RELIGION PROMOTES WHAT is good in humanity —  mercy, wisdom, charity, justice, compassion. These are fundamental to most religious traditions. But religious institutions and movements consist of humans capable of both good and evil, truth and lies, peaceableness and violence. Most Americans have positive feelings about the role religion plays in American life, according to recent surveys. But more than 75 percent are against religious organizations endorsing political candidates or getting involved in partisan politics.

Religious zeal and political power can be an explosive combination — which is why the First Amendment promotes the separation of these powers. Yet the heart and faith of voters impact their choices in the polling booth — and the emotions and imaginations of voters can be swayed by media, social groups, and targeted manipulation to impact an individual’s vote.

One form of manipulation is through conspiracy theories — and conspiracy theories that manipulate religious and social imaginations are particularly potent. They are not new — recall the early U.S. grassroots movements, such as the Anti-Masonic Party and the Know-Nothings, who fought against perceived threats to Protestant Christian values, as well as the John Birch Society’s modern links to the Christian Identity Organization.

As conspiracy theories, disinformation, and populism become more mainstream, one less-understood conspiracy is having an outsized impact on immigration laws: The “great replacement theory” promotes the idea that nonwhite people are brought into the United States and other Western countries to “replace” white voters as part of a godless, liberal political agenda.

The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, reminded many Americans that the horrors of organized hate were not something in the past. The refrain by white nationalists of “You will not replace us!” recalled virulent antisemitism and anti-immigrant rhetoric of earlier eras. The media repeated the slogan as it tried to make sense of how domestic terrorism, spurred on by online rhetoric regarding the removal of Civil War statues, could have culminated in such social violence and the murder of Heather Heyer by neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. It was a traumatic moment among many in America.

French ideas take root in U.S.

THE TERM “GREAT REPLACEMENT” has its contemporary genesis in a set of racist books by two French authors. Renaud Camus released his treatise Le Grand Remplacement (2011) and drew inspiration from Jean Raspail’s novel Le Camp des Saints (1973). These books were key influences in the Trump administration as well as the 2012 and 2022 French presidential elections.

Renaud Camus, born in rural France in 1946, earned post-graduate degrees in philosophy, political science, and history of law. He began his political activism as a vocal socialist. That is until 1992, when he had an “epiphany” on a trip to an old French village, where he noted a change in the village’s ethnic composition. This led him to believe that white European Catholics were disappearing for the benefit of Middle Eastern, Black, and Muslim populations who would replace them.

In 2002, Camus created his own racialist political party, which ran candidates for the first time during the 2012 French presidential election. His party’s platform advocated “reimmigration” and the end of all new immigration to the country. The reimmigration platform promoted legislation to return all immigrants to their country of origin, thus eliminating nearly all nonwhite people from France. He used his position as party founder to spread hate and generate fear about “replacement” across Europe.

In 2017, Camus co-founded the National Council of European Resistance, a pan-European movement to oppose all immigration to Europe and to defeat what he termed “replacist totalitarianism.” For Camus, the politics of Europe were under the control of a Leftist elite promoting white “genocide by substitution” through the implementation of a “great replacement theory” to create a weak and submissive populace that would easily succumb to this elite’s New World Order (itself a conspiracy theory that fears an emerging totalitarian world government).

Despite his launch into party politics, Camus thought that the 2022 French presidential election would define a point where it could be too late to “save” France through a democratic process. He believed that by then those who had immigrated to the country would have become the “masters” of the elections. In Camus’ mind, there would no longer be a solution through the ballot box. He wrote The Great Replacement to warn about what was to become of Western civilization.

Throughout the book Camus argues that the reduced role of Christianity in society, industrialization, and the loss of national cultures has created a need for immigration if capitalism is to continue and thus maintain the materialistic globalized world. He holds that capitalism and the lack of God in Western society have led to the perfect nexus for whites to be replaced.

