You Are Not Being Replaced
Whoever they are, they can't replace you - no one can. (Unlocked for Free Subscribers - because I am on vacation. See you guys next week)
(This was a paid post that I am unlocking for free subscribers because I am awesome and also because I am on vacation.)
Links -
This is an excellent look at the role humiliation and lack of status have played in the lives of young men who have turned violent - mass shooters and serial killers alike.
Here is a brief primer and what is called Replacement Theory.
A View -
Very probably, a future topic of The Embassy will be the world of NFT’s (and the metaverse or Web3 …). We aren’t talking about NFT’s today, but I want to start with a definition. NFT is an acronym for Non-Fungible Token. So that helps, right? Fungible is not a word we use a lot, but it means, roughly, “exchangeable” or “replaceable”.
Fungible: able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable.
A $20 bill is fungible. They have a number on them only to make sure they are authentic - but you don’t care which one you have. One $20 bill is the same as any other - they all spend the same way.
Because of how we can form teams on social media, or how we are divided into demographic groups - politics, culture, age, class, geography - we can begin to think that people are fungible. Or, at least we begin to think that people within these groups are fungible - one white suburban married man with a certain political lean and within a certain income category is treated the same by the talking heads and the marketing algorithms as any other. And by the culture wars. But people are not fungible. We can start to think of them that way, but they aren’t. We are unique bearers of the image of God. None of us can be replaced. We might occasionally become confused on this point, but it isn’t a thing that can happen. Each of us has a unique identity and a common value in a shared story. We don’t have a proper view of our identity and value (or our neighbor’s) outside of this redemptive, eternal story we are in.
Each of us has a unique identity and a common value in a shared story.
But we can forget and join a team - my team good, your team bad. Taken to the logical extreme, your team is evil - your team is an existential threat to my team and to me. It is a deformed story where good is us and bad is them. And since, in this deformed story, your team is an existential threat to the good people (my team), I am justified in any words or actions against you. You are replacing me. In the real story, there aren’t teams, not really. There are differences across groups but these differences do not pose a threat. In the real story, in my faith tradition, we have a broken, fallen image-bearingness and a shared need of redemption while living out a life with a possibility of love and beauty and meaning. This is why I started The Embassy talking about the story we are in and who we are in that story. Losing track of that - forgetting or not knowing who we are or what story we are in - leads to all sorts of pain, inflicted and experienced
All of this is in the context of the shooter in Texas. Or the one in Buffalo. And the one in St. Petersburg on the same day. And the one in Orlando, and Christchurch, and Charleston, and El Paso, and Pittsburgh, and … The shooters in these various locations all have a different manifesto, but the same manifesto. Apparently (I didn’t read it) a large section of the ‘manifesto’ of the Buffalo shooter was copied and pasted from earlier manifestos. They are grandiose, explaining the lack of what should be their true status in terms of other, more outwardly successful people who have somehow cheated them of their rightful place and honor - who, they think, are replacing them. They are racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic … all of the ‘theys’ which, in the minds of all the shooters, threaten their existence. All of which must be defeated, destroyed, eliminated. The forever culture war of us against them taken to its logical, violent, and final conclusion. This betrays who we really are. It is tragically and pathologically wrong about who they are. And it completely misunderstands the story we are all in together. Nobody is being replaced. Nobody can be. We are all irreplaceable. All of us are bound together as unique image bearers in this big story. All of the shooters and all of the victims and all of us watching helplessly. The shooters should face justice, but this justice should be humane, human - so as not to betray our true selves or deface theirs.
The mass shooter is a fairly recent phenomenon. But his sentiment, his way of seeing and being in the world, isn’t recent. There is an inflection point in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus ‘sets his face’ toward Jerusalem one last time, where he will die on the cross to activate this part of the redemptive phase of this story we are in together. On the way, he and his disciples passed through Samaria and ran into opposition.
