to change “what we say, how we raise our kids, how and when we can pray, what marriage is.” The sermon’s title was “Stand Firm.” More

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      A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders

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      Some evangelical pastors are hosting events dedicated to Trump’s election falsehoods and promoting the cause to their congregations.COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The 11 a.m. service at Church for All Nations, a large nondenominational evangelical church in Colorado’s second-largest city, began as such services usually do. The congregation of young families and older couples swayed and sang along to live music. Mark Cowart, the church’s senior pastor, delivered an update on a church mission project.Then Mr. Cowart turned the pulpit over to a guest speaker, William J. Federer.An evangelical commentator and one-time Republican congressional candidate, Mr. Federer led the congregation through an hourlong PowerPoint presentation based on his 2020 book, “Socialism — The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control.” Many congregants scribbled in the notebooks they had brought from home.“I believe God is pushing the world to a decision-making moment,” Mr. Federer said, building toward his conclusion. “We used to have national politicians that held back the floodgates of hell. The umbrella’s been ripped after Jan. 6, and now it’s raining down upon every one of us. We had politicians that were supposed to certify that — and instead they just accepted it. And, lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”Evangelical churches have long been powerful vehicles for grass-roots activism and influence on the American right, mobilized around issues like abortion and gay marriage. Now, some of those churches have embraced a new cause: promoting Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. They have opened their church doors to speakers promoting discredited theories about overturning President Joe Biden’s victory and lent a veneer of spiritual authority to activists who often wrap themselves in the language of Christian righteousness.For these church leaders, Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.“What’s going on in our country right now with this recent election and the fraudulent nature of that?” Mr. Cowart, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, asked in a sermon last year. “What is going on?”It’s difficult to measure the extent of churches’ engagement in the issue. Research suggests that a small minority of evangelical pastors bring politics to the pulpit. “I think the vast majority of pastors realize there is not a lot of utility to being very political,” said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor.The Church for All Nations in Colorado Springs. Stephen Speranza for The New York TimesStill, surveys show that the belief in a fraudulent election retains a firm hold on white evangelical churchgoers overall, Mr. Trump’s most loyal constituency in 2020. A poll released in November by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 60 percent of white evangelical respondents continued to believe that the election was stolen — a far higher share than other Christian groups of any race. That figure was roughly 40 percent for white Catholics, 19 percent for Hispanic Catholics and 18 percent for Black Protestants.Among evangelicals, “a high percentage seem to walk in lock step with Trump, the election conspiracies and the vigilante ‘taking back of America,’” said Rob Brendle, the lead pastor at Denver United Church, who recalled that when he criticized some Christians’ embrace of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in a sermon the Sunday after the riot, he lost about a hundred members of his congregation, which numbered around 1,500 before the pandemic.Rob Brendle, the lead pastor of Denver United Church, said that when he criticized the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol the Sunday after the riot, he lost about a hundred congregants.Kevin Moloney for the New York TimesHe thinks many fellow clergy may share that view. “I think the jury’s still out, but it’s not a fringe,” he said.Some of the national evangelical figures who supported Mr. Trump during his presidency and his 2020 campaign, like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, separated themselves from his insistence that the election was stolen. Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham and the president of Samaritan’s Purse, equivocated. Writing on Facebook the month after the election, Mr. Graham acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory but said that when Mr. Trump claimed the election was rigged against him, “I tend to believe him.”Others embraced Mr. Trump’s claims or argued for the preservation of his rule in spite of his loss. Shortly after the election was called for Mr. Biden, Paula White, a Florida televangelist who served as the White House faith adviser during Mr. Trump’s presidency, led a prayer service in which she and others called upon God to overturn the election.Pastor Greg Locke of Global Vision Bible Church holding a service in his church’s parking lot in 2020.Brett Carlsen/Getty ImagesGreg Locke, a preacher who leads the Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tenn., spoke