“You Will Not Replace Us:” Religion, Race and Christian Theology

Perhaps the most disturbing thing I heard during the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis was the shouted comment, “Jews will not replace us.”  The slogan—or at least the sentiment-- has been repeated, notably by the man who went into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh to kill Jews, and then by the nineteen-year-old man who walked into the Chabad synagogue in Poway, with the same intent. 

The comment is both anti-Semitic and racist, coming from an ignorance of some white men who fear all those immigrants and people of color who are reproducing at a rate that will make whites a minority by 2045. And yes, it recalls Nazi Germany in the 1930s (and before), people like Hitler who insisted on the supremacy of their Aryan “race” and feared that Jews (or their influence) were threatening the purity of their nation and culture.  But then I was reading an article by Julie Zauzmer in The Washington Post (“The alleged synagogue shooter was a churchgoer who talked Christian theology, raising tough questions for evangelical pastors”). I read that John Earnest had learned his hate, not only from radical internet sites, but also from a stream of traditional Christian theology, taught in his evangelical church. It suddenly hit me.  “Replacement theology!” That’s what “You will not replace me” echoes, and it has a dangerous theological significance.

“Replacement” theology is drawn from the New Testament, where we hear in some of the epistles that Christians (the Christian Church) has replaced the Jews. Christians are those who are now blessed by God, taking the place of Jewish Israel in God’s favor. Jews are condemned for not embracing Jesus as their savior. “Replacement theology” is quite different from Christian “restoration theology.” It holds that the Jews will be restored—to Jerusalem but also to God’s favor by accepting Jesus as their savior). Two very different Christian theologies that encourage very different attitudes towards Jews. “Replacement theology” has fueled Christian hatred of, and violence towards, Jews over the long course of history.

 There are plenty of negative verses in both the Old and New Testaments that could be used to encourage hatred of the other, particularly when stripped of historical context. John says the Jews are not God’s children, but of “the Devil,” a position that Rosemary Reuther long ago (in her book Faith and Fratricide) showed led to the development of anti-Semitism in Christianity. It wasn’t until Vatican II that the Catholic Church stopped teaching that Jews killed Christ. In the Old Testament, God tells Jews to destroy all the idolatry as they conquer Canaan, and Canaanites are described as an ungodly enemy. The majority of Jews and Christians disavow such positions. Modern Jews and mainstream Christians (both Protestant and Catholic) emphasize the universal values articulated by the Torah, the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus in the New Testament as values of social justice and the desire to see the image of God in every human being. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg passionately reminds us that hate should have no place in the Christian faith. I would add in any religion that boasts a connection to God.

But hate continues to rear its ugly head. The Washington Post article points out that some of the strident, violent anti-Jewish views expressed by the young man who entered the Chabad actually derived from the theology he absorbed in his evangelical church, one in which his father is an elder. He never learned this hatred of Jews from his parents, who immediately condemned their son’s act. But days before the attack on the synagogue, John Earnest wrote a seven page letter declaring his hatred of Jews, how they deserve to die and that he’d be doing God’s work in killing them. When the Rev. Mika Edmondson, a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (an evangelical denomination that the young man was a member of) read those words, he was “stunned.” “It certainly calls for a good amount of soul-searching,” said Edmondson.  Earnest is a practicing Christian; he has attended church regularly. What most disturbed the pastor was his realization that “in the manifesto, the writer spewed not only invective against Jews and racial minorities but also cogent Christian theology he heard in the pews” (Julie Zauzmer). This “replacement theology” and hate are things he picked up from studying the Bible. Rev. Edmondson suggests the church bears some responsibility, perhaps not just for the young shooter’s beliefs (beliefs that led to action) but also for the recent upsurge of violence aimed at Jews. And so he announced that his church—and probably other churches—need to do a better job.  Bravo.

This is the first time I’ve heard an evangelical pastor recognize that perhaps contemporary evangelical Protestantism has played a role in the upsurge of anti-Semitic violence, not that I’d ever want to put all evangelicals or evangelical churches in the same basket.  But we have seen violence from some white-supremacist Protestants that have combined religion with racism and xenophobia.  It can happen in any religion—we’ve seen it with radical Muslims, we’ve seen it with some extremist Jews in Israel. In all cases, it’s a dangerous fundamentalism that reads the Bible literally, and understands God as now giving directions to his followers to kill idolaters, which they define simply as those who are “other” than them. 

What happened to Jesus’s teaching (which also was the Rabbis’) that the sum of the Bible is “love thy neighbor as thyself?” The same phrase occurs in the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus 19:18. But even that command (if read literally) can be narrowed to mean, love someone who is like you (your neighbor), but not someone who is not. I prefer Leviticus 19:34, “love the stranger as yourself,” which is much harder to turn to evil ends.