“I don’t know what kind of religion causes people to pray for people while preying on people,” Sen. Raphael Warnock told hundreds of United Church of Christ members and local politicians on Sept. 26 while speaking at a youth conference in the city.
The U.S. senator from Georgia criticized Republican lawmakers who he said prayed together before passing The One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
Warnock, a Democrat and pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, delivered the keynote address of the seventh annual meeting of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ at the DCU Center in downtown Worcester. While nor’easter winds blew outside, Warnock advocated for faith’s role in politics and volunteer work.
Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty and several city councilors and Massachusetts state representatives attended his keynote speech.
The Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ comprises over 500 churches and 100,000 members in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, a conference spokesperson said.
Warnock said the real test of a person’s faith is “the depth of your commitment to the most marginalized members of the human family.”
He criticized last year’s Republican tax and spending law, saying it cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, removed 15 million people from their health care coverage, raised premiums for about 20 million Americans, cut food assistance and moved wealth “from the bottom to the top.” Warnock said U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson was among the lawmakers who joined hands to pray before passing the bill.
Johnson’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but in an interview with CNN in May 2025, before the bill passed in the Senate, he said, “We are not cutting Medicaid in this package” and said that only people defrauding the program would lose coverage.
In July 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law’s changes to Medicaid would reduce federal spending by about $900 billion over 10 years and would increase the number of people without coverage by 10 million by 2034.
Warnock also criticized money’s role in politics and partisan redistricting, saying “crooked politicians” are “drawing crooked lines.”
Youth event
On Saturday morning, Warnock spoke with about 30 children from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York who assembled hygiene kits for people experiencing homelessness as a part of a youth event at the conference. He asked them to connect this volunteer work to their faith, talked about inequality in the United States and spoke on how unhoused people are often wrongly blamed for their circumstances.
He cited data that he said shows Christians are more likely than other groups to blame the poor for a lack of effort. This claim is backed up by a 2017 poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, which surveyed over 1,600 adults found 46% of Christians said poverty is generally due to a lack of effort, compared to 29% of non-Christians.
After Warnock spoke about inequality in the United States, the children had many questions about how the nation has accumulated over $40 trillion in debt, a number verified by U.S. fiscal data. Warnock explained both the history and economic issues with national debt, but also said, “I can’t even imagine it, even though I’m in the rooms we discuss it.”
Warnock grew up in public housing in Savannah and was the 11th of 12 children of Pentecostal preachers. He was the first in his family to graduate from college and went on to earn a master of divinity and a doctorate.
In 2021 he became the first Black person elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia. The street he grew up on has been renamed Raphael Warnock Way, but Warnock said he worries the children who live there now won’t have the same opportunities he did.
“It would be harder now for me to do what I did in the 1980s,” Warnock said during his keynote.
Reactions
“Love, the kind that costs something, the kind that shows up, is still the most powerful force on Earth,” said Rev. Darrell L. Goodwin, executive conference minister and president of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ, when he introduced Warnock on Saturday.
After the speech, Goodwin said in a written statement that Warnock’s message “reinforced our conviction that caring for people experiencing poverty and defending human dignity are central to following Jesus.”
Warnock closed his address with a call for unity.
“Our task in this moment is whether we, the people of God, and whether we, the American people, in this complicated family story, can weave the rough places, and the low places, and the high places, and the crooked places, into a quilt of togetherness,” Warnock said.
The conference also included a book signing on Saturday night and a sermon Sunday morning featuring Warnock.