(Global Project against Hate and Extremism – GPAHE)
“Project 2025 is very clearly on a path to Christian Nationalism as well as authoritarianism. It rejects the constitutional separation of Church and State, rather privileging religious beliefs over civil laws. Religious freedom is referenced throughout the plan and is seen to trump all other civil rights which should be subsumed to an individual’s religious rights. The message that America must remain Christian, that Christianity should enjoy a privileged place in society, and that the government must take steps to ensure this is clear in every section of the plan, as is the idea that American identity cannot be separated from Christianity.
As a result, Project 2025 favors a government mandated by biblical principles, which excludes certain communities, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, from civil rights protections.
To accomplish this, the Project relies heavily on interpretations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which states “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” It has been described by the Supreme Court as a “kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws [that] might supersede Title VII’s commands in appropriate cases.” RFRA, passed in 1993 with almost unanimous approval from the House and Senate, was originally intended to protect religious exercise but has over the years been used to erode civil rights and deny healthcare under the guise of religious freedom, as in the case of Burwell v Hobby Lobby, where the Supreme Court ruled that employers could deny certain healthcare services if it went against their religious beliefs. In Bostock v Clayton Country, the Court ruled that discrimination based on sex includes protection for sexual orientation and transgender status which the Project demands be very narrowly interpreted to only include hiring and firing and that all materials in federal agencies that would interpret Bostock more liberally be withdrawn.
This plan is for the next conservative president, but the Project’s sponsors have been working to achieve this vision for years and will continue to do so, regardless of who wins in 2024. Official supporters of Project 2025, specifically the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), have had much success with recent Supreme Court rulings on abortion and a company’s right to refuse service based on religious principles. Little could have been as fortuitous for this movement as the election of Representative Mike Johnson (R-La.), a former employee of the anti-LGBTQ+ ADF, to U.S. House Speaker, second in line to the presidency. He is an election denier who claims his worldview can be ascertained from the Bible, including its denial of evolution and a belief that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, despite all science to the contrary. Former ADF head, Michael Farris, has said that Johnson is the highest-ranking biblically-trained conservative Christian that he and his fellow evangelical Christians have ever seen and that Johnson will usher in the most conservative House of Representatives.
The Project’s Christian Nationalist goals are inherent in its dehumanizing language about LGBTQ+ people, putting them in the same sentence as pornography and pedophilia, rabid rejection of “wokeness,” its promotion of the “traditional family” writing that, “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” its certainty that gender identity is binary and that being LGBTQ+ is an ideology rather than a natural state. It goes on to say that work on the Sabbath should be paid at time and a half, and that the government should protect the “letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection law,” and employers should be able to abide by their religious beliefs regarding marriage, the LGBTQ+ community, women’s healthcare, race, and any other religiously held conviction regardless of anti-discrimination laws. The Project wants a “general statement of policy specifying that it (the government) will not enforce any rules against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by healthcare providers who receive federal funds in the Affordable Healthcare Act, and indeed, the DOJ should aggressively defend a provider’s right to discriminate in court challenges.”
Many of the Project’s recommendations are based on the false idea that the “Left” is determined to rescind religious protections saying, “Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.” And about education, it would upend the accreditation requirements for schools and universities by removing rules the Project sees as biased against religious schools or doctrine, but still allow Title IV funds to be available to these institutions. It also wants an executive order to remove what it calls the “list of shame,” the list of schools that have applied for religious exemptions to Title IX, from the Department of Education website. The Project demands that faith-based adoption and foster care institutions be able to deny a child a home if the home doesn’t meet with their religious tenets.
While not all aspects of the desire to infuse far-right interpretations of Christianity are apparent in the wording of Project 2025, they are abundantly clear in the missions and activities of many of the advisory board and the Project leader, Heritage Foundation. Examples include The American Conservative advocating for Christian conversion therapy counseling claiming that a law protecting young people from harmful conversion therapy infringes upon their free speech, the California Family Council whose mission and vision are, “Advancing God’s Design for Life, Family, & Liberty through California’s Church, Capitol, & Culture” and “God’s people living as principled citizens of both heaven and earth: Biblically Faithful, Civically Responsible, Culturally Impactful”, and the Eagle Forum which seeks “to define and defend more effectively the Judeo-Christian worldview of the U.S. Constitution and legal system in today’s Culture War” and refers to supporting LGBTQ+ rights as a religion in itself.”
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 