Sen. Ralph Warnock, D-Ga., slammed Donald Trump's use of religion during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night.
Warnock, who is a Baptist pastor, began his remarks by sharing his mother’s history picking cotton and tobacco in Georgia.
“But because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” Warnock said to the crowd.
He went onto criticize Trump’s use of Christianity in his campaign, specifically referencing a fundraising push in which Trump was selling $60 “God Bless the USA” Bibles named after Trump-supporting musician Lee Greenwood’s song.
“I saw him holding the Bible and endorsing a Bible as if it needed his endorsement,” Warnock said. “He should try reading it!”
“It says do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. He should try reading it,” Warnock said as the crowd cheered.
Georgia is expected to be a crucial battleground in the 2024 election. In 2020, President Joe Biden flipped the historically Republican state in one of the closest results of the 2020 election. Trump currently leads Harris in Georgia 46-50, according to a recent New York Times/Sienna College poll.
Later in his speech, Warnock condemned Trump’s part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and the former president’s anti-democratic rhetoric.
“The lie and the logic of January 6 is a sickness. It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws across our country,” he said. “We must be vigilant tonight because these anti-democratic forces are at work right now all across our country.”
Warnock concluded his speech with a unifying message: “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.”
