The Roundtable: Can We Stop the Crack Up?

Halting the country's accelerating fracture along political, religious, and demographic lines must begin with recognizing our common humanity.

Author:
Roundtable Editor
Publish date:
Jun 6, 2022

The May 14 shooting in Buffalo, New York, took the lives of ten people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The shooter explicitly claimed to be motivated by replacement theory, an ideology that posits that White Americans must act to prevent being demographically “replaced” by other ethnic and cultural groups. The theory, which originated in white supremacist circles, has grown increasingly mainstream in recent years. A group of experts joined Roundtable to discuss the ideology and its implications. In this segment, the panel discusses what conditions have caused replacement theory to take root in the U.S.

Jim Denison notes that conservative Christians have long felt increasingly alienated by the changing cultural norms of the last half-century.

“I know a great number of white Christians who go back to issues, whether it's school, prayer, abortion issue, the sexual revolution, Obergefell in 2015, and they're just seeing this moral trajectory. The culture is very much moving away from what we would understand to be consensual, biblical morality,” he argues.

“Nothing could for a moment justify any of the horrendous evil that we're seeing. Racism is sin. But there really is a growing number of folk in the so-called conservative white Christian world who feel themselves to be marginalized by the trajectory of the culture.”

Sharon Kyle attributes the theory’s rise to the nation’s long legacy of racial discrimination.

“What I think we're seeing here is the legacy of a country that was born out of the taking of the land, the taking of labor, racially cleansing the land from the native Americans, and racially cleansing communities of were freed after slavery,” she says.

“Until we get to the point where we as a nation have a common understanding that we are all created equal, this racial hierarchy will destroy this nation.”

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