Christian Nationalism builds on trends that I identified on this thread. Perry & Palin tied to dominion movement
Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently(7/06/2024) said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The plan is ambitious. The Mandate for Leadership is both specific in detail and vengeful in tone. Its central agenda is to impose a form of Christian nationalism (CN) on the United States. Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs. Christian nationalist ideas are woven through the plans of Project 2025 and the pages of Mandate for Leadership. Its thousands of recommendations include specific executive orders to be repealed or implemented. Laws, regulations, departments, and whole agencies would be abolished. It portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic.
Page 4 sets the tenor:
The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Presumably, First Amendment freedoms would be reserved for only those who agree with this dystopian view.
In addition to erasing the rights of women and minorities, the Mandate for Leadership:
- Expresses a special contempt for the LGBTQ+ community (103);
- Recognizes women primarily in their roles as wives or mothers;
- Recommends the elimination of the Head Start childcare program (482) despite the fact that for nearly six decades the program has helped low-income children and families with nutrition, education, and high-quality, affordable day care to prepare children for school and enable low-income parents to work. Indeed, Project 2025 suggests that the new administration should “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care” (486). It states that children who spend undefined “significant” time in day care experience “higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes.”
- Recommends banning abortion, ensuring that only pro-life government policy prevails, and outlaws the mailing of abortion-inducing medication (459);
- Portrays single motherhood as destroying families (4); and
- Identifies fatherlessness as the root of all evil, stating that fatherlessness is “one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts” (4).
Structural Change
The major means to bringing about such deep and lasting change is by eviscerating the federal civil service and enabling a president to fire 50,000 civil servants. Loyalists would be hired in their place to return the federal government to the patronage system (also known as a “spoils system”) that existed in the 19th century. Education and experience would be secondary to right-wing ideology. Loyalty to a president with conservative principles would become a prospective employee’s primary qualification.
In these and other ways, Project 2025’s vision for America would make the president a strongman. Institutions and departments that are now independent or answerable to Congress would instead be weakened or put under his control. Serving the public would become an afterthought. (Source: Kettering Foundation, August 19, 2024)
Only a couple months into Trump’s second term and we can see how closely he and his administration are sticking to the authoritarian playbook of CN.