Why Are We So Silent? Great Replacement Theory And The Church
“The burden brown people carry of never feeling safe.”
I don’t always check the news Sunday mornings before church. This means last Sunday I wasn’t aware of the horrific racist massacre last weekend in a grocery store in Buffalo until after worship.
That it took a while for me to learn about the attack is also sign that I am white pastor in a predominately white church. I have a feeling black pastors would have known.
This is one example of the complicity I recognize in myself, the way my safety and comfort inures me to, as I heard later in the day, “the burden brown people carry of never feeling safe.”
If you notice, the mass murder in Buffalo has fallen out of the news cycle much more quickly than George Floyd or Charleston. I’m not entirely sure why, but I wonder partially if it’s because it was at a grocery store.
It wasn’t in a church. Shootings at a church alarm us and trigger some deep part of our psyche (we are already hearing news of the impact of the massacre on communities of faith in Buffalo as they mourn the dead). And the killer wasn’t a cop, so there wasn’t the energy of lament around perpetual police violence and systemic devaluation of black lives.
No this was just a grocery store. But because it was a grocery, quotidian as our visits to grocery stores are, that it happened there expands even further all the places and spaces where people of color carry the burden. Is no place safe?
The white supremacists have been successful. In fact, I’m afraid they are winning (in the short term). They’ve shifted the national conversation toward their opposition to so-called critical race theory. Those working at anti-racism are now in a defensive pattern fighting battles around a discussion framed by the white supremacists.
The hate spewed that precipitated these racially motivated shootings is the fear of a “great replacement.” This fear has been around a long time in America and the fear runs deep. The philosophy has influenced the highest seats of power. It’s why Steve Bannom was a presidential advisor.
In the absence of a very loud racist in the highest seat of power, perhaps it’s harder to maintain collective energy to speak out to and respond to racism. But on the other hand, as a pastor who lives in Arkansas, I see daily how my two senators and congressman all stoke the fires of xenophobia and racism with their campaign ads and policies. I’ve sat in a room with Steve Womack where he talked about how immigrants “don’t have the same values as us.”
That’s great replacement fear-mongering.
Perhaps in Arkansas the exhaustion for those of us trying to do anti-racism work comes from knowing our elected officals so overtly dog whistle precisely because it’s what their base wants to hear.
Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” writes in a recent article with the New York Times:
We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.
So what are we to do as people of faith, as the church? I think there are a few crucial steps churches can take right now to faithfully resist the rising great replacement fears in our nation.
The first is committing to anti-racism work. Consider this resource from the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Such work is not easy. In fact, it’s complicated, because often even while doing the work those of us who have been catechized in white supremacist systems will still enact white supremacy while thinking we are combatting it. There is as much unlearning as learning. Nevertheless, we are called to do the work. Do hard things, right?
The second is committing to reparations. Our congregation has committed to giving 4% of everything given to the church to African-American reparations. We believe real equity means economic equity to match our ideological commitments. Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk.
The third is to re-center ourselves, again and again, on the freedom of the gospel as proclaimed by Paul, where he says that in Christ Jesus there is no longer Jew nor Greek. In other words, faith in Christ compels us to move beyond racial resentment. To live into Christ now means doing anti-racism work.
In worship tomorrow, I plan to highlight all of this in the sermon. Especially in predominately white churches, we need to talk about the impact racist theories like “great replacement” theory has on our neighbors.
I’m reminded, as I heard again last week after our refugee resettlement board meeting, that one of the most powerful ways to have positive outcomes for youth in immigrant and refugee communities is to establish a real sense of belonging. When people feel they belong, they feel safe, they build community, they are healthier and stronger.
I want my black and brown neighbors to feel safe. I want everyone to have a sense of belonging. And I want to move beyond the message of scarcity, which believes that one group can only belong if it replaces another group, with the actual message of abundance that we have in Christ, that in the good creation God has made, there is room for all, Jew and Greek, immigrant and citizen, white and brown and black.
And that this good creation will especially grow toward new creation in Christ when we can say with joy and love, Black Lives Matter. And then live that way.