I’m not sure when people–okay, mostly Christian people–began using the term “faith-based” to mean “religious,” but like so many other euphemisms being thrown around these days, the term is inaccurate. Many of the earth’s religions aren’t “faith-based,” they are works based, focused upon behavior rather than belief. The term “Judeo-Christian” is a similar contrivance, a term that Christianizes in what may–or may not–have originally been an effort to appear religiously inclusive.
Whatever the original motivation for these terms, Project 2025 makes it quite clear that the “faith” that makes one entitled to call oneself an American is Christianity, and that any lingering “Judeo” part of “Judeo-Christian” is irrelevant.
A report in The Guardian focuses upon that element of Project 2025, using a current discriminatory law in Tennessee as an example of the approach favored by that document. In Tennessee, a Jewish couple who wanted to foster a child were rejected by a Christian state-funded foster care placement agency that informed them it only provided adoption services to “prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”.
Under First Amendment jurisprudence as it has existed thus far, taxpayer dollars cannot be used to favor some religions over others, or–for that matter–religion over non-religion. (Granted, Justice Alito is probably salivating at the prospect of overturning that long line of precedents…) If Trump is elected, however, and the agenda proposed in Project 2025 begins to be realized, Americans can kiss genuine religious liberty good-bye.
The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
According to a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, quoted in the article, the image of family portrayed by Project 2025 is “blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.”
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
That last paragraph sounds exactly like a speech by Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, currently running for U.S. Senate. Banks–and his clone Micah Beckwith, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor–who represent the core of the MAGA effort to remake the United States into a White Christian theocracy.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
Trump’s effort to distance himself from Project 2025 runs into several inconvenient facts: his choice of a Vice-Presidential candidate who wrote the document’s introduction, the number of cronies who participated in its drafting, and the GOP’s official platform, which echoes several of its themes.
When President Biden says that America’s constitutional democracy is on the ballot in November, he wasn’t engaging in hyperbole.
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