Christian apocalypticism

OF COURSE, THIS idea is not entirely new. Camus cites fellow French author Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints as an inspiration. Raspail, born in France in 1925, was an award-winning travel writer turned novelist. His traditionalist Catholicism fueled writing in which ideologies on the Left and Right fail, to be replaced by a Catholic monarchy. The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel on the end of Western civilization, has become one of the defining texts for white nationalist movements.

Raspail too was inspired by a visit to an old French village, where his family had a home. While staring out to the water he thought, what if they come? — not knowing who “they” were. He then spent a year on his dystopian and racist creation. The book initially was released in 1973, but was not well received until 1975, when it was released in English in the United States.

Raspail uses as epigraph and title a line from the Book of Revelation: “And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city” (20:9). His book is a racist tale of immigrants sent on a mission to destroy the Western world, enabled by liberal politicians and liberal religious leaders. The loose plot focuses on a Belgian Catholic priest and aid workers who are promoting the adoption of children from India to Belgium. The priest and an aid worker end up accompanying immigrant children on a ship to the West, their “convoy” to Europe.

Raspail casts religious leaders from various Christian denominations as competing to be the most publicly sympathetic to the plight of immigrants and ensure an easy path for the immigrants’ arrival. The pope in the novel is from Brazil and described as “[t]hat feeble voice of the sick Christian world.” Raspail also spends an inordinate amount of time on the moral and physical destruction of the Catholic priest. The priest, slowly weakened by lack of food and water on the ship, is sexually abused. With each sexual act, the priest’s dedication to his vows is decimated. He dies broken in his faith. Raspail uses this character as a metaphor for the slow perversion of the church; the degradation and eradication of the priest’s faith reflects the persecution-to-destruction of religion in Western society.

Similarly, he depicts as sexually perverse the immigrant children’s parents, who commodify their children by selling them to Western nations for adoption. Reports of the parents’ desperate poverty are described as tools the liberal media uses to create a narrative of sympathy. Raspail has the immigrant convoy take three days to reach the West — over Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. In his words, “On this Easter Sunday evening, eight hundred thousand living beings, and thousands of dead ones, were making their peaceful assault on the Western World.” He portrays these three days as the end of “the white world.”

The novel also takes aim at the role of media in contemporary society, positioning so-called liberal media in a battle against media on the Right. Raspail portrays legacy media as welcoming the destruction of the Western world in the name of compassion and atonement for both past actions and current privileges. The Right’s media, on the other hand, promotes ideas that the “white race” and the nation need to be saved, no matter the costs, whether inhuman or not. Hauntingly, Raspail’s fictive right-wing media argues to return the immigrants to their homelands, sink their ships, destroy their caravans, or “put them all in camps.”

Influence within the Trump administration

THIS TROPE OF “putting them all in camps” has a tragic connection to U.S. immigration policies established under the Trump administration (and largely ended under the Biden administration).

Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and former presidential policy adviser Stephen Miller have stated publicly that The Camp of the Saints was influential in their understanding of immigration policies. So much so that Miller, at the beginning of the Trump administration, turned to Katie McHugh, editor of the far-right news website Breitbart, to publish an article comparing Pope Francis to the pope in the book. Raspail’s fictional pope promoted the idea of the Western world opening its borders to immigrants. The article — Miller suggested the title, “‘Camp of the Saints’ Seen Mirrored in Pope’s Message” — appeared in Breitbart 18 days after his request.

Bannon, too, used the book as a warning. In a 2014 presentation in Vatican City to conservative cardinals, he stated that the Judeo-Christian West was in crisis and argued, much like Camus, that immigration policies destroying the West are due to capitalism, humans as commodities in the global economy, and the secularization of the West. He framed the nationalism battle not only in anti-immigration tropes, but further declared it to be a war against “Islamic fascism.” Bannon often refers to immigration as a “Camp of the Saints-type” invasion, bringing the title of the book and its narrative into the mainstream lexicon. Most media have not made note of this disturbing trend.

