Although Georgia has one of the largest Black voting populations in the country, white voters alienated by Trump are also prime targets for Democrats in November. During Jon Ossoff’s 2017 special-election congressional campaign, which covered much of the suburban area north of Atlanta, “there were scores of folks coming in, saying, ‘Look, I have always been a Republican, but the election of President Trump has revealed the identity of the party, and this is not something I can participate in,’” Theron Johnson, a Democratic organizer on the campaign, told me. This rage is especially potent among women. “The suburban female vote is driving what’s shifting in Georgia,” says Erick Allen, a Black Democrat who flipped a formerly Republican state-legislature seat representing part of Cobb County in 2018. Faith is a big part of that. “There are enough believers and followers of Christ who understand the perversion of religion that the current Republican standard-bearer,” Trump, represents, Allen told me. “I think there’s going to be some blowback from that.”

But Warnock’s role in the Black-church world may complicate his attempt to build a coalition of voters. His scholarly work focused in part on the flaws of the prosperity gospel, a theological tradition popular in both Black and white churches that emphasizes individual salvation and health over the collective liberation and the activism that Warnock advocates. “In the decades after Dr. King’s death, there are churches that have taken a different kind of view of the gospel,” he told me. “They don’t necessarily see the work of justice, even when they’re engaged in it, as central to their Christian identity.” Throughout his career, Warnock has argued that King’s tradition of the gospel is as much about economics as it is about race: “King has certainly been sanitized and domesticated and therefore distorted,” he told the Montreal paper The Gazette in 2001. “People whose ideological orientation is clearly antithetical to that of King can mouth pious platitudes in honor of King while arguing for policies King would never have supported.” In past interviews, Warnock has spoken about the failures of certain Black-church traditions more sharply: Shortly after his book came out in late 2013, he told NPR’s Michel Martin that the “burgeoning Black middle class … has too often given in to the kind of narcissism and mindless consumeristic impulses of America without asking the hard questions about the distribution of wealth, about the broadening chasm between the haves and the have-nots.”