COLLEGE PARK, GEORGIA – Five Democratic presidential candidates injected faith and bible verses into their messaging during a forum hosted by the Black Church PAC at a Christian conference outside of Atlanta.
“When two or more of us gather in his name, he is with us and we rejoice,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said as she took the stage at the forum on Saturday.
“The Bible, if it is about anything, it is about justice, it is about reaching out to people in need, it is about standing up to the wealthy and the powerful,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish. “That’s what this campaign is about.”
Some candidates regularly bring faith-based messages to the campaign trail. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg often says that God does not belong to a political party. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker quoted a verse written at the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated about Joseph’s brothers throwing him in a pit to die, though Joseph later rose out of the pit: “Here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him, and see what becomes of the dream.”
At the forum, candidates went further than normal in appealing to Christian values, though they largely stuck to their typical messages.
“We have the power, and Lord knows this nation needs some Holy Ghost power up in here,” Booker said at the forum Friday when talking about gun violence, black maternal mortality rates and voter suppression. “Don’t just pray about it, be about it. Faith without works is dead.”
“The scripture that I hear on Sunday says that we are supposed to identify with a prisoner as though we ourselves are imprisoned, that we are supposed to find salvation in feeding the hungry, that whoever oppresses the poor taunts his maker, that we are supposed to walk in humility and seek out leaders with the hearts of service,” Buttigieg said at the forum.
Buttigieg, Booker, and former housing secretary Julián Castro spoke at the forum on Friday.
About 5,000 millennials attended the Young Leadership Conference, according to organizers, while over 1,000 appeared to be in attendance during the candidate forums on Friday and Saturday. It was a chance for candidates to not only connect with black voters, but faith-based voters.
Tanya Latigue, a human resources manager in Greenville, South Carolina, said while she finds it important to hear faith-based messages from candidates, it has to be genuine. Buttigieg, who is Episcopalian, did not seem authentic to her, she said.
“You can sense when someone’s not authentic, if they just memorize scripture,” Latigue told the Washington Examiner. “I mean, even the devil knew scripture.”
Ashlyn Carter, who works in medical billing in Atlanta, said that she liked hearing Elizabeth Warren speak about bring raised in the Methodist church and teaching Bible study.
“If there is somebody who believes that being a good person and being a good Christian are important to them, then that would play a role for me and who I vote for,” Carter told the Washington Examiner.
