Leaving It Up to Chants

What Antisemitic Campus Chants Tell Us About This Angry Era

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 some 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 would do well to listen to the common ring of the Charlottesville chant, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” with the one recorded this week on the Columbia campus: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp!”

An observer might have asked in Charlottesville, “What Jews are trying to replace you?” The white nationalists there would no doubt have told such a person that a shadowy cabal was seeking to import immigrants, to commit “white genocide.” Just so, another observer might ask at Columbia, “What Zionists have entered your camp?” Israeli military forces? No. The “Zionists” in question are Jewish students—one wearing a Star of David—attempting to walk on campus.

At one level, the video of the students 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 point of repeating back, in unison, “Repeat after me.” Does that part really have to be repeated? Well, kind of; that’s part of what happens in a chant. The message is not reasoned discourse. The rote nature of the repetition is the point. It’s also the danger. In a mob, the individual is submerged into a collective—a collective usually reverberating with anger.

Campus protests are an essential 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 good will can, and should, simultaneously hold moral condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism, systemic rapes, and hostage-taking alongside moral concern that the lives of innocents in Gaza are protected from Israeli bombs, starvation, and Hamas itself.
Even speech that I would 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 protect them.

Christians, though, ought to 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 listen to the chants. By this, I don’t just mean that we should listen to the content of the chants, as important as that is. White nationalist mobs and Orbánist intellectuals—on social media or in real life—parroting back talking points straight from Mein Kampf ought to alarm us.

So should masked leftist students shouting the same slogans—“From the river to the sea!”—used to justify not just opposition to Israeli policies but to the very existence of the Jewish state itself. The chants of an angry mob almost always seek a scapegoat—and those scapegoats are almost always religious minorities.

Consider, for instance, the vitriolic rage with which some professing Christians—at city councils and town zoning boards all over the country—treat Muslim Americans.

The talking points are usually taken right from the Know-Nothing rhetoric of a century before: Muslims can’t “assimilate” into American culture; Islam is not a religion 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 first Black commander in chief in our history, was not a “real” American but was a Muslim, as though the two would be contradictory even if true.

Who was hurt in all of this? A lot of Muslim men and women and children—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 sons and daughters who died fighting to protect their country from terrorism.

As unspeakable as the damage to our Muslim neighbors was, they were not the only ones harmed. Everyone was—perhaps none more than those shouting the rage 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 always 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 in the streets of Jackson screaming about the presence of Black children in their schools.

Watching the red-faced rage of a man screaming racist epithets, Clower saw the kind 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 persons, as human beings, and he did not want to become what he saw.

Chants are powerful; that’s why they’re used by human beings seeking to merge together as one. Like everything else, the power is precisely because they were created for good. Listen to a recording of Gregorian chants, for instance, to hear the beauty of a gathering of people whose voices blend together, no longer distinguishable as individuals but as something merged together as a whole.

When I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, I would sneak away to a Cistercian monastery an hour’s drive away to listen to the monks chant the Psalms together. I would calm down, reminded of what it was, as a child, to recite in unison, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” I must have been the only 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 meant to join us together, to create a kind of hive mind in which we lose, for a moment, our sense of individuality, to become part of something together. The resonance of that kind of chanting is meant to take us to those emotions that are best expressed in that sort of “hive”: awe, wonder, worship. They are meant to break us from the preoccupation of the self.

If history has shown us anything, though, it is how dangerous it can be when a collective meant to channel awe becomes instead a channel of a much more uncontrollable emotion—that of anger. In those chants, the individual is lost not in a mass but a mob. The energy that lights up such a gathering is not shared smallness in 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 in the darkest, most violent aspects of our fallen human nature.

The biblical picture of a human being stands in contrast with both individualism and collectivism. We are created to be persons in communion. The apostle Paul used the metaphor of a collective body, with individual members who are distinguishable and unique but who belong to each other (1 Cor. 12:12–27). And the apostle Peter used the metaphor of a building made up of individual, living stones (1 Pet. 2:4–5).

The mob is so dangerous because it taps into an artificial 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 place to hide from one’s own moral accountability: I was just swept away. I was just following orders. The Christian moral vision, though, tells us that the consciences we try to quiet are right: We can sin together—sometimes in a number that no man can number—but we stand at the judgment seat not tribe by tribe or mob by mob but one by one (Rom. 2:9–16).

The fallenness of mobs ought to remind us of what these mobs have fallen from. We are, indeed, created to join our voices in a chant: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people 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 different one from this era’s broad road of isolated persons 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.

The After Party Live

Several of you came out to Washington, DC, last Friday for The After Party Live with David French, Curtis Chang, and our teams. I left that gathering encouraged and enlivened by what God is doing. Polarization and hyper-partisanship do not have to be our future as a country, much less as a church. Getting to hear from several of you about what is afoot in your own ministries charged me up for what’s happening next.

At another event in DC, the highlight was seeing a gathering of women leaders who previously served with me during my presidency at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and who are now serving all over the place. They dubbed themselves—along with those who couldn’t be there—as “the SheRLC,” which made me laugh and reminded me, again, how proud I am of the ERLC alums, what God is doing through them, and what a privilege it was to get to serve for eight amazing years with joyful warriors of that caliber.

