Project 2025 has been in the news quite a bit lately as more people are awakening to the all too real dangers of American Christian nationalism. As part of my research on Christian nationalism, I’ve been slowly going through the Project 2025 document which I downloaded from the website before it was removed — a full version of which is attached to this post below. This week I read Russ Vought’s chapter (pp. 39-58) entitled “Executive Office of the President of the United States” in which Vought lays out his plans to turn America into a theocratic hellscape driven by bigotry, misogyny, and Christian libertarian economics. It is as horrifying as various journalists, historians, media outlets, and scholars have been saying and that is not hyperbole.

Vought, the founder of The Center for Renewing America, was a member of the Trump administration and maintains regular communication with the disgraced former president. Vought has stated that one of his goals is to make Christian nationalism a priority for the next Trump administration while explicitly maintaining that America has to be answerable to Jesus despite the first amendment’s clear separation of church and state. Of course, he does not mean that America should be answerable to Jesus’ call for social justice as laid out in the Magnificat, the Lord’s prayer, his teachings about those who hoard wealth, and his quite plain social justice injunctions in Matthew 25:31-46. Rather for Vought and other Christian nationalists, their focus is on grabbing power, whitewashing both history and Christianity, codifying bigotry and hatred into law, gutting regulations that keep people safe, and cutting taxes for the wealthy. They aim to do this by decimating staff numbers at various government agencies and replacing those who are fired with Trump loyalists.

One can easily see Vought’s disdain for governance and especially for government agencies who help to uphold workplace safety and labor laws, establish and maintain a level playing field for all citizens, hold organizations and business entities accountable for the environment, and collection of tax revenues. Vought consistently bemoans experts in their fields who work for agencies like the EPA as he made clear with this statement about “the pervasive notion of expert ‘independence’ that protects so-called experts from scrutiny.” In other words people with expertise in their fields are getting in the way of Christian libertarians gutting environmental regulations in favor of letting corporations pollute for profit. This is why one of the most insidious things Vought and Project 2025 want the Council on Environmental Equality to ban is “cumulative impact analysis” an important EPA tool that protects citizens and the environment from the ravages of corporate laissez-faire capitalism. This would allow the Trump administration to overturn environmental legislation in order to rubber stamp projects that would doubtless contribute to global climate change and ecological collapse. One can see this in how they describe Biden’s climate change policies as “climate fanaticism” and their desire to abolish the Office of Domestic Climate Policy. This is absolute madness on a planet with a rapidly changing climate driven by humanity’s hubris and failure to be good stewards of the only planet we have. Theologically speaking this is the polar opposite of loving our neighbors and following the golden rule as I wrote in my book Go Golden.

One of the ways that Project 2025 and Russ Vought seek to do this is by demolishing legal precedents in much the same way that Trump’s SCOTUS appointees did after perjuring themselves in their confirmation hearings when questioned about Roe v. Wade. As Vought writes in the Project 2025 document about the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, “The Director must ensure appointment of a General Counsel who is respected yet creative and fearless in his or her ability to challenge legal precedents that serve to protect the status quo.” By stacking the courts and governmental agencies, a second Trump administration could rewrite laws, eliminate protections for LGBTQIA people, further cement systemic racism and gender biases in our country by reversing what Vought calls “woke” policies related to race, gender, and equality, as well as eviscerate labor and environmental regulations in favor so-called free market capitalism. He makes no pretense about these plans going so far as to demand that a conservative president must “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” in order to take power away from elected officials and bureaucrats Washington D.C. and give it back to “America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”

Other Christian nationalists like William Wolfe who have worked with Vought in their attempts to make America a theocracy have echoed those latter sentiments in the terrifying “Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” Vought stops short of quoting scripture in the Project 2025 document, but his multiple references to woke policies, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), critical race theory, and climate change all align with the stated goals of Christian nationalists like Wolfe, Doug Wilson, Doug Mastriano, et al. Vought wants Trump to immediately rescind Executive Order 14020 and to abolish the Gender Policy Council (GPC). This is where Vought’s Christian nationalism jumps off the page. Executive Order 14020 promotes gender equality in the U.S. and globally. For Vought, “Abolishing the Gender Policy Council would eliminate central promotion of abortion (“health services”); comprehensive sexuality education (“education”); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet “gender affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors. In addition to eliminating the council, developing new structures and positions will have the dual effect of demonstrating that and strengthening the family is a priority while also facilitating more seamless coordination and consistency across the U.S. government.” In other words, Vought wants the U.S. government to mandate white, patriarchal, heteronormative, pro-fetus policies while eliminating policies that actually help people who are not white, male, and heterosexual.

Unsurprisingly, the only experts Vought cares about are the legal experts he can tap to circumvent and change laws he doesn’t like and economists devoid of ethics whose sole purpose is the maximization of profit at the expense of humanity, biodiversity, and the biosphere. Freedom of, or from, religion doesn’t come into to for Vought and those of his ilk. Equal rights and dignity for BIPOC and LGBTQIA people are not important to them either. What is important for them is freedom to be racist and bigots, freedom to maximize wealth, and freedom to impose their myopic version of Christianity onto others. It is a frightening prospect for society that is nothing like the teachings of Jesus, Paul, or the prophets. Americans of every faith or of no faith should be alert to the danger and vote accordingly, even if they have to hold their nose in the voting booth. We simply cannot allow the Christofascists to take control because it will be game over for any semblance of democracy if that happens.