WASHINGTON (RNS) — Shortly after joining Senate colleagues in midweek voting for a review of an environmental standard, Sen. Raphael Warnock sat in his Hart Senate Building office and talked about prayer and policy.
The senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church recently declared that the U.S. is in the midst of a “spiritual crisis,” a topic he discussed at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and in the pulpit from which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach.
Warnock, a Democrat, said prayer undergirds his policy efforts to address the troubles he sees across Georgia and the rest of the country. Though he seldom gets to the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast on Wednesdays, his private prayer time is a regular part of his schedule. It’s enhanced by reading the writing of Christian mystic Howard Thurman and praying with “a couple of prayer partners.”
“I have a very strong prayer life, and it is specially activated early in the morning before the noise of the world gets started,” he said in an interview Wednesday (Jan. 7). “It anchors my agenda and holds at bay the distractions.”
Warnock, 56, talked with Religion News Service about why he thinks there’s a spiritual crisis in America, what can be done about it and how he’s discussed aspects of it with his young children.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
In your speech last month to the Center for American Progress, you spoke about how De …