American Christians should embrace their heritage, reject obligate unchecked mass immigration (even when couched with words like “diversity” and “multi-culturalism”), hold biblically informed positions on immigrants and political theology, and work diligently to reach the nations with the gospel of Jesus. None of these things are in contradistinction to one another. And part of this reinstatement of American Protestant courage may be reading ‘The Camp of the Saints’.

I was a young seminary student, entering my second year of studies in 2002. That fall, I was enrolled in an ethics class taught by one of my favorite professors, Dr. Harold O. J. Brown. I was particularly excited about that class with Dr. Brown. Since Dr. Brown had helped found the evangelical pro-life movement[1] and (to this day) is one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met, I knew that a course on ethics would be one of his best classes. Before the class started, I purchased all the books on the syllabus, including The Camp of the Saints.[2] I was unfamiliar with the book, and we didn’t (to my recall) discuss it in class. At that time, I didn’t know three things. First, I didn’t know that Jean Raspail’s novel would become one of the most contentious books in the immigration debates starting in the late 2010s. Second, I didn’t know that Dr. Brown had long considered the value of that book in understanding global shifts in immigration. Two years earlier, on the topic of globalization and the family, Dr. Brown wrote, “When I think of globalization, I think of something more like Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, in which the building pressure of the impoverished millions of East Asia and the cowardly indecisiveness of the rich nations of Europe lead not to universal prosperity but to worldwide misery.”[3] Third, I didn’t know why Dr. Brown assigned a book to seminary students that wasn’t discussed directly in class. Why would he do that? 

Dr. Harold O.J. Brown (1933–2007)

We can’t answer that question without first discussing who the man—Dr. Harold O.J.

Brown—was. Dr. Brown earned four degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School: an A.B., a B.D., a Th.M., and a Ph.D. in Reformation ecclesiology, in addition to serving as a Harvard teaching fellow (1961–1965) and as an oarsman on a championship-winning Harvard crew.[4] He wasn’t just a scholar; he was also a minister, ordained in the Congregational Church and the Evangelical-Reformed Church in Switzerland. However, his work did not end as a pastor-theologian.

He was also an author and organizer of Christian political action. Dr. Brown’s most popular books were Heresies and The Sensate Culture. He wrote for and edited numerous journals and magazines, including Christianity Today[5] and the Religion and Society Report[6], and Chronicles. A lifelong advocate for the unborn and opponent of abortion, Brown also co-founded the Christian Action Council (what would become Care Net) in 1975 along with Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop.[7] For the purposes of this essay, Dr. Brown’s bona fides show that he was an incredibly gifted scholar, pastor, Reformed theologian, professor, and Christian activist, undeniably committed to the sanctity of life and the protection of the dignity of all people.

The Sensate Culture

Because my first exposure to Raspail’s controversial work was through my academic relationship with Dr. Brown, it would be helpful to place Raspail’s major theme—unrestricted mass immigration—in Dr. Brown’s own thinking on that topic. We see this most clearly in Dr. Brown’s book, The Sensate Culture. Brown believed that “American immigration policies after World War II brought in an influx of Asians and Middle Easterners, adherents of non-Western religions. Instead of seeking their harmonious integration into Western culture—something that most of them want—America at the end of the twentieth century is self-critical, ashamed of its history, and at the ready to welcome a kind of cultural pandemonium under the slogans ‘pluralism’ and ‘multiculturalism.’”[8] Brown’s concern was distinctively for the preservation of Christianity; he saw mass immigration as a dire challenge to the Western church. In that book, Brown is explicitly drawing on the work of Pitirim Sorokin, who summarized civilizational growth and decline in three progressive stages: ideational, idealistic, and sensate.[9]

These three concepts describe, in Brown and Sorokin’s thinking, a “supersystem” of phases through which civilizations pass. They intend to describe how a society balances the twin social desires of pursuing high principles and indulging in the attractions and pleasures of the sensual world. In the ideational phase, a civilization actively rejects sensual pleasures and short-term goals to preserve communal high principles through societal self-control. In phase two, the idealistic phase, the civilization still values spiritual truth and civic values most, but also begins to grow in its appreciation of, and indulgence in, the pleasures of the sensory and material world. The last phase, the sensate phase, marks an abandonment of spiritual or national values and principles in favor of the open and self-indulgent pursuit of sensual and material pleasures.[10] Brown agreed with Sorokin, believing America was in the final stage, the sensate stage.

Brown also shared Sorokin’s belief that there was still hope if action was taken, which was a major reason Brown wrote The Sensate Culture. And far from desiring to save Western culture (and Christianity) at the expense of the rest of the world, Brown saw that preserving Western Christianity was the best way for the rest of the world to benefit. The alternative, Brown warned, was that “instead of the benefits of science, industry, education, and wealth being expanded to spread around the globe, the starvation, sickness, and ignorance of the poorest nations overflow the world.”[11] Taken in this light, we can see how The Camp of the Saints would be a novelistic and dystopian version of what Brown hoped would not happen. But also, Dr. Brown was explicitly working for the Christian good of the world rather than denigrating one culture over another for ulterior social or political reasons.

