The Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document is 900 plus pages of Christofascist ideology that the Heritage Foundation’s leadership and partners hope will become public policy if Donald Trump inexplicably wins another term as POTUS. It is replete with fear mongering, blatant lies, weaponization of the Bible to harm immigrants, BIPOC communities, and LGBTQ+ peoples. A lot of the incendiary rhetoric comes from Christians like Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Russ Vought. I have read several chapters of the document and could find no evidence of Jesus or his teachings anywhere within its pages. This is certainly true in the chapter about the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) – pages 91-131 of the document. Nearly every word of this chapter is anti-Christ as I will show in the paragraphs which follow.

From the beginning of the chapter we learn that the U.S. DoD “consumes $850 billion annually – more than 50 percent of our government’s discretionary spending.” (p. 91) That is an absolutely obscene amount of money to spend on weaponry, warfare, and the slaughter of untold numbers of human beings who are created in God’s image. All of that money spent is to ensure that the U.S. remains a super-power and in so doing allows America to continue consuming more of the world’s resources while denying peace to many people around the world. The chapter’s author, Christopher Miller, makes it crystal clear why it is important to keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the very next page. He and others like him want to make China a new Cold War style enemy in order to protect America’s capitalist interests, i.e. Asian markets. If China becomes more powerful, according to Miller, then “it could dramatically undermine America’s core interests, including by restricting U.S. access to the world’s most important market.” (p. 92) Having also lived through a significant part of the Cold War with Russia as a Gen X kid, the prospect of another arms race, this time with China and Russia, is deeply disturbing.

Think about that quote for a moment. According to the people behind Project 2025, America’s core interest is not related to “democratic freedoms” as we are often led to believe, but protecting unfettered capitalism and profit making enterprises. America’s military then is not maintained to ensure the freedom and liberty of Americans, but rather to advance American economic might and hyper-consumption of resources at the expense of others. I first wrote about this theme for academic papers as an undergraduate history major and then again in my first book Go Golden in a chapter entitled “War and Peace” so it was not a surprise to me to find such an admission in the Project 2025 document. Yet, for many people who have not studied these things and for whom military service is seen as patriotic it should be an eye opener.

Theologically speaking too, this American war mongering reality and Project 2025’s vision for expanding it, are hugely problematic. Jesus is known as the Prince of Peace, not for being another Ancient Near Eastern warrior god. He called his followers to love their neighbors and their enemies, but nowhere did he say that they were to take up arms to kill others in his name. That is however a key goal of the Military-Industrial Complex and of Project 2025. Miller and other war profiteers at Heritage want China to be the latest “enemy other” because a major enemy is needed as an excuse for an arms race and proxy wars. Jesus never said that Christians should seek out groups of people in order to make them into enemies, nor did he condone creating enemies so that money will flow into the coffers of the already rich. Jesus said we are to love our enemies. He did not say we should scapegoat them, rattle our sabers at them, or go to war with them. Project 2025 does just that.

Jesus also had a good deal to say about the accumulation of wealth at the expense of others. I firmly believe that Jesus would say that there should be no hyper-wealthy people in a world when billions of human beings suffer from the ravages of poverty. Many of his parables, stories, and other teachings address wealth and poverty. Other New Testament writings including Acts, Pauline epistles, James, and Hebrews also condemn the hoarding of riches. Much of the DoD chapter is about creating, maintaining, and hoarding wealth at the expense of others. Miller ludicrously calls for expanding the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal (pp. 93-95) and for bypassing existing regulations, (p.97) which is a key theme throughout the entire “Mandate for Leadership” document. Regulations get in the way of profits which is why the war profiteers and polluters loathe any sort of regulations. Human beings and the biosphere be damned.

Miller claims that the U.S. military is underfunded despite the $850 billion already being spent on it. Rather than solving global problems like climate change, water shortages, ecosystems collapsing, and transportation issues, Miller believes that science and engineering should be focused even more on creating Weapons of Mass Destruction and increasingly lethal warfare. (p.99) He calls for mandatory Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) testing in all schools that receive federal funding and increased youth military indoctrination by expanding Jr. ROTC programs. Like other bigots at Heritage, Miller calls for an end to anything he considers Marxist, like critical race theory or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or gender ideology. Related to the latter, he wants all military personnel with gender dysphoria to be kicked out of the military.

Sticking with the overall anti-democracy theme of Project 2025, Miller advocates for U.S. Cyber Command’s (USCYBERCOM) “participation in federal efforts to “fortify” U.S. elections to eliminate the perception that DoD is engaging in partisan politics.” (p.120) This is straight up Orwellian nonsense. The groups behind Project 2025 are brazenly authoritarian, and anti-Democracy as Kevin Roberts’ foreword to the document makes plain. The only reason they do not want federal oversight of elections is because they want a Christofascist dictator. It’s a great deal easier to cheat and claim victory if there is no one to secure an election or to report the facts.

The entirety of Project 2025 is nakedly fascist and reminds me often of Orwellian “newspeak”- “war is peace” or “2+2=5” as Orwell described in 1984. Miller’s chapter puts paid to any claim that these people follow Jesus because it’s about profiting from wars and rumors of wars. The authoritarianism the authors plan is to be done in Jesus’ name though Project 2025 is the polar opposite of his teachings. Like much fascist rhetoric and policy, the Project 2025 authors claim without merit that they are the patriotic ones and that they are the group that promotes freedom all while undermining democracy and taking rights away from anyone they don’t like. A vote for Trump is one hundred percent a vote for Project 2025 despite Trump’s lies to the contrary. A vote for Trump is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Please vote accordingly.