Both Christian nationalism and Trumpism share an underlying ideology of white supremacy, adherence to hegemonic gender norms, and the willingness to employ violence for political ends.
A nearly 900-page document, Project 2025 represents the culmination of the policy, personnel and training agenda of the conservative Heritage Foundation and the 52 conservative cosignatory groups, including Moms for Liberty, Family Research Council and the James Dobbs Foundation. Their work, plus that of the 140 former Trump administration officials the foundation enlisted to draft 25 of the 30 chapters of this tome, squarely places this handbook in the hands of incoming President Donald Trump.
Familiar names such as Peter Navarro, Ken Cuccinelli, Stephen Moore, Rick Dearborn, Russell Vought and Ben Carson make it clear that the first 180 days of a Trump administration would pursue the following four guideposts:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual right to enjoy “the blessings of liberty.”
Point 1 is a clear defense of white Christian nationalist limitations of ‘family’ to Christian nuclear families. Point 4 is less about rights and more a glorification of the free-market economy.
This manifesto follows the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 “Mandate for Leadership” (a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook, with more than 2,000 conservative policies) and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to inform the legislative agenda of the 1994 congressional campaign. This document clearly delineates the Foundation’s contemporary construction of the enemy:
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”
Project 2025 and White Christian Nationalism
Project 2025 is the result of decades-long organizing on the religious right, but the underpinning ideologies can be traced back to the colonization of the United States.
The current rise of white Christian nationalism in the United States reveals a troubling intersection of historical and contemporary ideologies that threaten democracy and social equality. This movement, rooted in the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery, established Euro-Christian superiority and gained momentum through opposition to pivotal events like the civil rights movement and critical Supreme Court decisions, particularly Brown v. Board of Education, Engel v. Vitale and Loving v. Virginia. These developments in civil rights protections for minorities galvanized many white Americans, framing racial and religious issues as assaults on freedom.
In the 1970s, figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Anita Bryant mainstreamed Christian nationalism, targeting LGBTQIA+ rights, discrimination protections for minorities, and reproductive autonomy under the guise of religious freedom. This trajectory intensified with the Reagan administration, which integrated Christian nationalist rhetoric into the Republican Party.
Today, organizations like the Heritage Foundation push agendas that institutionalize these values, aiming to reshape laws and policies to restrict constitutional freedoms.
Project 2025 exemplifies this effort, seeking to dismantle checks and balances and expand executive power while embedding Christian nationalist ideologies into American law. Funded by dark money from sources like the Koch brothers and DeVos family, this project threatens academic as well as personal freedoms and promotes a false narrative that America was founded as a Christian nation.
The election of Trump in 2016 further solidified the alliance between white Christian nationalists and the Republican Party. Although Trump has falsely stated that he is not connected to Project 2025 (his VP, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book), Trump’s Agenda 47 closely mirrors Project 2025’s core tenets. Apart from official connections, the connection between Christian nationalism and Trumpism underscores a shared ideology of white supremacy, adherence to hegemonic gender norms, and the willingness to employ violence for political ends.
The current legislative landscape—with anti-trans measures, immigration restrictions, bans on diversity initiatives, and attacks on bodily autonomy—illustrates the urgency of addressing these intertwined threats. As the Heritage Foundation shapes policy and political discourse, understanding the historical and ideological foundations of white Christian nationalism is crucial for those committed to feminist and social justice causes. This movement impacts marginalized communities and seeks to redefine the moral and cultural order in a way that undermines basic and vital democratic principles.
Theologies Behind White Christian Nationalism and Project 2025
While rulers and politicians have long used Christian theology to justify colonialism, domination and subjugation, a key factor behind white Christian nationalism and Project 2025 was R.J. Rushdoony’s mid-20th century promotion of dominionism, a theological idea that claims God has tasked Christians with taking dominion over society. While most conservative Christians would not identify themselves as dominionists, dominionism has made its way into much of contemporary evangelicalism.
Dominionism seeks to provide men (and we do mean men) with the greatest possible freedoms, absent a government that limits freedoms like our present one does. Within dominionism, most responsibility for society goes to the male-headed household and the church. Government’s role would be only to protect private property and punish capital offenses.
