Several members of the U.S. Congress unveiled plans June 11 to respond to Project 2025, a plan by Christian Nationalist groups to impose theocratic laws on the country.
The counteroffensive, titled “The Stop Project 2025 Task Force,” is being led by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
“The stakes just couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told the Associated Press.
He likened Project 2025’s agenda to “a Blitzkrieg” and said it’s vital that lawmakers respond.
“If we’re trying to react to it and understand it in real time, it’s too late,” Huffman told the AP. “We need to see it coming well in advance and prepare ourselves accordingly.”
Project 2025 is being spearheaded primarily by the Heritage Foundation but has been endorsed by a panoply of Christian Nationalist organizations. It’s a wide-ranging plan, 900 pages in all, that covers all areas of governance, but one section specifically singles out church-state issues.
The plan calls for a nationwide system of school vouchers, severe restrictions on reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, and maintains that the federal government should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” which it refers to as “heterosexual, intact marriage.”
Elsewhere, the plan endorses discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in foster care programs and calls for eliminating the government’s ability to close houses of worship during pandemics. It even endorses curbing work and commerce on Sundays, asserting, “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day. … Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism.”
Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser welcomed the announcement of the task force’s creation.
“We applaud Reps. Huffman, Lieu, Pocan, DeGette, Raskin, Jayapal and Barragán for forming a task force to combat Project 2025, an existential threat to American democracy,” Laser said in a statement.
“Project 2025 is a detailed playbook for restructuring the federal government in order to accomplish the policy goals of Christian Nationalists, including banning abortion and restricting birth control access, rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and erasing marriage equality, eliminating the Department of Education and diverting public funds to private religious schools, and redefining religious freedom as a license to discriminate,” Laser added. “If we allow Project 2025 to be implemented, Christian Nationalists will trample the wall of church-state separation and upend our democracy. We must fight this un-American agenda and all the ways Christian Nationalists are trying to impose their narrow religious beliefs on all of us.”
For more on Project 2025, see “Destroying Life and Liberty” in the June 2024 issue of Church & State.