Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock has praised his religious mentor, Dr. James Hal Cone, as a “poignant and powerful voice” of high “spiritual magnitude.”
Cone, however, was a controversial theologian who argued that white Christians are “satanic” and advocated for the “destruction of everything white” in society.
Warnock has described Cone, who served as his academic adviser at the Union Theological Seminary, as his “mentor.”
“There will be no peace in America until white people begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?'” Cone wrote.
Warnock cited the work over a dozen times in the chapters and footnotes of his own 2013 book The Divided Mind of the Black Church.
One of Cone’s central arguments is that whites worship a false “white God” and follow an anti-Christian “white theology.” In reality, he wrote, “God is black” and “has nothing to do with the God worshiped in white churches.”
“The white God is an idol created by racists, and we blacks must perform the iconoclastic task of smashing false idols,” wrote Cone. “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity.”
The book argued that the purpose of black theology is the “destruction of everything white.”