Instead, families and churches would institute Mosaic Law over a Christian nation. In this Christian nation, all biblical mandates (as read by dominionist Christian men) are still in effect unless specifically repudiated by Jesus or another Christian Testament writer. That means, for example, the death penalty for anyone from rebellious teenagers to astrologists to queer folks could be subjected to death by the government, simply for being who they are.
Dominionists conflate biblical and constitutional law and call for the repeal of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which outlaw slavery, grant full civil rights to ex-slaves, and grant political suffrage to all citizens. Dominionists don’t think slavery was necessarily a bad thing. In fact, they argue the Emancipation Proclamation was a disaster for enslaved people.
Additionally, dominionists advocate for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which granted political rights to women. The vote, they argue, should belong to the male head of the household who votes for the family.
Dominionism is non-democratic, arguing for a society governed by theocrats who determine implementation of biblical law. Within this theocratic vision, violence is acceptable. No regulations should exist on men carrying and using weapons against evildoers and those who enable them.
Alongside dominionism is the belief in Christian patriarchy within which women are subject to their husbands. Queer sexuality and gender identity are controlled and punished. Religion scholar Karen McCarthy Brown suggests that control of women is central within fundamentalist religions because women represent the threat of “the Other” within. For dominionists, that leads to distinct and direct policies to keep women (and LGBTQIA+ people) under men’s control.
Project 2025 and Public Policy for Women
One of the most devastating actions Project 2025 outlines might be getting the least attention: the plan for the complete capture of our bureaucracy and civil service by the far right.
The functioning of our democracy has come to rely on a professional, apolitical and well-trained bureaucracy. It makes the promise of the government to serve all citizens more equally real.
Women’s rights movements—ranging from voting rights, to protections for widows and children, to reproductive rights, to financial rights—were able to work through this professionalized system to guarantee benefits and rights that were promised by the constitution but not provided by legislative bodies.
The majority of people sharply disagree with Project 2025’s gender and sexuality discrimination agenda.
Project 2025, with its aim of creating a database of only those loyal to a narrow white Christian nationalist agenda, will repoliticize our civil service and reinterpret laws to discriminate against women and other sexual, gender, and racial minorities. This occurs in lockstep with the plan to fill all open judicial system positions with judges who also hold such views, and there will be no or very limited legal recourse to challenge these outcomes.
This is also a playbook successfully shared by far-right autocrats worldwide, including Victor Orbán of Hungary, who Trump openly admires.
One example of how tentative progress has been for women’s right is the case of marital rape. Until 1976 in all states, marital rape was not illegal, and it was not criminalized in all states until 1993. To this day, in 19 states, there are exemptions for husbands from marital rape. In many of these states, if a husband drugs and rapes his incapacitated wife, he will not be charged with rape. This is, for example, the case in South Carolina. Next, imagine if that wife is pregnant from being raped by her husband and wants a divorce and an abortion; she would not qualify for the rape exception to the six-week ban in place in that state. This illustrates the urgency of framing these issues as recognizing women’s personhood.
Despite this grim picture, democratic success is within reach—as we see throughout Europe. Voters in Poland pulled back from the brink of a slide into autocracy, and the other parties in Germany refused to enter a coalition with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won significant seats.
In general, many Western European democracies benefit from a system where it is incredibly difficult to capture the full government due to proportional representation. The U.S. system with its majoritarian winner-take-all electoral system and the electoral college does not have that same safety mechanism.
But we do have an incredibly strong base of our own resistance: our people. In research done by Catherine Bolzendahl, we see that the majority of people sharply disagree with Project 2025’s gender and sexuality discrimination agenda.
The majority of the country sees abortion rights as a package of women’s and family rights. Americans who are the most supportive of abortion rights are the most supportive of paid family leave. Americans want both rights simultaneously.
Project 2025 is the reassertion of an old-fashioned hegemonic masculinity vastly out of step with the American people—even among self-identified conservatives. Men want to be partners, supporters and protectors but reject claims that men should embody traditional notions such as using physical aggression in various situations, refusing to do housework, and being emotionally distant.
The rights of women (and other minority groups) succeed in step with the progress of human rights. Agendas like those outlined in Project 2025 are a direct effort to destroy that progress, but the progress that has been made in these past 50 years cannot be turned back—and we expect those gains will be a critical factor in shaping outcomes, regardless of the election outcome.