During the early months of the Trump administration, Bannon and Miller worked to position U.S. immigration policies within the framework of The Camp of the Saints. The right-wing media echoed their (false) narrative of links to liberal Catholics, the Vatican, and other liberal Christians as supportive of open border policies. American liberal churches were presented as being in support of “immigration lawlessness,” and the liberal, legacy media were accused of promoting open borders and welcoming the caravans at the U.S.-Mexico border, using images of suffering children and women to manipulate the emotions of the nation. While previous U.S. administrations detained migrants, the Trump administration implemented mandatory detention. No previous administration used the separation of families as a deterrence. The Trump administration response to immigration was to “put them all in camps.”

When conspiracy theories combine

THE IMPACT OF the “great replacement theory” on the West is not only through the violent acts witnessed at the Unite the Right Rally, nor the policies of the Trump administration. One of the foundations of that conspiracy theory is that the low birth rate among white populations is a catalyst to white replacement. When Roe v. Wade fell, white nationalists celebrated a victory to save “white America.” Before that, the theory was entwined with COVID-19 conspiracy theories, linking to ideas of the pandemic and vaccines as tools for the “elites” to control the white population.

With the “great replacement” encompassing tropes of racism, anti-immigration, nationalism, and perceptions of Christian persecution, the linked “super conspiracy” itself builds upon the perceptions of injustice, while stoking the patriotism of those who envision their nation under attack.

Within a conspiracy there is distrust in the institutions of society, a belief that the enemy has infiltrated universities, governments, media, and religious institutions. This narrative also provides a rationale for why things are the way they are and why one may not be as successful as anticipated or have no purchase within the “American Dream.” The scapegoats, and those of the nation, become the “other,” a group of people who are working to destroy one’s notions of what the nation is and should be.

Like the culture battles at the turn of the 19th century against the Protestant Social Gospel movement, Christians and churches that support programs and policies that care for the marginalized or asylum seekers are seen as part of the problem. White nationalists present these churches as part of the powerful cabal that wishes to see the destruction of the nation.

In this white nationalist interpretation of the nation, their specific brand of Christianity is not only under attack by this “compromised” version, but true Christianity has been removed from society — aided by the weakness of these social gospel churches and leaving only an immoral state. Sadly, the manifestos of the killers in 2019 mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, and the 2022 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket included such assertions that their white nationalist brand of Christianity has been removed and thus the society destroyed, resulting in the opportunity for the “great replacement” to occur.

With the rise of such threats as the Black-Robed Regiment (a movement of militant pastors, supported by Far Right political activists, advocating that their congregations take up arms in defense of democracy), Patriot Churches (a network of nondenominational congregations that advance an extremist “God and country” philosophy), and the New Apostolic Reformation (a charismatic movement that defends Trump’s presidency as a fulfillment of prophecy), it is critical that religious leaders, academics, and policymakers understand how these social forces work and how to leverage good religion, good legislation, and good social movements in defense of democratic pluralism.

YES, YOU CAN take action against conspiracy theories! Churches are part of the solution.

• Use the power of the pulpit to repudiate false theories like the “great replacement.” Education is far more effective in curbing conspiracies than ignoring them. Engage in conversation and relationship with those who espouse conspiracy theories. Isolation from differing viewpoints leads people further into a bubble of self-validating opinions.
• Promote online safety and media literacy in your community. Provide skilled teachers who can help individuals identify when they are interacting with extremist disinformation or being drawn into racist or other ideologies of hate. Check out the Center for Media Literacy and the U.K.’s Centre for Digital Theology.
• Hold tech and social media companies accountable. Legislative and consumer pressure can enforce policies and terms of service so that internet-based platforms do not harbor hate groups and violent extremists. Follow the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
• Protect youth from extremist disinformation. The Southern Poverty Law Center and American University published “Building Networks and Addressing Harm: A Community Guide to Online Youth Radicalization — Resources for Trusted Adults, Mentors, and Community Leaders.”
• Defend and promote inclusive, truthful education. Many states are pushing laws to restrict inclusive education and age-appropriate teaching about history. Read Walking Away From Hate by Jeanette and Lauren Manning.
  
  —The Editors