project 2025: Christian Nationalist Agenda

For a lot of recent elections, we’ve been told that this next election is  the most important we’ll ever face. As a survivor of both the 2000 and 2020 elections, I have to admit that sometimes that’s true. But for a nation with a dangerously short attention span, it also creates an alert fatigue that we aren’t willing to push through.

It bothers me because  the fight we’re  facing isn’t hidden. Take Project 2025,  for example. This is literally a mainstream project designed to remake the federal government in  the evangelical Christian image. And most people don’t even think about.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an incredibly thoroughly policy agenda. Its full name is the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, and it proposes sweeping changes to the federal government and a detailed plan for a 180-day policy implementation.

Project 2025 includes replacing non-political government employees with loyalists, drastically rolling back global climate change policies and environmental programs, and a strategic list of policies and programs targeted  towards every Executive level department. In addition, it outlines how government officials intend to “rescind” workplace discrimination protections for the LGBTQ+ community, eliminate abortion and contraception access, and bring back patriarchal headship in marriages.

On the outside, it looks like a plan to cut through the gridlock of our political system and get something done. In reality, Project 2025 is a 900+ page Christian nationalist manifesto that signals a deep crisis in our democracy.

Is Project 2025 Christian Nationalism?

Yes. Project 2025 roots its argumentation in the political ideology of Christian Nationalism. Over and over the justification for even secular policies is that “God wants this.” The document mentions Muslims once (in connection with propaganda),  Islam only in connection with Iran or terrorism, and  Jews only insofar as they are attached to Christians (“Judeo-Christian traditions”). Atheists, Hindu, and any other  (a)theological affiliation are completely absent.

Additionally, the policies outlined throughout are geared towards increasing the power of the federal government, especially the Executive Branch, to enact a Christian agenda espoused by a specific sect of evangelical Christians to make the US a “Christian” nation.

What is Christian Nationalism?

Do not confuse Christian nationalism with patriotic folks who happen to be Christian. Both patriotism and Christianity represent fundamental parts of U.S. history and development. Christian nationalism is a thing apart and is neither patriotic nor Christian.

The Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) refers to Christian nationalism as, “a worldview where one’s theological imagination is coopted by state power.” And  accuses it of being “political idolatry” that trades real adherence to the Christian faith for the “false god fashioned by the myth of American exceptionalism.” Dr. Drew Strait of the AMBS exposed the role of Christian nationalism in the January 6th insurrection illustrating the way people of good faith can be turned towards the false promise of political ideologies.

Many Christian organizations, including Christianity Today and Faithful America are speaking out against the harm Christian nationalism does to their faith. Those of us who value both our faith and our country will find neither in this patently authoritarian, anti-American movement. Project 2025 spends almost a thousand pages detailing how anyone who disagrees with the Christian nationalist agenda will be legally less free.

How does Project 2025 promote Christian Nationalism? 

Yale professor Jason Stanley notes the steps to a fascist political state that include dividing people into “us and them.” Christian nationalism  provides the division, and Project  2025 provides the framework. 

Project 2025’s us-them talking points draw a false distinction between “good” Americans who go to high school football games and don’t need college because they can just read the “Book of Human Nature” (which I assume is handed out at the College of Hard Knocks). The anti-elite university rhetoric is Orwellian when you consider how many endorsers of this project went to and sent their children to Ivy League universities. Regardless, real America includes apple pie, abstinence, and oil drilling.

Project 2025’s real Americans also want to promote pregnancy and stop “grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb.” Given the prevalence of rape-related pregnancies and that intimate partner homicide is the number one killer of pregnant women, such a family-values platform should mention domestic violence. Which Project 2025 does. Once. To say that domestic violence is not a reason to grant asylum at the border. Real Americans like pregnancy, but it appears the women doing the pregnancy are essentially on their own.

Leftists, or fake Americans, are not just blue haired lesbian abortionists driving Priuses and plotting to take away your gas stoves and borders, they are “America’s corporate and political elites [who] do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated—self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty.”

Rule of law arguments are especially two-faced coming from a group that tried to literally overthrow the government.

Is Christian Nationalism is a threat to National Security?

Yes. According to the FBI and  Department of Homeland Security. Christian Nationalism has been called the biggest threat to American freedom.

What can be done about Project 2025?

First and foremost, vote against people who agree with it. Most Democrats reject it outright, but you can find libertarians and true conservatives who will as well. Voting in local elections will also help keep these politics from taking hold at the grassroots level.

It is important to remind those susceptible to the rhetoric of Christian nationalism that the movement does not really include all Christians. Quakers, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Christian Left, and many Lutherans and Episcopalians are not included. Often Mormons/LDS and other organized political groups are included as a means to power but jettisoned after.

Organize against these dangerous, anti-American policies by engaging with groups that are already confronting them.

Having grown up in rural Texas, I’m often surprised by people from urban areas and the coasts who are surprised by the presence of Christian nationalism. This has always been a streak in United States. But before September 11, 2001, political Christianity was paired with a mistrust of the federal government. During Bush’s “crusade” post 9/11, anti-government Christianity morphed into Christian nationalism.

We traded our liberty for security, and we got neither.