“Foreign Invasion"? Project 2025, Immigration, and American Evangelicalism

American evangelical views on immigration may be more complicated than we realize. But, does anti-immigrant rhetoric on the Right echo the Nazi past - and an antisemitic work by Martin Luther?

Sep 06, 2025

ca. 1,700 words; a 12-minute read

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In the foreword to “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” or “Project 2025,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts complains, “today’s progressive Left … cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border.” He then contends, “Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’ —publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience.”[i] A bit later, he sets out the conservative solution, arguing bluntly, “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized.”[ii]

Since the 2024 US presidential election, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted numerous raids and detained many individuals who are purportedly in the country illegally. Controversially, they have done so, often in broad daylight with many witnesses, at farms and orchards, gyms, and even churches. Many incidents have been reported of masked ICE agents detaining people, in some cases without showing any identification.

signage on night — Photo by Nitish Meena on Unsplash

One such event occurred this summer, not far from where my wife and I live on Long Island. A restaurant worker, a longstanding, well-loved member of his community, was detained by ICE while doing his job. Outside of his immigration status, no evidence has been presented about him having committed any crimes. His family and community are devastated. At the request of his lawyer, due to the sensitivity of the situation, I have withheld any identifying details from this piece.

ICE actions such as these, sanctioned as they are by “border czar” and former ICE acting director Tom Homan and the president, go well beyond sealing the border or ending illegal immigration. They also go beyond the enforcement of immigration laws with respect to those who commit violent crimes – for which there is broad bipartisan support.[iii]

This article will highlight some echoes of the Nazi past in some of the immigration rhetoric on the Right in the United States, and in the impetus behind some actions of the current administration. An analysis of recent polling data about evangelical views on immigration will be followed by an examination of how Project 2025’s language on immigration, while not itself antisemitic, resembles rhetoric employed by leading German Protestants during late Weimar and the Third Reich to denigrate Jews.

American Evangelicals, Trump, and Immigration

An AP survey carried out in the immediate wake of the 2024 US presidential election revealed that roughly 80% of white American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in that election. The same survey showed that just over half of Latino evangelicals supported Trump. Further, Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign showed that Trump voters overall regarded the economy, immigration, and abortion (in that order) as the three issues most important to their vote. Further, the percentage of Trump voters for whom immigration was “very important” to their vote rose from 61% in 2020 to 82% in 2024. This may reflect, at least in part, that “the immigrant population in the US grew by more than 1.6 million people between 2022 and 2023, or about 3.6 percent, the largest annual growth since at least 2010.”

Yet, a more recent poll of American evangelicals conducted by Lifeway Research, a publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, shows that their views on immigration are complicated. 44% responded that “the number of recent immigrants to the United States” represents “a drain on economic resources”; 37% answered that the number of recent immigrants is “a threat to law and order.” Yet, 74% “support potential immigration legislation that establishes a path toward citizenship for those here illegally” while roughly the same percentage believe that “the U.S. has a moral responsibility to accept refugees.” 86% described legal immigration as “helpful to the U.S.” while less than 15% saw it as “harmful to the U.S.” Analysis of the rhetoric Protestants used about Jews in Nazi Germany will give us some historical context for the views American evangelicals currently hold about immigrants.

Echoes of the Nazi Past: A “Foreign Invasion,” the National Community, and Jewish Criminality

At a Protestant Church Congress held in Königsberg, Germany, in 1927, Erlangen University Professor Paul Althaus gave a stirring keynote address on Kirche und Volkstum (Church and Nationality). He presented a carefully constructed new political theology that railed against a “foreign invasion” (Überfremdung) in the areas of fashion, the arts, and finance, which he believed had led to a disintegration of the national community (Volksgemeinschaft). The travails of the German Volk, he charged, were due to the “Jewish threat.” While Althaus hoped that the church might penetrate the Volk with the Gospel, supposed “Jewish influence” in economics, the press, the arts, and literature made this impossible.[iv]

Althaus had captured perceptively the mood of Weimar Protestants. He also provided theological cover for völkisch (nationalistic) thinking in their ranks. He would become one of the most prolific and prominent Protestant theologians during the Third Reich. Yet, key aspects of his thinking married deeply conservative, nationalistic ideas to traditional Lutheran theology well before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Althaus exclaimed that “the German turning point of 1933” is “a gift and miracle of God.”[v]

View of Nürnberger Tor, one of the entrances to the University of Erlangen, on top of which a banner has been placed stating that Jews are not desired here. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Stadtarchiv und Stadtmuseum Erlangen.

