Prominent Evangelical Leader Condemns Tucker Carlson Pushing ‘Replacement Theory’: ‘Poisonous’ to the Church
Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Day, tore in former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday over his long-term promotion of “replacement theory,” which is the idea that elites in the U.S. are diluting the political power of White Americans by encouraging non-Whites in other countries to immigrate to the country.
Moore published an op-ed in the magazine, known as “evangelicalism’s flagship” publication, titled, “On Tucker Carlson and the Fear of Being Replaced.”
“Christians who seek the wrong kingdom will dread the wrong apocalypse,” Moore’s subtitle read. After a brief introduction noting Carlson’s outsized influence on the American right over the past many years, Moore turned to the fired Fox host’s legacy.
Moore, a theologian and preacher, wrote that Carlson’s “legacy ought to tell us just how much the church has secularized. Nowhere is this clearer than in the kind of replacement theory embraced by so many Christians.”
The conspiracy theory, which has been linked to mass shootings like in Buffalo and El Paso, “states that nonwhite individuals are being brought into the United States and other Western countries to ‘replace’ white voters to achieve a political agenda,” according to NPR. The theory is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes.
Moore offered some background on the theory and writes it originated “on the white nationalist fringes” and “holds that ‘globalist’ elites are seeking to replace white Americans with Black and brown immigrants from around the world.” He then goes on to cite the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as a prominent example of the theory manifesting itself in modern culture. Moore then pointed to “the alt-right crowd chanting, ‘You will not replace us; Jews will not replace us.’”
Moore continued by noting that “this view was made mainstream by Carlson” and that the Fox News host made no effort to subtly dog whistle to it as many on the far right do. Carlson would “explicitly articulate it, even arguing that immigrants were making the country ‘dirtier,’” he argued.
After a few paragraphs looking at the rise of secularism among Americans – “the ‘replacement’ of conservative Christians by their own liberal and secular children and grandchildren” – Moore ripped into nativist identity politics, which were long at the heart of Carlson’s Fox News program.
“Every blood-and-soil form of fear-based identity politics thrives on defining us in terms of visceral categories like race, tribe, or nationality. This assumes a blatantly social Darwinian view of what human communities are or can be,” Moore explained, adding:
The problem for Christians is that the gospel contradicts this ideology at its very root.
If “Christianity” for you is white and American, then it is not only out of step with the Bible; it is also precisely the kind of religion that almost every chapter of the New Testament explicitly repudiates as carnal and pagan.
Moore then quoted Biblical verses to make his point, writing, “If Jesus is right that our ultimate belonging comes not by our flesh but through the Spirit (John 3:3–8), then none of us can consider our present or potential future siblings in Christ scary or ‘unclean.’”
He concluded with a final section under the title, “Jesus Loves Tucker Carlson,” in which he offers Carlson some kind words of compassion and empathy over his firing, but first, he concluded:
Cable television hosts come and go, but there will always be people who try to make us find our identity in the wrong places and our enemies in the wrong people. They want us to be afraid so we will look for someone or something to fight for us. The great replacement theory is bad for democracy, but it is even more poisonous to the church.
