{"id":95098,"date":"2022-05-16T21:18:27","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T03:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=95098"},"modified":"2022-05-16T21:57:55","modified_gmt":"2022-05-17T03:57:55","slug":"where-i-stand-on-great-replacement-theory-a-brief-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/05\/where-i-stand-on-great-replacement-theory-a-brief-note.html","title":{"rendered":"Where I stand on “Great Replacement” theory: A brief note"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ABA<\/a>
The American Bar Association erected this monument to the rule of law at Runnymede, in England, where Magna Carta was signed.\u00a0 \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019re gradually approaching the dog days of summer.\u00a0 With that in mind, it\u2019s probably as good an occasion as any to inflame some of my more obsessive critics again, and to give them an opportunity to slander me and to distort what I say.\u00a0 So I think that I\u2019ll take up the notion of \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d theory.\u00a0 If you haven\u2019t heard much about it, here\u2019s an article that will help to orient you:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe roots of the \u2018Great Replacement\u2019 theory that enraged the Buffalo shooter: The manifesto, allegedly written by Payton Gendron, referenced an idea that has percolated as America\u2019s demographics change\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t actually heard very much about \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d theory until the shootings in Buffalo, New York \u2014 I pay no attention at all to Tucker Carlson \u2014 so, when it began being emphasized in news coverage and commentary about the Buffalo incident, I decided to look it up.\u00a0 I really am serious about my commitment to trying to grasp why various worldviews appeal to people.\u00a0 (See my recent blog entry \u201cAn important part of my approach to other faiths and worldviews.\u201d<\/a>)\u00a0 I didn\u2019t spend a lot of time on the topic, and I make no pretense of being a particularly informed amateur on it, let alone an expert, but I thought that I would perhaps try to figure out whether or not there might be at least a kernel of truth in it that appealed to me or seemed reasonable to me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let me state one bottom-line conclusion right up front:\u00a0 I have no sympathy whatsoever for notions that there is some sort of conspiracy to replace us wholesome White folk with supposedly threatening racial or ethnic minorities.\u00a0 (I take no stance here on the specific motivation for certain Democratic stances on border policy.). And, excepting (of course) my most befogged and deranged critics, I expect readers to understand and believe that I condemn in the most absolute possible terms the murders committed by that eighteen-year-old self-described fascist, anti-Semite, and White supremacist in Buffalo, just as I utterly repudiate fascism, anti-Semitism, and White supremacism themselves.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

With that out of the way, though, let me recommence by sharing a seemingly irrelevant anecdote:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many years ago, in response to an invitation from the Sydney area presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>, I made a fairly extended lecture tour of all of the major cities of Australia, not only doing firesides for Latter-day Saints and speaking at various universities but visiting with several Muslim organizations, spending time with a number of politicians (e.g., with city councils, mayors, and state and national legislators), including Kevin Rudd<\/a>, who was then serving as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs but who some time thereafter became Australia\u2019s Prime Minister; leaders of the Uniting Church in Australia; several imams; and a number of professors.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One day, the area president and I and one or two others visited with Taj El-Din Hilaly<\/a>, who was serving, at the time, as the Mufti of Australia.\u00a0 I\u2019m going by (reasonably clear) memory now, but I remember noticing, as we drove up, that the suburban Sydney neighborhood in which Shaykh Taj El-Din\u2019s mosque and headquarters were located seemed entirely Middle Eastern, albeit a bit cleaner than many Middle Eastern towns are.\u00a0 Everything was in Arabic, for example.\u00a0 Everybody spoke Arabic.\u00a0 Things looked<\/em> Arabic.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My impression was strengthened when I realized that, so far as I could tell, the Mufti, who was a native of Egypt but who had lived in Australia for roughly two decades by then, could speak no English.\u00a0 He probably couldn\u2019t read a mainstream Australian newspaper or understand a major Australian radio or television broadcast.\u00a0 And yet he was expected to advise Australian Muslims on how to navigate life Down Under and to issue legal rulings on issues arising from that life.\u00a0 While I was still there, or shortly thereafter, the imam of Georgetown University visited Sydney and, without identifying anybody in particular, criticized Muslim leaders who don\u2019t speak the languages of the countries in which they reside and who yet presume to guide their fellow Muslims in those countries.\u00a0 It was pretty obvious that he had Taj El-Din Hilaly in mind, and everybody knew it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Mufti routinely made inflammatory statements suggesting, for example that the Jews were behind all wars, that rape victims got what they deserved because of their provocative dress, and so and so forth.\u00a0 John Howard, the Australian prime minister at the time, was so provoked at one point that he publicly opined that people shouldn\u2019t be permitted to immigrate to Australia if they didn\u2019t subscribe to \u201cAustralian values.