As Columbia University and other elite campuses erupt into protests against the United States’ diplomatic and military support of Israel’s war against Hamas, US Sen. John Fetterman denounced the antisemitic speech of a few of these protesters, remarking on the social platform X, “Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students.”
Whatever one thinks of Fetterman’s analogy or of the Israel-Hamas war, we might do well to take heed to the common ring of the Charlottesville chant, “You won’t replace us! Jews won’t replace us!” with the one recorded this week on the Columbia campus: “We have Zionists who’ve entered the camp!”
An observer might need asked in Charlottesville, “What Jews try to interchange you?” The white nationalists there would little doubt have told such a person who a shadowy cabal was in search of to import immigrants, to commit “white genocide.” Just so, one other observer might ask at Columbia, “What Zionists have entered your camp?” Israeli military forces? No. The “Zionists” in query are Jewish students—one wearing a Star of David—attempting to walk on campus.
At one level, the video of the scholars chanting seems almost farcical, like a parody out of an old episode of Portlandia. The leader yells out a sentence; the followers repeat it back—even to the purpose of repeating back, in unison, “Repeat after me.” Does that part really must be repeated? Well, sort of; that’s a part of what happens in a chant. The message will not be reasoned discourse. The rote nature of the repetition is the purpose. It’s also the danger. In a mob, the person is submerged right into a collective—a collective often reverberating with anger.
Campus protests are a vital a part of a society that prizes free speech. Students have every right to make known their opinions that they disapprove of Israeli political or military policies in Gaza. Citizens of fine will can, and may, concurrently hold moral condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism, systemic rapes, and hostage-taking alongside moral concern that the lives of innocents in Gaza are shielded from Israeli bombs, starvation, and Hamas itself.
Even speech that I’d find morally repugnant—the “whataboutism” that waves away the atrocities of Hamas and Iran and their terrorist collaborators—is, in a liberal democracy, free to be expressed. And, when others are threatened or harmed, a university has a responsibility to guard them.
Christians, though, should be especially attentive to what’s happening to a society that increasingly seems, on the horseshoe extremes of the populist right and the activist left, to be driven toward the pull of the channeled rage of the mob.
That’s why we must take heed to the chants. By this, I don’t just mean that we should always take heed to the content of the chants, as necessary as that’s. White nationalist mobs and Orbánist intellectuals—on social media or in real life—parroting back talking points straight from Mein Kampf should alarm us.
So should masked leftist students shouting the identical slogans—“From the river to the ocean!”—used to justify not only opposition to Israeli policies but to the very existence of the Jewish state itself. The chants of an offended mob almost at all times seek a scapegoat—and people scapegoats are almost at all times religious minorities.
Consider, as an example, the vitriolic rage with which some professing Christians—at city councils and city zoning boards everywhere in the country—treat Muslim Americans.
The talking points are often taken right from the Know-Nothing rhetoric of a century before: Muslims can’t “assimilate” into American culture; Islam will not be a faith but a ruse to dominate and impose sharia law. Many such mobs—online and in real life—wove and disseminated bizarre conspiracy theories that the then-president of the United States, the primary Black commander in chief in our history, was not a “real” American but was a Muslim, as if the 2 can be contradictory even when true.
Who was hurt in all of this? A whole lot of Muslim men and girls and kids—including people so patriotic that they fought proudly for this country, and families so patriotic that they received American flags from the graves of their little children who died fighting to guard their country from terrorism.
As unspeakable because the damage to our Muslim neighbors was, they weren’t the one ones harmed. Everyone was—perhaps none greater than those shouting the trend themselves.
My fellow Mississippi Baptist, the late comedian Jerry Clower, would often say that what convinced him of the moral bankruptcy of the Jim Crow segregationist regime he had at all times known was not the arguments of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fannie Lou Hamer or other civil rights leaders. Instead, what convinced him was watching a crowd of other white Mississippians within the streets of Jackson screaming in regards to the presence of Black children of their schools.
Watching the red-faced rage of a person screaming racist epithets, Clower saw the sort of self-consuming wrath about which his Bible had warned him. The spell was broken. Just for a moment, he saw the crowds not as a mass of white Mississippians but as individual individuals, as human beings, and he didn’t wish to develop into what he saw.
Chants are powerful; that’s why they’re utilized by human beings in search of to merge together as one. Like all the things else, the ability is precisely because they were created for good. Listen to a recording of Gregorian chants, as an example, to listen to the fantastic thing about a gathering of individuals whose voices mix together, not distinguishable as individuals but as something merged together as an entire.
When I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, I’d sneak away to a Cistercian monastery an hour’s drive away to take heed to the monks chant the Psalms together. I’d calm down, reminded of what it was, as a baby, to recite in unison, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a lightweight unto my path.” I will need to have been the one visitor to Thomas Merton’s monastery there to relive Southern Baptist Vacation Bible School.
Chants—of whatever kind—resonate deeply with human nature because they are supposed to join us together, to create a sort of hive mind wherein we lose, for a moment, our sense of individuality, to develop into a part of something together. The resonance of that sort of chanting is supposed to take us to those emotions which can be best expressed in that form of “hive”: awe, wonder, worship. They are supposed to break us from the preoccupation of the self.
If history has shown us anything, though, it’s how dangerous it will possibly be when a collective meant to channel awe becomes as an alternative a channel of a way more uncontrollable emotion—that of anger. In those chants, the person is lost not in a mass but a mob. The energy that lights up such a gathering will not be shared smallness within the face of something or Someone greater but what the Bible calls the “works of the flesh,” the drive to idolize the tribe by delighting within the darkest, most violent features of our fallen human nature.
The biblical picture of a human being stands in contrast with each individualism and collectivism. We are created to be individuals in communion. The apostle Paul used the metaphor of a collective body, with individual members who’re distinguishable and unique but who belong to one another (1 Cor. 12:12–27). And the apostle Peter used the metaphor of a constructing made up of individual, living stones (1 Pet. 2:4–5).
The mob is so dangerous since it taps into a synthetic feeling of communion. But unlike the body of Christ, where the energizing principle is the mind of Christ, the mob is fueled by the frenzy of the limbic system. A mob is a spot to cover from one’s own moral accountability: I used to be just swept away. I used to be just following orders. The Christian moral vision, though, tells us that the consciences we attempt to quiet are right: We can sin together—sometimes in a number that no man can number—but we stand on the judgment seat not tribe by tribe or mob by mob but one after the other (Rom. 2:9–16).
The fallenness of mobs should remind us of what these mobs have fallen from. We are, indeed, created to affix our voices in a chant: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, since you were slain, and together with your blood you bought for God individuals from every tribe and language and folks and nation” (Rev. 5:9). That song is to the Jew who, thanks be to God, re-placed us. And the narrow path to where that song is sung is a unique one from this era’s broad road of isolated individuals and energized crowds.
To sing, we must say no to the slogans. To find love, we must say no to hate. To find community, we must say no to the mob.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
