Project 2025: American Mythmaking
Project 2025 is a policy text produced by the Heritage Foundation that offers a systematic overhaul of the Executive Office of the President and all related agencies, departments, and functions. The text’s opening remarks describe the need to not only “rescue the country from the grip of the radical left,” but also to put the right people in place who can craft and carry out this agenda “on day one of the next conservative administration” (About Project 2025 | Project 2025).
There is the temptation to suggest that the policy rhetoric of Project 2025 is not worth discussing, on the grounds that it will never see the light of day (even with a conservative presidential victory.) I would argue that this not only ignores the reality of current Supreme Court activity, but also fails to take into account how organizations like the Heritage Foundation (and a bevy of pseudo-religious advocacy groups) describe their work. The unpacking of the marriage between certain far-right political and religious interests is central to developing a response that not only takes seriously the effort to undermine American democracy, but also seeks to create healthy discourse about the ways in which our democratic systems can learn and grow beyond this inflection point.
At the outset, a pertinent question arises: what exactly constitutes the “far-right?” Although scholarly views differ, there is some consensus that in the American context, racial animus and an active commitment to white supremacy are consistent features (Azani et al.). Scholars trace the development of the contemporary far-right movement from “anti-government sentiment created by the Vietnam War” (Azani et al.), and note that the emergence of the far-right movement into mainstream political consciousness occurred through not only official embrace by political elites and parties, but by the dissemination of far-right discourse through the internet.
Key to understanding this rhetoric is that it is not new. The evolution of America’s far-right, especially in its relationship to American Christianity, finds at least one of its origin points in the late 1960’s, when an all-white private school was denied tax-exempt status for refusing to desegregate their student body (Haberman). The later revocation of tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University, who had denied entrance to non-white students through erroneous interpretations of scripture, eventually led to lengthy Supreme Court activity, where ultimately segregationist policies had to be abandoned.
The sin of white supremacy, especially in the American Christian context, is not new. In his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass noted that:
“We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.”
That the effort to defend segregationist policies persisted as long as it did reveals a belief among some far-right religious leaders that conservative presidential administrations would reverse gains made in areas like racial and gender equality. Early attempts during the Reagan Administration to provide covering fire for institutions like Bob Jones University led to fierce public backlash, resulting in eventual Supreme Court rulings that granted the IRS authority to deny tax exemptions (Haberman).
At the same time, early attempts by far-right religious leaders to organize faith communities against reproductive rights were surprisingly unsuccessful, primarily because the Burger Court had situated the right to abortion as “belonging to the private sphere” (Dowland). Nearly half of Southern Baptists polled in the immediate years following Roe v. Wade had no issue with medical access to abortion care, and many conservative voters were generally suspicious of attempts to undermine individual rights. Along similar lines, many conservative Christian communities were open to (if not openly supportive of) the feminist movements of the early to mid-1970’s, with even Christianity Today endorsing the Equal Rights Amendment in a 1974 editorial (Dowland).
However, by the late 1970’s, far-right Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly would succeed in organizing elements of American Christianity into the Moral Majority, a political/religious organization that opposed reproductive rights and the Equal Rights Amendment on the grounds that they disrupted the sanctity of the “nuclear” family. Although earlier efforts to ground their movement in the defense of segregation and in opposition to reproductive rights had failed, their invocation of “family” dovetailed nicely with other mythmaking elements of American society.
We see the echoes of this activity in the portions of Project 2025 that deal directly with family and education. Section 14 states that every human being “possesses inherent dignity and worth…from the moment of conception,” while section 11 calls for the elimination of all federal involvement in the administration of our educational systems, curiously rooting the problem in congressional activity that attempted to address achievement gaps produced from our long history of systemic discrimination. The denial of reproductive rights and access to an equal education under the law are not new developments.
One implication of this analysis is that what constitutes a far-right faith has nothing to do with Christianity, but rather is the infiltration of certain ideologies of fear and hate into every day religious practice. Another question that merits further study is whether the terms “conservative” or “progressive” have any real theological content.
As this blog series is only meant to begin the conversation, much is left to be discussed. Up next will be an exploration of the ongoing erosion of the separation of church and state, the non-Christian notion of the “nuclear” family, as well as the rise of Christian nationalism, especially in the post 9/11 context.
Peace,
Jeremy
Jeremy Langill
Executive Minister
Rhode Island State Council of Churches
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