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I remember, sophisticated progressives derided that notion.\u00a0 What, after all, are \u201cAustralian values\u201d?\u00a0 \u00a0Hilarious, they said.\u00a0 And ignorant.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I had no problem at all understanding him, although I admit that it would be difficult to define \u201cAustralian values\u201d with any real degree of rigor or precision.\u00a0 And this, I think is where \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d theory might have unwittingly stumbled upon a germ of truth \u2014 while at almost the same time rendering it toxic or radioactive by bigoted, racist association:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I do really think that there is a discernible if imprecise core of values and attitudes, descending in a rough and difficult line from Magna Carta, that deserves to be cultivated and defended and preserved.\u00a0 It has, though, nothing whatsoever to do with \u201cWhiteness.\u201d\u00a0 It is a complex of beliefs affirming liberty and representative government and the rule of law and, yes, voluntary exchanges (economic and otherwise).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although it has nothing intrinsically to do with \u201cWhiteness\u201d or ethnicity or genetics or even with Christianity \u2014 some of my heroes in this regard are Black (e.g., Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams), some are Jewish (e.g., the great Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, with whom I once had the opportunity to spend some time in Scotland), and some of whom (e.g., the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. and, at least once upon a time, prior to the 2016 presidential election, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) come from such formerly despised immigrant groups as Italians, the Irish, and Hispanics \u2014 the core social-political values to which I refer are, broadly but in my opinion pretty definitively, associated with the \u201cEnglish tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would almost be tempted to speak of a more general \u201cAnglo-Germanic tradition,\u201d thinking of such manifestations on the geographical margins of the Germanic cultural region as the Icelandic Althing<\/a><\/em> (the Al\u00feingi<\/em>) and the open-air Landsgemeinde<\/em> that originated in medieval Switzerland but that was still a feature of some cantons while I was serving my mission there in the first half of the 1970s.\u00a0 I say that I would \u201calmost\u201d be tempted because some major problems like Prussia, Bismarck, Metternich, the Kaisers, and the Third Reich, located right in the middle of Germanic Europe, prevent me from doing so.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not only in Germany and Austria that dictatorship and oppressively autocratic governments still feature, although fading more and more with every passing year, in living memory:\u00a0 \u00a0Democracy, the rule of law, and representative government have taken firm root in such places as Italy, Russia, China (that is, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where they are currently imperiled), Spain, Japan, Korea, and much if not all of Latin America only relatively recently and, very often, under the influence of the Anglo-American tradition.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s mere coincidence or to be casually dismissed that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States have created and maintained flourishing, stable, representative democracies with very good \u2014 though certainly not flawless \u2014 records of the rule of law and respect for human rights.\u00a0 And I think that they have had salutary influence in such places as India, South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, please don\u2019t accuse me \u2014 I know that this request will be wasted on certain implacably zealous critics, but I make it anyway \u2014 of overlooking such enormous blemishes on those records as slavery, colonialism and imperialism, the denial of votes to women, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and (although it\u2019s mostly an Afrikaner thing) apartheid.\u00a0 I\u2019m not.\u00a0 But I love the line attributed to Martin Luther King about how \u201cthe arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice\u201d \u2014 and I think that that moral arc has been at least somewhat shorter under what, broadly speaking, I understand to be the English tradition.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want that precious legacy devalued.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want it to be rejected.\u00a0 It\u2019s not to be casually dismissed.\u00a0 And, yes, I do want emigrants from Asia, from Latin America, from the Islamic world, and from other places around the globe to share in our commitment to it.\u00a0 To share in \u201cAustralian values,\u201d if you will.\u00a0 And to that extent, if any, there may be just the slightest<\/em> kernel of value to what passes for Great Replacement theory.\u00a0 But the term has been so poisoned \u2014 and not merely by that young monster in Buffalo \u2014 that it probably ought to be altogether avoided if only for that reason alone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 We\u2019re gradually approaching the dog days of summer.\u00a0 With that in mind, it\u2019s probably as good an occasion as any to inflame some of my more obsessive critics again, and to give them an opportunity to slander me and to distort what I say.\u00a0 So I think that I\u2019ll take up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere I stand on "Great Replacement" theory: A brief note<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    ***   We're gradually approaching the dog days of summer.\u00a0 With that in mind, it's probably as good an occasion as any to inflame some\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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