As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them. Then he and his disciples went to another village. (Luke 9:51-56)
Do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them? You do, don’t you? Don’t you? No. He doesn’t. In the understanding of my faith, he wants to die on a cross for them to open the path to their redemption. They were not merely a group that opposed them. They were fallen image bearers in need of redemption. As we all are. The most scandalous thing I will write in this piece is that the Texas shooter and the Buffalo shooter and all the others aren’t in a different category on this score, they are fallen image bearers in need of redemption.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a dissident in the old Soviet Union who chronicled his years in the harsh and dreary prison system there. He experienced dark cruelty and unexpected grace - sometimes from the same people.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
The line separating good and evil runs right through every human heart. And there is always at least one small bridgehead of good or an unuprooted corner of evil. This is one of the ways in which we are neighbors, as Jesus taught one day on that final journey to Jerusalem. After an expert in the Mosaic law correctly identified his chief duties - love God with all we are and have - and love our neighbor as ourselves - he asks a question.
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)
I can love my neighbor if my neighbor is in my in-group (I can’t really do that as well as I would hope, but that is an article for another day). But if I can define “my neighbor” narrowly enough, I can at least stand a chance of loving them - or not hating them.
Jesus answers by way of the parable of the Good Samaritan, where a member of the hated out-group, a ‘they’ upon whom his disciples wanted to call down fire, provides the example of a love that is selfless and sacrificial. It is the Samaritan who shows what it means to love our neighbor - and Jesus’ narrative choice surely wasn’t accidental. The Samaritans are my neighbor, a potential exemplar of heavenly love, not people for whom fire must be called down upon. All the ‘theys’ are my neighbor. All the out-groups and all the people in all the out-groups are my neighbor. And your neighbor. And, horrifically, all the shooters are my neighbor. You can find various people speculating on whether the redemptive turns toward grace of Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer before their deaths were real. I don’t know. But I think it possible, I believe they were not beyond the reach of redemptive grace. Some of the online speculation has trouble with this idea. I understand. It is scandalous in the truest sense of the word. It might make us angry, but it is the way God deals with all of us who don’t deserve redemption, which is all of us.
Much can and should be said about this shooter and just about all the others. Just one thing that can be said is they didn’t seem to have good neighbors. They seem to have withdrawn into a false little world of us and them, a world of hate and fear and power. Some have wondered if any of these shooters (young, disconnected and disaffected white men almost exclusively) would have gone down that particular path if they had a girlfriend. That may sound like pure mockery, but there may be something there. A real relationship or set of relationships with real connections, real affections, real responsibilities seems likely to have altered their course. I am not blaming their physical neighbors, of course. I am simply saying we were made to have them and to be them, and if we don’t have any of that in our life, we may drift into a dark place.
An African proverb says, “the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” If the game rejects you, you can return in dominance as a vengeful god, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility. Will Storr, The Status Game: Male, Grandiose, Humiliated
They are all our neighbor - some have harmed us, some have done bad things, some hate us, some want (we think) to replace us. Should we call down fire?
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
We are not being replaced. In my faith tradition, that isn’t a possibility or category. Instead, in this redemptive story we are in, as a result of that resolute journey to Jerusalem, our evil can be exchanged. The evil in our hearts, which we can’t get rid of ourselves, can be exchanged with the gift of righteousness by God’s grace. We don’t become completely righteous in thought or word or deed (of course), but our account gets credited with His righteousness. And our evil can be given in the same exchange to be punished on a cross outside of Jerusalem. We don’t have to fear the other is replacing us. We don’t have to hate the other in order to show our virtue or to show our disapproval of them or their actions - justice will come in due time. In the meantime, we can pray for and serve the victims, work toward a more just world, and offer the same grace we have been given to those who don’t deserve it. Because neither did we and that is what grace is. And we can work to be better neighbors.
A Take -
I don’t honestly know what to make of the fact that I was in the beginning stages of trying to figure out how to write something about a mass shooting in Buffalo when there was an even larger scale mass shooting in a school in Texas. The Texas shooter does not appear to be an alienated, disaffected, isolated, directionless, young white male. But the alienated, disaffected, isolated, directionless, and young seem to apply. I don’t really know what to add to this, other than we need each other - and whatever solutions there are are not easy and must involve a deeper community for all.
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