A Bond-level villainous presidential blueprint

Known as Project 2025, the 920-page manual may make for dry reading, but it mercilessly eviscerates federal agencies one by one. The destruction proposed by Project 2025 is far-reaching, sparing no area of government or policy. From the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to Agriculture, Education, Justice and many more, Heritage’s legion of fiendish wonks lays the framework for transferring power from agencies it thinks have “gone woke” to the White House, which Project 2025 ensures will be filled with the Heritage Foundation’s closest allies.

The Foundation, always archconservative, has veered disturbingly toward Christian nationalism in recent years. Its president ominously claimed in early July that it is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless — if the left allows it to be.” This chilling statement has caused more Americans to take a closer look at how dangerous Project 2025 is, but raising awareness has still been challenging.

With such a sweeping plan, those who support democracy have little choice but to either sound the alarm in very general terms — as actor Taraji P. Henson courageously used her platform to do as the host of the BET Awards in June — or to shine a light on one specific threat at a time, as HBO’s John Oliver did when he exposed Project 2025’s proposed dismantling of the civil service system, and replacement of career government workers with ideologues. Let’s hope there’s a sufficient collective American attention span to remember that all these dire threats are from Heritage’s big book of bad ideas.

Below are four distinct threats to consider in terms of implications for the separation between state and church.

Threat No. 1: Christian nationalists writing policy
First and foremost, the central goal of Project 2025 is to consolidate power in an Oval Office run by its creators and supporters. In addition to the Heritage Foundation, an “advisory board” made up of dozens of notorious organizations contributed to Project 2025, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Center for Law & Justice, and First Liberty Institute, just to name a few. These wealthy organizations have worked to promote a false, Christian nationalist version of American history. They posit that the U.S. Founders were Christians who never believed in separating public policy and religion (so long as religion is limited to their preferred version of Christianity).

Allowing such entities to dictate federal policy would have disastrous and wide-reaching policy implications. We rely on federal agencies to have some respect for the fundamental right to a secular government. Replacing agencies’ limited autonomy with total White House control removes that safeguard, opening the floodgates for myriad Christian nationalist policies. The Supreme Court recently took a major step in the same direction with its calamitous decision to repeal the Chevron doctrine, shifting federal agencies’ discretionary powers to courts.
Whereas today the Department of Health and Human Services has some (not fully adequate) policies to ensure HHS-funded organizations do not push religion on people they serve, under Project 2025 the White House could decide to ditch that policy and instead ensure that preferred Christian churches receive as much federal funding as possible, which they could use to proselytize. The Department of Justice and the FBI could be weaponized against religious dissidents. These are just a couple of examples. It should be apparent that strengthening the reins of power, then giving those reins to Christian nationalists, is a terrifying prospect.

Threat No. 2: Replacing public secular schools with discriminatory religious schools
Project 2025 openly calls for eliminating the Department of Education — thereby removing all federal support of public schools and weakening public schools across the country. It also calls for mandatory religious exemptions from accreditation “standards and criteria” for private schools. In other words, religious private schools and universities that fail to meet accreditation standards would be entitled to claim accreditation anyway — simply because of their religious mission.

Project 2025’s Advisory Board is actively fighting to allow public religious charter schools — private religious schools in every sense except that they are fully taxpayer-funded. Public schools have historically provided a strong lesson for American students in how a secular government promotes the religious liberty of all students and respects diversity. Project 2025 envisions secular schools being largely replaced by taxpayer-funded Christian schools that indoctrinate students into Christianity and Christian nationalism — the idea that Christianity and America are so closely linked that non-Christians or the wrong kinds of Christians are not true Americans.

Threat No. 3: Instituting a “backdoor” federal abortion ban
As noted by renowned abortion rights historian and law school Professor Mary Ziegler, FFRF’s 2023 “Forward Award” honoree, Project 2025 calls on the FDA to limit and then eliminate access to mifepristone, the besieged medication abortion pill. Even though the Supreme Court just temporarily punted on the proposed ban, the secretary of Health and Human Services could override the FDA’s drug approval decisions, creating a second avenue for a strengthened executive to ban mifepristone. Project 2025 also argues that the Justice Department should enforce the antediluvian Comstock Act, passed in 1873, which in part barred use of the mails for abortifacients. If federally enforced,  the Comstock Act could override state abortion rights protections. The act’s namesake, Anthony Comstock, a Protestant religious fanatic, bragged about his religiously motivated “chastity” laws driving more than a dozen people to suicide. Reviving this draconian Puritanical measure to ban mifepristone (or for any other purpose) would be a serious affront to our secular system of laws.

Threat No. 4: Supporting climate change denial
Finally, Project 2025 takes aim at efforts to address climate change — unsurprising given the Heritage Foundation’s reported ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch. Crucial agency offices related to energy transition would be eliminated in the Department of Energy. The Environmental Protection Agency’s focus on climate change would be gutted and those favoring drilling and privatizing public lands would be in charge.

This aligns with the trend of climate change denial by Christian nationalist organizations. For example, just this past February, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute (which sits on Project 2025’s Advisory Board) called it “incredibly disturbing” that there was support for government action to address climate change, based on the idea that our liberties are a gift from God and thus cannot be limited by the government. These groups know that their audience of hyperconservative evangelical Christians make up the lion’s share of climate change deniers who believe that “God is in control of the climate,” and thus oppose any measures addressing this ongoing emergency.

Conclusion
Project 2025 is an existential threat, not just to the First Amendment but to our entire democracy. U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, who’s formed a House task force to challenge it, warns: “Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”

If the Heritage Foundation is like a Bond villain, as secular activists we must aspire to emulate 007 ourselves, thwarting a  powerful adversary despite seemingly long odds. In this case, that means using whatever platforms we have — social media, op-eds, town halls and word of mouth — to inform others about the serious danger posed by Project 2025. Working together we can raise a public outcry against Project 2025, leaving its Christian nationalist supporters shaken (not stirred).