While Althaus referenced the purportedly pernicious Jewish “influence” in German society, Christian association of Jews with deceitfulness and criminality – including “usury” and “thievery” – had a much longer pedigree. In a book about Nazism and the myth of Jewish criminality, Michael Berkowitz argues, “Through Judas’s betrayal of Jesus in the Christological drama, it is possible to render Judas as the prototypical Jewish criminal— for allegedly undermining the nascent church and threatening Christians as individuals. The assumption that Jews are deceitful, following the example of Judas, is one of the most dogged anti-Semitic tenets.”[vi]

Berkowitz further describes how Martin Luther, in his infamous book On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) “fulminated against Christians who had permitted the Jews’ practice of ‘usury’ to become transformed into acceptable ‘thievery.’” There, Luther rants, Jews are “nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury.”[ix] Trump-era conservative rhetoric about those who immigrate to the United States broadly parallels these age-old expressions of xenophobia and antisemitism.

Project 2025’s Negative Stereotyping of Immigrants and Immigration

If one sets aside for a moment the false dichotomies in the foreword to Project 2025, - between an apparently monolithic “Left” and conservatives, or between “open-borders activism” and sealed borders – the benefits of immigration are completely absent from the discussion. Meanwhile, exaggerations of immigrant criminality abound. For example, a study that analyzed Texas criminal records from 2012 to 2018 found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” Similarly, John Dickerson recently highlighted a statistic that refutes the idea that the ongoing ICE detentions are based primarily on immigrant criminality, as the administration maintains.

It is noteworthy that Roberts’s characterization of immigrants resembles Althaus’s portrayal of Jews in Weimar (and later Nazi) Germany. The precise terminology of “foreign invasion” is missing here (but not from the administration’s rhetoric, or that of many on the Right). Yet the idea that the situation on the US southern border is “lawless” (or was so during the Biden years) is present – and the situation is blamed on “open-borders activism,” which is decried as “cheap grace.” Robert’s drive-by use of one of Bonhoeffer’s signature contributions to Christian theology cheapens its meaning.

For Bonhoeffer, cheap grace meant (in part), “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”[x] The publication that has become a blueprint for many of the policies advanced by the second Trump administration synthesizes negative stereotyping – a familiar pattern present in antisemitism and other forms of prejudice – with dubiously “Christian” content.

Conclusions

The foreword to Project 2025 both exaggerates immigrant criminality and presents a false dichotomy between open and sealed borders as potential solutions to the situation on the US southern border. It trades in anti-immigrant rhetoric reminiscent of centuries-old antisemitic canards about purported Jewish criminality. When they decry immigration to the US as a “foreign invasion,” anti-immigration proponents in the current administration and on the Right echo the Nazi past. Such language – combined with the seemingly ubiquitous presence of masked ICE agents in American communities – has created an atmosphere of terror and dread among immigrants, their friends, and their families. Immigrants like the Long Island resident I referenced here earlier – but whose name I cannot mention for fear of making his situation worse.

It remains to be seen whether American evangelical views on immigration are as complicated as the Lifeway Research survey suggests – and whether evangelicals will urge their political leaders to support more measured penalties for overstayed visas rather than the draconian practices currently in place.

Afterword

I write all of this as both a historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and an ex-evangelical.[xi] It pains me that so many of my fellow Christians can view human beings created in the image of God with suspicion or worse – simply because they weren’t born in the US, speak another language, have different customs, or are from an ethnic background different from their own. I hope the conflicting data about immigration noted above signifies that some evangelicals are wrestling with how to reconcile their beliefs about human dignity with the hateful rhetoric embraced by many on the Right.

Given how much weight the president seems to place on the views of evangelicals and other conservative Christians, the peace and happiness of thousands of families of immigrants praying for their detained loved ones may depend on it. In some cases, immigrant lives may depend on it.

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Echoes from the Past

“Foreign Invasion"? Project 2025, Immigration, and American Evangelicalism

American evangelical views on immigration may be more complicated than we realize. But, does anti-immigrant rhetoric on the Right echo the Nazi past - and an antisemitic work by Martin Luther?

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