The current U.S. political landscape contains plenty of alarming factions. Two of the most prominent are an openly theocratic wing led by Christian nationalists and a cabal of extreme anti-government activists who seem to believe we can run a country of 333 million people with a government the size of a city council.
Every now and then, these two blocs come together, and, in the best tradition of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, stitch together something truly horrifying.
Meet their latest creation: Project 2025.
Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and endorsed by dozens of Christian nationalist groups, Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for dismantling the federal government and replacing our secular democracy with a theocracy. It is guided by three D’s: Downsize, Destroy, and Deify. The America that Project 2025 seeks to fashion would look nothing like the one we live in now, and it’s one most secularists are not going to find hospitable.
The document calls for sweeping changes in several policy areas.
Public Education
The American right has never reconciled itself to the existence of public schools. Privatization is their order of the day, and Project 2025 is sprinkled with calls for “educational choice” and “educational freedom.” These are code words for private school vouchers or, in other words, your taxpayer dollars funding private, mostly religious schools that elevate indoctrination above education (see A Warning from Arizona, page 13). And, for good measure, Project 2025 also calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
Reproductive Rights
Project 2025 prods the federal government to adopt “a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.” The document declares that life begins at conception, a statement of theology that has been used in some states to ban all abortion. Under Project 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would focus on “furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’”
With abortion now banned in many states, people have been crossing state borders to access the procedure. Project 2025 seeks to crack down on what it callously calls “abortion tourism” and openly asserts that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should engage in “abortion surveillance,” a polite yet chilling term for spying on people who travel to get reproductive care that may be banned where they live.
The document also seeks to overturn the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), federal legislation that requires hospitals to provide stabilizing abortion care to pregnant patients in medical emergencies, and says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was wrong to approve the drug mifepristone, which has long been safely used for abortion care and miscarriage management.
Under Project 2025, employers could cite expanded religious exceptions and refuse to provide birth control in health care plans, wiping out a crucial benefit that millions of Americans rely on.
LGBTQ Rights
Project 2025 calls for ending a host of laws that protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination. It goes so far as to assert that health care providers should be permitted to refuse care to LGBTQ patients, even in cases of medical emergencies.
Project 2025 rejects the idea that transgender people even exist. It calls on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.”
Under Project 2025, the federal government would prioritize “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” which the playbook elsewhere refers to as “heterosexual, intact marriage.”
HHS, the project asserts, should “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” The department, the plan insists, spends too much time focusing on “‘LGBTQ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”
To buttress heterosexual, patriarchal families, Project 2025 calls for the development of “faith-based programs that incorporate local churches and mentorship programs … [that] affirm and teach fathers based on a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender-neutral parent.”
Finally, the project calls for essentially making LGBTQ people invisible in the eyes of the federal government. It endorses “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Social Services Discrimination
Many social services in America are run by religious groups under government contracts. Project 2025 would dramatically expand the ability of these groups to take taxpayer money while engaging in alarming forms of discrimination.
Foster care and adoption services are just one example. In some parts of the country, evangelical Christian groups rake in taxpayer money to run these programs on behalf of the government, yet they refuse to work with families who don’t meet a certain religious test. Thus, atheists, Jews, liberal or moderate Christians, Roman Catholics, samesex parents, and others who want to provide loving homes to children in need can find the door slammed in their faces.
These discriminatory policies are being challenged in court. Project 2025’s authors see that as a horrible thing, writing, “Unfortunately, many of the faith-based adoption agencies that serve these children are under threat from lawsuits, or else their licenses and contracts have been halted because they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.”
Public Health
Project 2025’s backers are still smarting over the steps government agencies took during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep people healthy, such as banning large gatherings of all types. They insist that houses of worship should be able to stay open, no matter how dangerous it might be.
“What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” the document asks. “The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.” Never mind that keeping Americans safe from deadly communicable diseases is very much the CDC’s lane.
The plan would also obstruct scientific research by prohibiting vaccine manufacturers from using fetal cell lines in the future.
Freedom to Learn
Bemoaning the “toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” the groups behind Project 2025 declare virtual war on the right to read, learn, and explore. The document declares that “pornography” should be outlawed and asserts that educators and librarians “who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Project 2025’s backers have a broad definition of what constitutes pornography. As the recent wave of book bans has shown, to many Christian nationalists, “pornography” is any book they don’t like, such as volumes with LGBTQ+ themes or books that contain factual information about human sexuality.
The Secular State
Project 2025’s Christian nationalist supporters believe that Sunday is the Sabbath and should largely be a day of rest. Endorsing “Sabbath Rest,” the document states, “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day. Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism.”
Of course, it’s not a shared day off for those who don’t regard Sunday as the Sabbath, and this portion of Project 2025 amounts to little more than a Christian nationalist attempt to control how Americans spend their weekends. For many people, commercial activities such as shopping, dining out with friends, attending sporting events, visiting museums and amusement parks, going to movies and so on are how they choose to spend days off, including Sundays. (Although it is never explicitly stated, one can’t help but get the impression that Project 2025’s supporters are angry that these diversions compete with church.)
The document is laced with references to the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, a code phrase Christian nationalists use for fundamentalist domination. It bemoans the fact that growing numbers of Americans are stepping away from organized religion, which it calls the “rejection of the church.”
“But wait,” you might ask, “this thing got shut down, right?” No, that’s just what its architects want you to believe. After groups that support secular government, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and other rights and freedoms sounded the alarm about Project 2025, the American people took a look and decided they didn’t like it. Seeing the people recoiling, the Heritage Foundation tried to do some damage control by announcing the staffer overseeing the project would be stepping down.
So what? Christian nationalists have been advocating for the policies in Project 2025 for decades. We know this theocratic hellscape is what they’re trying to create, whatever its name. Project 2025 has already been drafted and circulated, and any politician who is so inclined can pull from it. Heritage is pretending to step back because they are feeling the heat over the project’s unpopularity, but we’d have to be awfully naïve to believe these organizations, which spent so much time drafting this 900-page, four-pound monstrosity are suddenly going to abandon their creation.
Does that mean Project 2025 will soon be coming to a government near you? Not necessarily. Remember, polls show that the more Americans learn about Project 2025, the less they like it. That gives defenders of church-state separation and secular government an opening.
The next step is up to us. To tweak a popular passage from the Book of Mark, “Go into all the world and preach the bad news of Project 2025 to everyone.”