A new poll from PRRI finds that half of Americans oppose rounding up millions of their neighbors and putting them in concentration camps.
The same poll shows that nearly half — 47% — support concentration camps.
The reporting here is from Axios, where the emphasis is always on the political horse-race, leading to the surreal framing of whether straight-up Nazi shit as something mainly of interest due to how it may impact the electoral prospects of the two parties: “Americans split on idea of putting immigrants in militarized ‘camps.’”
This is not ambiguous. The question here was not some vague pudding about “stronger/harsher immigration policies” or about “strengthening the border.” That kind of phrasing allows wiggle room for those responding to or interpreting polls. This poll didn’t allow such fuzzy evasion. These Americans were asked — explicitly — whether or not they supported “rounding up” people and “putting them into militarized camps.”
“Round them up and put them in camps” is unadorned Nazi shit. It just is. There’s no way of qualifying or caviling or weaseling out of that. “Round them up and put them in camps” is the essence of the thing itself.
And it’s what 47% of the Americans responding to PRRI’s question said they support.
PRRI offers a breakdown of this question by religious affiliation.* This is thoroughly disheartening. “Round them up and put them in camps” is massively popular among white Christians, with support from 58% of white mainline Protestants, support from 61% of white Catholics, and support from 75% of white evangelicals.
Hence the Latin in the title here: There is no salvation inside the church.
The overwhelming majority of white evangelicals preach a gospel that is wholly comfortable with “round them up and put them in camps.” This gospel, apparently, is one that makes its adherents more likely to want to see others rounded up and put into camps.
It is, in other words, something very much like whatever gospel it was that the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller was preaching in 1933.
I grew up attending a private fundamentalist Christian school and was baptized at a white fundamentalist Baptist church. Both of those encouraged me to read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, a devout spiritual memoir by a Righteous Gentile whose family aided those in occupied Holland who were being round up and sent to the camps and who was, herself, eventually rounded up and sent to the camps. I read the book. I read the Spire Christian Comics adaptation of the book. And I watched the movie version — from Billy Graham Films — in church, in the sanctuary, where it was shown one Sunday night for our evening service.
That same fundamentalist Baptist church also sponsored a refugee family of “Boat People,” providing them with an apartment for their first year living in America.
The highlight of the year at that church was always the Missions Conference, during which members made the pledges that shaped the church’s budget for financially supporting missionaries around the world. The Missions Conference always kicked off with the “Parade of Nations,” in which kids processed into the sanctuary proudly carrying the flags of all the countries around the world where missionaries supported by our offerings worked. There were state flags in the mix too, as some of the missionaries we supported were “home” missionaries — including some who worked with immigrant communities here in America. Immigration was, in this context, a glorious, God-blessed thing — it brought the “mission field” here to us.
Sure, all of that was also deeply problematic. My church’s missiology was pervasively colonialist and shaped by cultural imperialism (although this was far less true for the missionaries themselves). And Corrie ten Boom wasn’t revered as a hero because of her resistance to fascism so much as she was celebrated as a living martyr who could be an edifying example to us as we also faced “persecution” for our faith. After we watched The Hiding Place movie in church, there was much discussion of the disappointing refusal of the ten Boom family to proselytize the Jewish neighbors they hid and smuggled to safety. What good was it to save people’s lives if you didn’t also try to save their eternal souls?
But for all of that, the white fundamentalist Christians at that church in that time would still have recognized that “round them up and put them in camps” is the definition of villainy. One of the very few “secular” movies people at my church allowed themselves to watch was The Sound of Music. And they understood that Col. Von Trapp was a hero because he refused to participate in “round them up and put them in camps.”
I realize that “the white American Christianity of my childhood seems vastly different from the white American Christianity of today” is a fuzzy claim that may reflect little more than nostalgia or the naiveté of my perceptions in childhood. But I really don’t think that “round them up and put them in camps” would have had the support of 75% of the faithful fundies at Hydewood Park Baptist Church in the 1980s. Or, at the very least, they’d have had the decency to be ashamed to admit such support to a pollster.
But today, in 2024, if you walk into that white American church — or into any white American church — then the odds are that most of those present openly and proudly support “round them up and put them in camps.” This is the culmination — the meaning — of their preaching, their prayer, their study, their worship, their discipleship, their devotion and piety and gospel and evangelism. All of that has led them, more than anyone else, to support straight-up Nazi shit including concentration camps.
There is no salvation in such places. And little worth saving.
* The spectrum of religious responses is almost exclusively Christian. It includes an array of five categories of Christians and only a single other category: “unaffiliated.” That seems, in this context, to refer to Christians who are not “affiliated” with the prior categories of Christianity.
So where is everyone else in this poll? I’m not sure. The data here is from PRRI’s 2024 American Values Survey, and many of the questions in that survey have a more inclusive breakdown of religious views, including things like “Latter Day Saint,” “Jewish,” or “Other non-Christian religion” as categories. I’m not sure if Axios only included some of that response in its reporting or if PRRI only collected data on this question from Christians.
The latter possibility seems unlikely, but would have prevented PRRI’s pollsters from having a conversation in which they said, “So … your grandparents were killed in the Holocaust … how do you feel about rounding people up and putting them in camps?”
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