The Camp of the Saints Synopsis

As for the plot of the novel itself, the story opens on Easter Sunday evening,[12] as a retired professor of literature watches a decrepit fleet of roughly a hundred ships ground itself on the southern French coast. Aboard those ships are some 800,000 survivors of a winding voyage from the Ganges. The novel’s first death is not a migrant’s doing: a young French radical climbs to the professor’s house to announce the old world’s end along with the certain destruction of the professor’s villa (and civilization) just before the professor shoots him. The rest of the story unfolds in flashback. The fleet forms in Calcutta and is refused entry by nation after nation, including those (notably) of the Third World, before turning toward Europe. France, meanwhile, is conquered by words and its own “cowardly indecisiveness.”[13] Journalists, politicians, and apostate clergy compete to moralize surrender, while the few voices bold enough to speak out are shouted down. In the climactic scene, the president cannot bring himself to order the army to fire and tells the soldiers to follow their consciences, and the army dissolves. A remnant of twenty— nineteen Frenchmen and one Indian—makes a last stand at a hilltop village, until the new regime annihilates it by airstrike. Revelation 20:9, the source of the novel’s title, is enacted with no fire from heaven.[14]

The Strange Publication History

Despite how critics view him now, Raspail was known for most of his career as an accomplished and decorated novelist, explorer, travel writer, and author of some forty books. He was honored by the French literary establishment repeatedly, receiving prestigious awards after the first publication of The Camp of the Saints, including the Académie française awarding him its Grand prix du roman in 1981 for Moi, Antoine de Tounens, roi de Patagonie and its Grand prix de littérature for his life’s work in 2003,[15] the same year France made him an Officer of the Legion of Honor.[16]

The Camp of the Saints itself received serious engagement from its first appearance in English in 1975 by Scribner. Jeffrey Hart defended it in National Review in 1975; the Atlantic Monthly made its demographic question the subject of a December 1994 cover story; and William F. Buckley Jr. called it “a great novel” in 2004.[17] But after a limited release second edition in 1994–1995, it went out of print because in part because of public pressure and accusations of racism. For decades, The Camp of the Saints was out of print in the English-speaking world.

Back across the Atlantic, a legal change radically affected the public availability of The Camp of the Saints. In France, the legal framework governing print publications changed significantly. Raspail observed in 2011 that the restrictive speech statutes enacted after his work’s publication—the Gayssot (1990), Lellouche (2003), and Perben (2004) laws—would expose the novel to prosecution on dozens of counts and make it “unpublishable, at least without severe amputations.”[18]

And yet, the book continued to gain pockets of notoriety and popularity, both with French and English speakers. In 2017, Political commentator Steve Bannon and French Political leader Marine Le Pen invoked it.[19] In 2019, leaked emails from years earlier showed White House adviser Stephen Miller recommending it to a Breitbart editor.[20] By the time Vauban Books issued a new authorized translation in 2025, the novel had become a book more denounced than read—Amazon briefly delisted the new edition in April 2026 before reversing course and calling the removal an “error.”[21] Books do not exist in a void.

Read More

1. Matthew Miller, “How the Evangelical Church Awoke to the Abortion Issue: The Convergent Labors of Harold O. J. Brown, Francis Schaeffer, and C. Everett Koop,” Reformation21, March 4, 2013, https://www.reformation21.org/featured/how-the-evangelical-church-awoke-to-theabortion-issue-the-convergent-labors-of.php.
2. Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints, trans. Norman Shapiro (The Social Contract Press, 1995) author’s copy, flyleaf inscription: “August 22, 2002, Dr. Brown’s ethics course.”
3. Harold O. J. Brown, “Breaking the Ties That Bind: Globalization & the Family,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 13, no. 9 (November 2000), https://www.touchstonemag.com. A slightly edited version of a paper delivered at the World Congress of Families II, Geneva, November 1999.
4. John D. Woodbridge, “Harold O.J. Brown (1933–2007),” First Things, July 10, 2007, https:// firstthings.com.
5. Dr. Brown wrote the lead editorial for Christianity Today on the legalization of abortion following the Roe v. Wade decision. Harold O. J. Brown, “Abortion and the Court,” Christianity Today, February 16, 1973.
6. Aaron D. Wolf, “Evangelical Theologian,” Chronicles, September 1, 2007, https:// chroniclesmagazine.org.
7. Maria McFadden Maffucci, “Heroes of the Foundation,” The Human Life Review, n.d., accessed July 7, 2026, https://humanlifereview.com.
8. Harold O. J. Brown, The Sensate Culture (Word, 1996), 2.
9. Brown, The Sensate Culture, 9. Citing Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (E. P. Dutton, 1941).
10. Brown, The Sensate Culture, 9–10.
11. Brown, “Breaking the Ties That Bind.”
12. Christian imagery and the motif of the immigrant invasion as an anti-Easter are repeated throughout.
13. Brown, “Breaking the Ties That Bind.”
14. “And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” (Revelation 20:7–10)
15. “Jean Raspail,” Académie française, accessed July 9, 2026, https://www.academie-francaise.fr
16. “Jean Raspail, officier de la Légion d’honneur.” Le Figaro, Carnet du Jour, June 13, 2020. https://carnetdujour.lefigaro.fr.
17. Jeffrey Hart, “Raspail’s Superb Scandal,” National Review, September 26, 1975; Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, “Must It Be the Rest Against the West?” Atlantic Monthly 274, no. 6 (December 1994): 61–84; William F. Buckley Jr., “No Irish Need Apply,” National Review, July 23, 2004.
18. Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints, trans. Ethan Rundell, intro. Nathan Pinkoski (Vauban Books, 2025), 33.
19. Cécile Alduy, “What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Populist Right,” Politico Magazine, April 23, 2017.
20. “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Hatewatch, November 12, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org.
21. Vauban Books (@VaubanBooks), X, April 20, 2026, https://x.com