alongside Alex Jones of Infowars at a “Rally for Revival” demonstration in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Locke offered a prayer for the Proud Boys, the violent far-right group, and for Enrique Tarrio, the organization’s leader who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy for his role in the Capitol insurrection.Mr. Locke — whose congregation is relatively small, but who claims a social media audience in the millions — is one of more than a dozen pastors who have appeared onstage at the ReAwaken America Tour: a traveling roadshow that has featured far-right Republican politicians, anti-vaccine activists, election conspiracists and Trumpworld personalities, including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a central figure in the effort to overturn the election in late 2020.Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn spoke at a ReAwaken America Tour event in Phoenix in January.Mark Peterson/ReduxThe event has drawn crowds of thousands of Trump supporters in nine states in the past year. All but one of the tour’s stops have been hosted by megachurches, and the tour is sponsored by a charismatic Christian media company.The performances wrap the narrative of election fraud in a megachurch atmosphere, complete with worship music and prayer, and have drawn criticism from some Christian clergy. When the tour came to a church in San Marcos, Calif., this month, a local Methodist minister denounced it as an “irreligious abomination” in an opinion essay.Smaller churches, meanwhile, have proven an important support network for the individual activists who now travel the country promoting the narrative of a stolen election.“Churches and bars, baby. That’s where it was happening in 1776,” wrote Douglas Frank, a high school math and science teacher in Ohio whose widely debunked analyses of the 2020 results have been influential with election conspiracists, in a Telegram post last month. So far this year, more than a third of the speeches he has promoted on his social media accounts have been hosted by churches or religious groups.Douglas Frank, a high school math teacher from Ohio with ties to former President Trump, presented his theories of election fraud to about 100 people in the Missouri State Capitol in January.David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressSeth Keshel, a former Army captain and military intelligence analyst who worked alongside Mr. Flynn in the weeks immediately after the election, is a popular draw with the same crowds. He attributed the prevalence of churches on the circuit to the instincts of local organizers.“Most conservatives are evangelicals and naturally think ‘church’ as a venue,” he wrote in an email. “There are some pastors more fired up about elections and liberty but not all.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Signs of progress. More

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      Will Christian America Withstand the Pull of QAnon?

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      The scandals, jagged-edged judgmentalism and culture war mentality that have enveloped significant parts of American Christendom over the last several years, including the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, have conditioned many of us to expect the worst. Which is why the annual meeting of the convention this week was such a pleasant surprise.The convention’s newly elected president, the Rev. Ed Litton, barely defeated the Rev. Mike Stone, the choice of the denomination’s insurgent right. Mr. Litton, a soft-spoken pastor in Alabama who is very conservative theologically, has made racial reconciliation a hallmark of his ministry and has said that he will make institutional accountability and care for survivors of sexual abuse priorities during his two-year term.“My goal is to build bridges and not walls,” Mr. Litton said at a news conference after his victory, pointedly setting himself apart from his main challenger. But those bridges won’t be easy to build.Tensions in the convention are as high as they’ve been in decades; it is a deeply fractured denomination marked by fierce infighting. The Conservative Baptist Network, which Mr. Stone is part of, was formed in 2020 to stop what it considers the convention’s drift toward liberalism on matters of culture and theology.Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias of The Times describe the individuals in the Conservative Baptist Network as “part of an ultraconservative populist uprising of pastors” who want to “take the ship.” They are zealous, inflamed, uncompromising and eager for a fight. They nearly succeeded this time. And they’re not going away anytime soon.They view as a temporary setback the defeat of Mr. Stone, who came within an eyelash of winning even after allegations by the Rev. Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, that Mr. Stone blocked investigations of sexual abuse at Southern Baptist churches and engaged in a broader campaign of intimidation. (Mr. Stone has denied the charges.)True to this moment, the issues dividing the convention are more political than theological. What preoccupies the denomination’s right wing right now is critical race theory, whose intellectual origins go back several decades, and which contends that racism is not simply a product of individual bigotry but embedded throughout American society. As The Times put it, “the concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.”What upset many members of the Conservative Baptist Network was a nonbinding 2019 resolution approved at the convention’s annual meeting stating that critical race theory and intersectionality could be employed as “analytical tools” — all the while acknowledging that their insights could be subject to misuse and only on the condition that they be “subordinate to Scripture” and don’t serve as “transcendent ideological frameworks.”Late last year, the Rev. J.D. Greear, who preceded Mr. Litton as president, tweeted that while critical race theory as an ideological framework is incompatible with the Bible, “some in our ranks inappropriately use the label of ‘CRT!’ to avoid legitimate questions or as a cudgel to dismiss any discussion of discrimination. Many cannot even define what C.R.T. is. If we in the S.B.C. had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that sin has left as we show passion to decry C.R.T., we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.” (The Southern Baptist Convention was created as a result of a split with northern Baptists over slavery. In 1995, the convention voted to “repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”) In his farewell address as president last week, Mr. Greear warned against “an S.B.C. that spends more energy decrying things like C.R.T. than they have of the devastating consequences of racial discrimination.” And another former president of the convention, the Rev. James Merritt, said, “I want to say this bluntly and plainly: if some people were as passionate about the Gospel as they were critical race theory, we’d win this world for Christ tomorrow.”Even if you believe, as I do, that some interpretations of critical race theory have problematic, illiberal elements to them, it is hardly in danger of taking hold in the 47,000-plus congregations in the convention, which is more theologically and politically conservative than most denominations. What is ripping through many Southern Baptist churches these days — and it’s not confined to Southern Baptist churches — is a topic that went unmentioned at the annual convention last week: QAnon conspiracy theories.Dr. Moore, who was an influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention until he split with the denomination just a few weeks ago, told Axios, “I’m talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.” He said that for many, QAnon is “taking on all the characteristics of a cult.”Bill Haslam, the former two-term Republican governor of Tennessee, a Presbyterian and the author of “Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square,” put it this way in a recent interview with The Atlantic:I have heard enough pastors who are saying they cannot believe the growth of the QAnon theory in their churches. Their churches had become battlegrounds over things that they never thought they would be. It’s not so much the pastors preaching that from pulpits — although I’m certain there’s some of that — but more people in the congregation who have become convinced that theories are reflective of their Christian faith.According to a recent poll by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nearly a third of white evangelical Christian Republicans — 31 percent — believe in the accuracy of the QAnon claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” White evangelicals are far more likely to embrace conspiracy theories than nonwhite evangelicals. Yet there have been no statements or resolutions by the Southern Baptist Convention calling QAnon “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message,” which six S.B.C. seminary presidents said about critical race theory and “any version of critical theory” late last year. Too many Southern Baptist leaders, facing all sorts of internal problems and dangers, would rather divert attention and judgment to the world outside their walls. This is not quite what Jesus had in mind.The drama playing out within the convention is representative of the wider struggle within American Christianity. None of us can fully escape the downsides and the dark sides of our communities and our culture. The question is whether those who profess to be followers of Jesus show more of a capacity than they have recently to rise above them, to be self-critical instead of simply critical of others, to shine light into our own dark corners, even to add touches of grace and empathy in harsh and angry times.That happens now and then, here and there, and when it does, it can be an incandescent witness. But the painful truth is it doesn’t happen nearly enough, and in fact the Christian faith has far too often become a weapon in the arsenal of those who worship at the altar of politics.Rather than standing up for the victims of sexual abuse, their reflex has been to defend the institutions that cover up the abuse. Countless people who profess to be Christians are having their moral sensibilities shaped more by Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologues than by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.Perhaps without quite knowing it, many of those who most loudly proclaim the “pre-eminence of Christ” have turned him into a means to an end, a cruel, ugly and unforgiving end. And this, too, is not quite what Jesus had in mind.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More