Wednesday, October 14, 2026 · Independent editorial

Warnock says Trump ‘unleashed a kind of wickedness’ — Christians, answer honestly

“In this moral moment in America, where we have a president who has unleashed a kind of wickedness into the ether, who is the most gifted politician I’ve ever seen at dividing us, we have an American pope,” Sen. Raphael Warnock said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” according to Pam Key at Breitbart News, and when the man saying it is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta it is a charge Christian voters should neither shrug off nor swallow whole, because it goes straight to the question every believer in America has to answer this fall about where the Republican Party really stands next to the faith we profess.

Breitbart reports that host Chris Hayes raised the subject by calling Warnock “a fellow man of the cloth” and asking about Pope Leo XIV, who Hayes said had undergone surgery that day to remove a lobe of his lung that was found to be cancerous, and a separate Breitbart report says the Vatican confirmed the pope has lung cancer after a successful surgery removed the lower lobe of his right lung, with a Vatican statement saying “The surgery was successful, and there were no complications.” Warnock answered that “Pope Leo’s voice is so important in this moment” and that the pope “has challenged this war mongering president, and as a result of that, he got push back from perhaps the most prominent and well known Catholic these days in politics, the vice president,” before closing with words every Christian can say amen to, “And I’m praying for him in this moment, for his strength, for his well-being. And I’m praying for the health of our country.”

This was not a one-off line either. CNN reported on Sunday, October 11, that while campaigning in New Hampshire for Democrats the Georgia senator spoke at length on how “Donald Trump has unleashed a kind of evil and wickedness into the ether,” and CNN describes him as test-driving a 2028 message that critiques both parties on faith and character. In that same CNN piece Warnock said, “God is not a Democrat. And contrary to what people seem to think, God is not a Republican,” and that is the one sentence here Christian conservatives should take to heart.

Here is the opinion part, and we label it as opinion. Warnock is right that God is not a Republican, and any believer who has quietly started treating the GOP platform as a fifth Gospel has his loyalties in the wrong order, but Warnock’s own words in that CNN piece show how selective his prophetic voice can be, because CNN reports that when told Justice Samuel Alito writes in an upcoming book that the decision to legalize gay marriage was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty,” Warnock answered, “What about slavery?” and then said, “You know what I think is an insult to God? Any form of human domination over others.” Christians can agree that slavery was a monstrous sin and still notice that a pastor who sees wickedness in the White House had nothing in those quotes to say about the unborn child, about marriage as Scripture defines it, or about religious liberty for believers who hold to what the church has taught for two thousand years.

That does not let the Republican Party off the hook, and Christian first means saying so out loud. A party that has spent years winning evangelical and Catholic votes could be tempted to take those votes for granted, to talk about life in the primary and go quiet on it in the general and to excuse coarseness from its own leaders that it would never excuse from the other side. Scripture says judgment begins at the household of God, which means the people who claim the faith should be the first to hold their own side to it, and a GOP that wants to keep Christian voters could earn that loyalty every cycle rather than assume it.

But honesty runs both directions, and the fair comparison is not the GOP against a perfect kingdom, it is the GOP against the actual alternative on the actual ballot. In our view the Republican Party has more often made room for the conviction that every child in the womb deserves protection and that churches have rights the state must respect, and a Christian can weigh that with clear eyes, decide which side gives the church more room to be the church, and still pray hard for the side he votes for to repent where it needs to.

And on one thing Warnock and every faithful Christian in America can stand together, which is praying for Pope Leo XIV, as Breitbart, citing NBC News, reports medical staff prayed the rosary as his operation started, because you do not have to be Catholic or a Democrat or a Republican to ask the Lord to give a sick man strength.

Christian first means we measure Donald Trump, JD Vance, Raphael Warnock and every candidate by the same Book, and we refuse to let any party baptize its agenda in our name. American second means the vote belongs to you and not to a cable host, a campaign or a pulpit. Republican third means the GOP gets our support only as far as it stands with Christ, and it should hear that warning as clearly as Democrats hear our objections. On Tuesday, November 3, 2026, walk into that booth having prayed first, read your Bible second and the campaign mailers a distant third, and let your ballot show that God is not a Democrat or a Republican, but He is still the One you answer to.

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