Four Moore Years

This week marks the fourth anniversary of this newsletter—and it was an accident.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of my travel, like that of the whole world, was suddenly ended. As my family and I established new rhythms and routines, I realized just how much of a whirlwind the last 15 years of my life had been. Dean-ing and provost-ing. President-ing. Preaching and teaching every week. Bouncing back and forth across the country. Raising five boys. The Trump Years. I didn’t realize until I was forced to rest just how tired I was.

In the midst of all of that, I wanted to not grow out of practice, though, at thinking and teaching, and, more than that, I wanted to stay connected to Christians (and others) out there who cared about the same things I did. My mind only “works,” however, on a deadline—and it can’t be an artificial, self-imposed deadline. If Sundays weren’t once a week, I would delay them until I felt like I’d “perfected” a sermon or a Bible study, which means it wouldn’t ever be delivered. The best way to have that deadline, I decided, was to set a day every week where I would send something out. If I didn’t, I knew there would be at least a few people out there who would ask why.

What was meant to be a temporary lockdown practice, though, became something more for me. As I’ve mentioned here before, it was like sending messages out in a bottle and finding that there was an amazing community out there on the other side, sending bottles of their own back to me. I sometimes wonder if that’s why the Desert Island Bookshelf came to mind.

So, thank you. Thanks for letting me “think out loud” here with you once a week. Thank you for your kind notes and words of encouragement. Thanks for having fun with me, with your playlists and bookshelves, and sometimes prompting me to cry.

When I was describing you—the readers of this newsletter—to a friend the other day, I said, “They are like whatever the opposite of a talk-radio caller is.” What I meant was that, in the brief time I spent doing live talk radio, unless you work hard to get around it, the sort of person who will stop everything and dial into a radio show is often the type of person energized by whatever makes them angry or afraid.

This audience is motivated by something else entirely—more of, as Mr. Berry might put it, a “planting sequoias” mindset. I’m grateful for that.

Four years ago, this was an accident. Now, for me anyway, it’s a blessing.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Christy Staats from Stow, Ohio. Here’s her list:

Out of Many, One by George W. Bush: I work in the immigration advocacy space, so not only is this a nod to our nation of immigrants and work that I am so passionate about but I would be lonely on a desert island and I would want people around me, so portraits of people and beautiful stories of people that make up our country would be a comfort when I can’t have cups of coffee with humans in real life and see art museums with friends.

Walking with God in Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller: Choosing which Keller book was difficult, as I own about a dozen and no one stranger had such an impact on my life and ministry. I still remember him teaching a group of Christian leaders, mostly pastors, in England in 2008, how to teach Christians and non-Christians in the same sermon. It has indelibly affected me forever since. This book arrived in the world when I went through the darkest night of the soul and it was perfectly timed. I read it over and over that year as I tried to remember hope. Desert island life might be wonderful or it might be difficult, but remembering God’s nearness in it all would be something I would want to continue to have refreshed in my soul.
What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey: An incredible book that impacted me as a college student.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling: I love Harry Potter. Gryffindor here. Remembering that hope is not lost even when it gets the darkest and that good wins in the end.

Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright: A good theology of heaven, resurrection, and mission even while stuck alone on an island will be important.

Complete Works by William Shakespeare: Is this cheating? It’s a lot of plays and books and poems but one needs plays and fiction and poems all the time, and more so on desert islands.

The Practical Works of Richard Baxter by Richard Baxter: One of my fav Puritans, from walking with God to rest, I will have a lot of time on my hands and digging into this classic will be good for the soul.

Sermons by C. H. Spurgeon by Charles Spurgeon: My other fav Puritan. Charlie can continue to remind me of the gospel and the goodness of God on my island.

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: This book turned me into a missionary after I read it as a college student. I went to the world and would want to remember to faithfully follow Jesus in all circumstances and also be mindful to continue to pray for the global church and mission even amid my own solitude.

Knowing God by J. I. Packer: A classic to immerse myself in the beauty of God as well as remember my mom who gave me this copy which used to be hers.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson: Yes, if you squint at the picture you’ll see a different Bryson book, but I couldn’t find the one I wanted—lost somewhere in my too-many-bookshelved house—which is filled with delightful, amusing stories of Bryson’s observations of the UK. Having lived in Britain for over a decade, I would need a book to remind me of my dearly loved second country with all of its quirks and joys.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen: I started reading a lot more Catholic teachers the last few years, but none tops my fav list quite like Henri Nouwen—his deep walk with Jesus, ways of teaching through the gospel, and deep spiritual truths. In this one, he helps his secular friend understand the spiritual life is beautiful and refreshing.

Thank you, Christy!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

Quote of the Moment

“This will be a very present consolation, if at any time God does not grant an immediate answer to our prayers, preventing us from fainting or giving way to despondency, as those are wont to do who, in invoking God, are so borne away by their own fervor, that unless he yield on their first opportunity and give present help, they immediately imagine that he is angry and offended with them, and abandoning all hope of success cease from prayer.”

—John Calvin, Of Prayer

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Onward,
Russell Moore