Losing Derb's Religion: a partial review of Camp of the Saints

We've been studying the book of Revelations in Sunday School for several months. A few weeks ago we came to the passage describing the battle of Armageddon (or Gog and Magog, depending on your timeline):

7And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison 8and 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. 9And 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, 10and 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.

I presently use the English Standard Version for personal study, but I grew up with the New International Version, which renders "camp of the saints" as "camp of God's people". So I didn't recognize the origin of the phrase when I read Derbyshire's review of the Jean Raspail's book,Camp of the Saints,several years ago. (O. D.: I can't find Derb's review online; it may have appeared exclusively in the dead tree edition of NR.) But knowing the origin, my curiosity was piqued, and I ordered it from the library last weekend.

Raspail's novel, first published in 1977, describes the collapse of Western Civilization in the face of a "peaceful invasion" of nearly a million impoverished third-worlders wading ashore on the southern coast of France. This invasion is greeted, not with force, but by the moral paralysis of a governing elite that no longer believes in its own country's right to self-preservation.

I offered this post as a review, but that's not quite right. This novel, which at this writing I haven't finished, is perhaps one of the most disturbing books I have ever read. (Perhaps I have lead a sheltered life.) It is disturbing on several levels. First, the physical and moral squalor of the invaders is horrifying. The details don't bear repeating (and are in any case easily found online) and surely exaggerate -- though perhaps not: I've never been to Calcutta, only to South America.

Second, and more noteworthy, the book disturbs in its amorality. In contrast to, say, Altas Shrugged, a novel which deals with not-dissimilar premises, Raspail's novel steadfastly refuses to make grand metaphysical claims of justice. On the contrary, it explicitly concedes, far more than I believe to be warranted, that Western power and prosperity is built on the oppression of the Third World. Raspail's point is not moral, but historical: this is the way all nations play the game. A people, through luck of natural selection, becomes strong: Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Mongols, Aztecs, Incans, Mayans, Europeans. These peoples rise to prominence on that strength; they maintain their position by their strength; and as their strength fades, they are violently displaced by those stronger than they are. Every people is in this same struggle, but only the Europeans tell themselves that their own pre-eminence is wrong, and only they believe that they must atone for their victories by choosing submission to destruction at the hands of peoples less powerful than themselves.

There is a lot to argue here (and if I ever get any commenters, we shall indeed argue it), but hashing out Raspail's overall thesis is not my primary intent. What I want to address is Raspail's decision to lay the suicide of the West directly at the feet of Christianity.

Consider this exchange between a retired professor, observing the armada from his house on the coast, and the spoiled shopkeeper's son come to loot him. The young looter refers to the invaders as "a million Christs."

"I got it from this priest. One of those worker types from the wrong side of town. I ran into him an hour ago. I was on my way up here, and he was running like crazy down the hill. Not in rags or anything, but kind of weird. He kept stopping and lifting his arms in the air, like the ones down there, and he'd yell out, 'Thank you, God! Thank you!' And then he'd take off again, down to the beach. They say there's more on the way."

"More what?"

"More priests, just like him . . ."

But Raspail isn't content with attacking only those clerics seeking radical redemption from the sins of their ancestors; this was but an extreme example. Witness this conversation between a Belgian consul in India and a group of missionaries. The missionaries were leading a protest against the Belgian suspension of transnational adoptions.

"Are you saying you've lost control?"

I'm afraid we have. But it doesn't matter. Most of us are glad to go along. You're right. There is something brewing, and it's going to be tremendous. The crowds can feel it, even if they have no notion what it's all about. Myself, I have one explanation. Instead of the piecemeal adoptions that these poor folk have hoped for and lived for, perhaps now they're hoping and living for something much bigger, something wild and impossible, like a kind of adoption en masse. In a country like this that's all it would take to push a movement beyond the point of no return."

"Nice work your Grace," the Consul retorted, simply. "A lovely job for a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church! Mercenary, hireling to the pagans, all of a sudden! What is this, the Crusades in reverse? Judas leaping up on Peter the Hermit's nag, and crying, 'Down with Jerusalem!'? ... Well, you chose a good time. There's no shortage of poor. There are millions and millions! The year isn't three months old, and already half of this province alone is starving. And the government won't do a thing. They've had it. Whatever happens now, they're going to wash their hands. That's what every consul in the city heard this morning. And what have you all been doing in the meantime? You've been 'bearing witness.' Isn't that what you call it? ... Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civlization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you've all become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren't any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you've given in. You can thank yourselves for that. The one thing your struggle for their souls has left them is the knowledge that the West -- your West -- is rich. To them, you're the symbols of abundance. By your presence alone, they see that it does exist somewhere, and they see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves. You can dress up in rags and pretend to be poor , eat handfuls of curry to your hearts' content. You can spread your acolytes far and wide, let them live like the peasants and dispense their wise advice ... It's no use, they'll always envy you, no matter how you try. You know I'm right. After all your help -- all the seeds, and drugs, and technology -- they found it so much simpler just to say, "Here's my son, here's my daughter. Take them. Take me. Take us all to your country.' And the idea caught on. You thought it was fine. You encouraged it, organized it. But now it's too big, now it's out fo your hands. It's a flood. A deluge. And it's out of control ..."

Raspail would impeach, if not the whole of Christian morality, then the universal application of that morality. He would presumably have no objection to the intra-societal exercise of philanthropy, where the charity alone does not define the relationship between giver and receiver. Such charity rightly springs from "the mystic chords of memory," as Lincoln put it in his inaugural address. But Raspail sees in the universality of the gospel message -- "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -- an insidious prejudice against loyalty to, and preference for, one's own, and he indicts this prejudice as the seed of our destruction.

Which brings me to John Derbyshire.

When I started reading him, and at least up until he reviewed Camp of the Saints, Derb described himself as "a feeble Christian" -- feeble, that is, in his attachment to the central Christian truth. Given his policy priorites, and given that his exposure to Christianity was in the Episcopal Church, Derb undoubtedly found Raspail's argument powerfully resonant, and his own faith far too feeble to resist it. If any outsider can point to the place where Derb abandoned Christianity, I would point to the pages of Camp of the Saints.

As for myself, by God's grace my faith is stronger, I have aligned myself with the more muscular branches of Christianity, and I am in any case more comfortable with the paradoxes in my worldview. But none of this is an argument. The blogger known as Vera and I went back and forth a while back on the question of what, if anything, contemporary Christianity (as opposed to the medieval kind) brings to the defense of Western Civilization. I did, in fact, bring up some practical uses for orthodox Christianity as it is lived by its adherents, but these were admittedly small-bore.

But let's turn the question around. How does Derb's present war on religion (which, in practice, means a war on Christianity) help advance his vision of a secure West? Does he really think that a receding Christianity will be replaced by a more muscular paganism? Does he really think that being atheist will encourage us to set about the bloody business of resisting the invasion? Or rather, will it not further empower the very forces seeking our destruction?

The question answers itself.