Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock at 2024 Democratic National Convention

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock enthusiastically endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris during his speech on the opening night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday.

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz represent the way forward. We’re not going back,” he said. “We’re not going back because we are the United States of America. We always dream about the future.”

He elaborated on this by touching on some of Harris’s past work with President Joe Biden, like the insulin cap, and on some of her major platform points for the future like restoring reproductive rights nationwide. He also had some serious words regarding former president Donald Trump.

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“People who have no vision traffic in division. He does not know how to lead us and so he wants to divide us,” Warnock said. “America, make no mistake, Donald Trump is a plague on the American conscience.”

The senator also drew on his experience as a reverend while also calling out an image many Democrats have criticized: Trump holding up a bible outside a church as protests broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

“He should try reading it. It says ‘Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God,'” Warnock said. “It says ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ It says ‘In as much as you’ve done unto the least of these, you have done it also unto me.'”

Warnock ended his speech with a unification message inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I need my neighbor’s children to be O.K. so that my children will be O.K. I need all of my neighbors’ children to be O.K. Poor inner city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia. I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza. I need Israelis and Palestinians. I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the track to be O.K. because we are all God’s children.”