A Church Where Mark Robinson Still Has Defenders

At a Black evangelical church in North Carolina, the candidate for governor still has support.

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Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.

It was about an hour into the 11 a.m. service on Sunday, and Bishop Patrick Wooden Sr. of the Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, N.C., was at the pulpit, wearing a suit of deep plum. The music had drawn quiet. The morning announcements had been made. And now, the bishop said, he had something to address.

“Everybody’s talking about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson,” Wooden said, explaining to the congregation that he’d gotten a call from a local reporter on Friday and that the news media — me — was sitting among them that morning. “I called him Friday,” Wooden said, referring to Robinson, “and spoke to him myself.”

Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

Four days after the report was published, Robinson has insisted that he won’t drop out of the race. And a visit to Upper Room, a deeply conservative Black evangelical church with its own outspoken leader whom Robinson has spent years getting to know, was a window into a place where he still has support.

Robinson has spent years visiting conservative congregations like this one, using their churches as a platform for a message that aligns closely with theirs. And on Sunday, Wooden made it clear that he was not willing to abandon the messenger. Wooden said that when they spoke, Robinson had denied making the posts presented in the CNN report, and Wooden said he believed Robinson more than the news media. But Wooden’s defense centered less on an assiduous denial of the accusations than on the present-day qualities of the man he had come to know.

“I do not know of his life prior to 2020 — I cannot speak on him, I can only speak to him from the time that I’ve known him,” Wooden told the congregation. “All I know, I’ve known, about him is that he’s been an upstanding man, a tremendous leader, and he’s been a fighter — he’s fighting for our children.” The congregation began to applaud.

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