Scholars Warn: Project 2025 is a Christian Nationalist Blueprint

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Baptist News Global | July 15, 2024

Project 2025 is a Christian nationalist blueprint for taking control of every level and facet of American government, and scarier still is that most people know nothing about it, scholar and author Kristen Kobes Du Mez said during the “The Convocation Unscripted” webinar.

“I feel like I’m questioning my sanity sometimes because people who I know care about these things in a general sense are not tuned in to know what’s actually happening,” said Du Mez, professor of gender, religion and politics at Calvin University in Michigan and author of the bestselling book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

She joined fellow religion and politics experts Diana Butler Bass and Jemar Tisby on the latest episode of the webinar connected to “The Convocation” Substack they share with Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute.

With Jones on vacation, the trio delved headlong into the 900-page Project 2025 “playbook” facilitated by The Heritage Foundation to form a fundamentalist Christian government and society. And for them, the reelection of Donald Trump as U.S. president is an essential beginning.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative administration,” organizers explain on the project website.

Initially, the idea is to radically expand presidential authority and replace the federal workforce with appointees loyal to the president and committed to creation of a government led exclusively by conservative Christians.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” according to the project’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

But the plan’s hundreds of pages also target transgender people, “gender ideology,” racial identity, reproductive rights, Critical Race Theory and public education.

“These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says in the foreword to the document.

The movement isn’t waiting for the November election to make its moves, a fact illustrated in states like Oklahoma, where teachers have been directed to begin teaching from a Christian Bible, and Louisiana, where a new law mandates posting the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms.

“I think the power Trump has brought to this strand of the right wing is, ‘Hey, we can actually take over the ‘government schools.’ … It’s not ‘put your kids in homeschool’ or ‘put them in a Christian school. We’re taking over the schools,’” said Tisby, a history professor at Simmons College of Kentucky who is a speaker and writer on issues of racial justice and is the author of numerous books including the bestseller The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.

Even the term “government schools” was coined by conservative evangelicals to undermine the validity of public education to more easily take control over it and to wage “a general attack on public education that seems to be picking up steam around the country,” he said.

The term also represents a subtle and subversive rebranding of public education, said Bass, a former college and seminary professor turned historian, speaker and writer and whose many books include the bestseller Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence.

“They want you to think that these are government schools instead of what they are, and that is locally operated … schools that are funded by cooperatives of taxpayers in one of what was truly one of America’s great ideas about making sure that the entire populace got a decent, rudimentary education that would create decent citizens,” she said.

The goal is to take a similar approach throughout the federal government, Du Mez warned. “If Trump wins the next time, they’re going to stock the entire government, all the agencies, with loyalists and essentially take over the Department of Justice — not have an independent Department of Justice anymore but have the Department of Justice doing Trump’s bidding.”

Yet the former president has adamantly denied any involvement or approval for Project 2025, he said in a July 5 post on Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Du Mez disputed Trump’s denial: “It’s pretty much his entire staff of the last administration and all the folks who were writing the Republican platform (behind the project). It’s the same people. So, he knows very well who’s writing it. … This is Trump’s base. Conservatives know full well that this is absolutely the agenda that is going to be on his desk day one.”

Jeff Brumley is Senior News Writer for Baptist News Global. A veteran newspaper reporter, he lives in Jacksonville, Fla., with his dog, Nosey.