Subtheme:
Scandalous Supersessionism: The Hypocrisy of Replacement Theory
Organizer: David G. Pedersen (College of the Ozarks)
When Renaud Camus’s 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement compared France’s modern nonwhite, non-Christian immigrant population to Europe’s militaristic colonial conquests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his xenophobic claims seemed too extreme and not sufficiently substantiated to be taken seriously. In the decade and a half since, these ideas have been adopted by various Western majority populations and applied to whatever minority communities the majority populations despise. These ideas, for example, have galvanized violent white supremacist outbursts in such high-profile tragedies as the vehicular homicide at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA (USA), the 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, NZ, and the 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY (USA). In each case, the perpetrators borrowed language—often direct quotes—from Camus’s writings to support their actions. Perhaps more insidiously, Camus’s ideas are echoed in various policy initiatives that have been passed by populist administrations throughout the developed Western world. Take, for example, the consistent characterization of migrants from Mexico and Central and South America as “invaders” in USA’s Executive Order 14159: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The conspiracy has become policy.
By decontextualizing passages from New Testament epistles about Christ’s rejection, the medieval doctrine of supersessionism mirrors Replacement theory by turning St. Paul’s invitations that gentiles might be “ingrafted” into the blessing of Yahweh (Rom. 11:17) into a racial/political replacement whereby Jews and then Muslims are actively excluded from the social benefits of community with Christian-coded political entities. While this process began as an imagined replacement, it eventually became all too practical in the expulsions of Jews from medieval nations and in the militaristic efforts to perform the role of New Israel in confrontations with Islam.
The purpose of this sub-theme will be to place medieval supersessionism in direct conversation with modern Replacement Theory. I am particularly keen to see proposals that push beyond medieval efforts to conceive of Christian communities as participants in Jewish identity, focusing instead on the ways that medieval Christian communities essentialized their own dynastic, racial, geographical, etc. distinctives as indicative of an exclusive claim to the status of the New Israel.
I hope to invite selected participants from this and other panels over the next two years to submit longer versions of their arguments to an edited volume to be proposed to University of Pennsylvania Press’s RaceB4Race series.
