The Crooked Places Made Straight

Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America

De: Raphael G. Warnock

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most

Sen. Rev. Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in the congress and pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Sen. Rev. Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources, but a poverty of moral imagination.

His sermon on the book of Isaiah draws from ideals resonant in his own faith and all of the great faiths and other moral traditions, offering a bold vision of how to live and relate to one another in the land. A moral topography, he calls it, a geo-politics that centers love and justice, or as Dr. King would so often say, the beloved community. The Crooked Places Made Straight examines six crises at the center of American life: voting rights and voter suppression, gun violence, mass incarceration, the persistence of poverty, dark money in politics, and the climate emergency.

This is not a naïve faith, either. As Sen. Rev. Warnock writes: the prophet Isaiah knows well the perils of public corruption, sophisticated legalized bribery, and a political class more interested in preserving their own power than in serving the people. He’s fed up with political leaders who were focused on their own gain at the expense of the people. “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves,” he says.

For Sen. Rev. Warnock, democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. A vote is a kind of prayer. The Crooked Places Made Straight is his inspiring vision for a more just and equitable America where communities thrive with hope and possibility and every child has a chance.