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.

When we see one incident after another of people driven by hate, racism and religious extremism killing other people just because they are of a different religion, Spinoza comes to mind. It not just race but religious fundamentalisms/extremism that drives this violence. And I believe our president does nothing to help it when he uses such rhetorics to rile up his "base." 

 On Saturday April 27, 2019, six months to the day after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, came the shooting at Poway’s Chabad synagogue, by a 19-year old angry teenager (his early photos make him look like such a nice boy, which is frightening, since is shows you can't always pick out a hater from a picture). This seemlingly nice young man who calls Jews "squalid and parasitic", as if they are filthy, sucking the life from a host and one of the more vile anti-semitic tropes, goes into the synagogue with a big assault rifle on the last day of Passover, when Jews say Yitzkor (the memorial service for those who have died, including those slain in the Holocaust, and throughout history). He kills a beautiful woman who was just starting to say the mourner’s kaddish, which now others must say for her. He shoots others, including Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who had one index finger shot off, the other badly injured. The only reason the carnage wasn't worse was because of two heroic congregants who rushed the shooter and of the brave rabbi who continued to speak to keep people calm during all the chaos. Fortunatley, the the gun also malfunctioned, an act of God, the rabbi later said.

  What kind of world are we living in?  And where is God? I find it so hard to have faith at times like these. But as Rabbi Isaac Neumann (of Blessed Memory), who had been in Auschwitz as a young teenager, told me when I lived in Illinois, there is no good alternative if one is going to continue living. It is the narrow bridge we walk on.

You might wonder what relevance Spinoza, who lived in the seventeenth century, has to do with what is happening now in our world, including the attack in Poway. Well, a lot. “I have often wondered,” Spinoza wrote, “that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance and honest dealing with all men, should . . . display the bitterest hatred.”  Not just the Christian religion, I would add, but other ones too.

I teach Spinoza in an Enlightenment course to Barnard English majors, in which I have chosen to focus on tolerance and intolerance. I asked to teach the “Enlightenment Colloquium” because I wanted to read Spinoza, one of the earliest Enlightenment thinkers and a proponent of toleration.  Spinoza’s Ethics are taught in philosophy courses, but I didn’t know anyone teaching his Theological-Political Treatise. I was curious about what he had to say about religion and politics, figuring he might have something to say to us in the here and now. I knew he was considered a heretic, but didn’t know why.

Benedick (Baruch) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, to Portuguese-Jewish parents who were able to openly practice Judaism in Amsterdam, which welcomed Jewsd and was uniquely tolerant of religious differences at the time.  Spinoza, as a brilliant young man, had been given a traditional Jewish education, but by his early twenties had doubts about religion and the Bible. In 1656, at just age 24, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Rabbis in Amsterdam in the most severe manner and an excommunication that has never been withdrawn.  Jews were to have no contact with him. We have no record of what his unforgiveable “heresies“ were, but we can guess from his Theological-Political Treatise, which he published fourteen years later in 1670. It was banned by the Dutch Republic in 1674. It was also published in England.  In his lifetime, Spinoza was accused by Jews of being Christian, and by Christians of being an Atheist. 

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise denied the existence of miracles, arguing that the Bible is an imperfect (that is, human) document that we need to approach with reason.  All of that would have been anathema both to the traditional Jewish community and to the Christian Dutch Calvinist republic. Both Protestants and Jews thought of their respective Bibles as the word of God, which Spinoza questioned. He especially attacked a literal, fundamentalist approach to the Bible. But I think two things bothered people then that are especially relevant to issues we still face today, perhaps more than ever, since the end of World War II.

 First, he denied that there is such a thing as a chosen nation or a chosen people in chapter 3 (on “The Vocation of the Hebrews”). Starting with the assumption that “Everyone’s true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of good, not in priding himself that he alone is enjoying that good to the exclusion of others,” Spinoza asserted that the Bible shows “The Hebrew nation was chosen by God before all others by reason of its social organization and the good fortune whereby it achieved supremacy and retained it for so many years.”  In redefining chosenness, he defied the idea of exceptionalism. For Spinoza continued, “In other respects they were no different from other nations, and God was equally gracious to al.” In other words. a God whose love and blessings are potentially unlimited.

It wasn’t just the Jewish establishment that was offended (most modern Jews have abandoned, or redefined and spiritualized the idea of being a “chosen people”). So was the Dutch Republic, which imagined itself as God’s elect nation, and invoked comparisons with Biblical Israel.  England too tended to think of itself as God’s chosen nation. The early settlers of America brought this idea with them as well and it has been enshrined in American exceptionalism, the idea that America is “a light to the nations.”

So Spinoza insisted that God gives blessings to all nations, and that any special distinction is limited to a specific time, and only meant in a specific (not universal) sense.  So much for any people claiming that only they enjoy love and privileges from God.

Spinoza feared that the idea of an exclusive chosenness leads to competition, hatred and war. What if God’s teaching was reduced to the core? Examining the entire Bible (a Jew reading the New Testament was itself heretical), using his reason to get to faith, Spinoza concluded that the core of both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is justice and charity. If all people lived by justice and charity (loving others as one loves oneself; doing to others as you would like done to you)—then they would be obeying God, and God would be happy.  So would humanity, as living in this way would get rid of hatred and violence, so much of which has been done in the name of religion over the long course of history.  

Of course, there are problems in Spinoza’s political thinking, including his idea that religious difference is the problem. Do we really want everyone to be the same? Do we really want to get rid of religion, ban it as the Soviet Union did? That didn’t work.  Spinoza didn’t have all the answers, but his call almost 350 years ago for justice and charity--the message of the Hebrew prophets as well as Jesus—could not be more timely.

In our twenty-first century world, injustice and intolerance (enabled by the words and actions of political leaders) are rampant, tied to the rising ethno-nationalism and religious extremism that are currently intertwined throughout America, Europe, the Middle East, India and elsewhere. In this pandemic, Spinoza’s words feel like a healing balm to me, even though he offered no solution to the problem: how can we both embrace our particular identities and feel part of an inclusive humanity when there are dangerous people who will never play the game of life by these rules?