[“Project 2025” is saying the quiet part out loud: Right-wing
groups do not want to ensure all Americans have religious freedom, but
want to impose conservative Christian views on our religiously-diverse
country.]
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THE THEOCRATIC AMBITIONS OF PROJECT 2025  
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Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons
September 8, 2023
MSNBC
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_ “Project 2025” is saying the quiet part out loud: Right-wing
groups do not want to ensure all Americans have religious freedom, but
want to impose conservative Christian views on our religiously-diverse
country. _

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A coalition of far-right groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, is
planning for the next Republican administration. Project 2025
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received considerable media attention for its $22 million budget
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for its plans to expand presidential power
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federal agencies, and for specific policies
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like rolling back environmental protections
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However, the plan’s theocratic elements have gone unscrutinized.

Project 2025 published a book of policy proposals, titled “Mandate
for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” for the next Republican
administration. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts
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the book by prioritizing the securing of “our God-given individual
rights to live freely” against a “woke” threat. “Today the
Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities
that reject woke progressivism,” he claims without evidence. “They
will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same
totalitarian intent.”

Roberts’ view that progressives are out to get Christians sets the
tone for individual chapters on various federal agencies.
While anti-abortion
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run throughout the book, several policy areas stand out.

This is about the next Republican president, whoever it may be, who
pushes Christian nationalism.

Roger Severino
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chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services urges the next
conservative president to “maintain a biblically based, social
science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Severino is
concerned that federal programs will be subjected to “nonreligious
definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently
enacted Respect for Marriage Act.”

The Respect for Marriage Act
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passed last year by Congress with strong bipartisan support, requires
the federal government and states to recognize same-sex and
interracial marriages. The law is not religious or nonreligious; it is
a constitutionally enacted law of the United States.

Project 2025 appears to call on the next Republican president to draw
distinctions between parts of the law as “religious” and
“nonreligious.” The Bible is not a higher authority than laws
passed by Congress, and far-right groups do not have to like American
laws to respect that those laws are not overruled by their personal
interpretation of the Bible.

Another startling section by Severino concerns C
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policies
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opposition to which has galvanized conservative Christians. He
criticizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s actions
and wonders “how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting
down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far
beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved
versus souls saved?” 

That’s not a tough question to answer: The federal government does
not need to worry about saving souls.

Trump is campaigning to establish ‘a presidential dictatorship,’
historian Beschloss says
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Meanwhile in his chapter on the U.S. Department of Labor, Jonathan
Berry frames his proposals as part of divine history. “The
Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always
recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to
God, neighbor, and family,” he writes, while claiming the Biden
administration “has been hostile to people of faith.”

Berry worries that “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” and
blames consumerism and secularism for the decline in Sabbath
observance.

But he’s not content to reminisce about the good ol’ days when
Americans went to church. He wants the federal government to push
people back to church, and calls on Congress to “encourage communal
rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to require that
workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.”
Berry argues this would lead to higher costs that would reduce work on
the Sabbath. 

Conservatives often frame their policy crusades as part of an effort
to expand “religious freedom,” a narrative deployed across the
Trump administration to gut civil rights protections
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But now “Project 2025” is saying the quiet part out loud:
Right-wing groups do not want to ensure all Americans have religious
freedom, but want to impose conservative Christian views on our
religiously-diverse country.

The federal government does not need to worry about saving souls.

Instituting “biblically based” policies, saving souls and inducing
Sabbath observance constitute a direct attack on religious freedom, a
freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, which keeps the government
out of religion.

In the chapter on the U.S. Department of State
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Kiron K. Skinner writes: “Special attention must be paid to
challenges of religious freedom, especially the status of Middle
Eastern Christians and other religious minorities, as well as the
human trafficking endemic to the region.”

There are certainly international religious freedom issues that the
president should pay attention to, but our ability to advocate for
religious freedom abroad is enabled by our respect for people of all
faiths — and nonreligious people — at home. A U.S. president who
enacts “biblically based” domestic policies has little to say to
heads of government abroad who pursue their own religion-based
policies.

Concerns about policies of this kind aren’t only about the possible
return of former President Donald Trump to office — this is about
the next Republican president, whoever it may be, who pushes Christian
nationalism. Project 2025 is providing a blueprint
for _any_ Republican administration.

It shouldn’t need to be said that the Bible shouldn’t trump
American law, but this campaign season it needs to be repeated, over
and over again.

_Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons is a religion contributor and the author
of "Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity."_

* Project 25
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* religion
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* theocracy
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* religous fundamentalism
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