The fears around Project 2025 were overblown by the Harris campaign, and that may be dangerous.
In the 2024 election, talk of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was ubiquitous among liberal voters. Kamala Harris pressed Donald Trump on the issue during their debate, and Democrats even placed political advertisements about Project 2025 in pornography websites and dating apps. Late night hosts like Kenan Thompson and John Oliver delivered bits about it to tens of millions of Americans.
Kaleb Graves
This focus on Project 2025 seemed like a good strategic move for the election. Few Americans are the kind of Christian fundamentalists who actually want Project 2025 to be law. By portraying it as Trump’s agenda, Democrats hoped moderate voters and disillusioned progressive voters would be spooked into voting for Harris.
As I write this on Inauguration Day, the start of the Trump administration, it is clear this strategy was not enough. The Trump-Vance ticket won all seven swing states and even the popular vote. But I do not just think the Project 2025 strategy was an electoral failure. I think it has given us an inaccurate image of the Trump administration and the next four years.
Project 2025 is not Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s playbook. That claim was a questionably effective campaign strategy, and it does not live up to careful scrutiny. At its core, the MAGA coalition is not a Christian nationalist movement. It is a populist movement, pulling together disparate groups with contradictory interests into an easy narrative about their fight against “the elite,” dubbed “the Deep State.” This coalition includes technocrats, New Age seekers and members of other world religions.
“It has given us an inaccurate image of the Trump administration and the next four years.”
It can be easy for anti-Christian nationalism followers of Jesus to miss the religious pluralism of the MAGA coalition. We spend a great deal of our time in conflict with Christian nationalism, and most of us have experienced its harm. It lives rent free at the forefront of our psyche. Christian nationalism and Project 2025 may represent problems we see daily, but that alone does not make them the MAGA ideology and gameplan. In fact, the other MAGA religious factions would not benefit from implementing Project 2025.
For example, followers of non-Christian world religions also make up a large portion of MAGA world. Trump influencer and misogynist Andrew Tate is a convert to Islam. Ben Shapiro and Randy Fine are notable Jewish Trump supporters. Trump government appointments Kash Patel, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard all identify as Hindu. Second Lady Usha Vance also is Hindu, and she leads an interfaith household with her allegedly Christian nationalist husband JD.
There also is a sizable New Age, “spiritual but not religious,” demographic within the MAGA coalition. These seekers were sucked into a world of conspiracies through some portion of the QAnon Great Awakening Map. This popular online chart, created by a self-proclaimed Buddhist Trump supporter, lists a number of New Age paths to MAGA extremism including psychedelics, yoga, psychics, crystals, Taoism, meditation, astrology, holistic medicine and organic foods. The convicted January 6 insurrectionist and “MAGA Shaman” Jake Angeli is a notorious example of this coalition, as he justified storming the Capitol on spiritual grounds.
Technocrats make up a third sizable non-Christian minority in the MAGA coalition. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs like them are not fundamentalist Christians. They are believers in Great Man Transhumanism. They see themselves as larger-than-life heroes, prophets chosen by fate whose superior intellect and vision will save (or at least remake) the world. Like wealthy oligarchs who have gone before them, they even believe they may conquer death with enough money and scientific progress.
“Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs like them are not fundamentalist Christians.”
If Project 2025 actually were implemented, these factions of the MAGA coalition would revolt. Psychedelic drug and marijuana advocates like Joe Rogan or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now Trump insiders, and they would throw a fit if Project 2025’s proposed intensification of the War on Drugs went into effect. Likewise, multiple cryptocurrency advocates and technocrats like Elon Musk would be furious if Project 2025’s proposed return to the fiscal gold or other commodity standard was realized. Anyone whose faith is not a particular kind of Christian fundamentalism would simply not stand for living in America in which they were subservient to the whims of the Heritage Foundation.
A populist coalition like that of Donald Trump and JD Vance can only survive by trying to keep its diverse constituencies happy, and Project 2025 or another Christian nationalist agenda would fail to do so. Much of it directly contradicts the interests of powerful allies. Implementing Project 2025 would kill Trump’s contradictory coalition.
Instead of seeing Project 2025 as a playbook, those of us in the resistance need to identify policies within it that are not unique to it. These policies would meet the self-interest of all diverse power players within the Trump administration. This likely includes loyalty tests for federal workers, anti-transgender legislation, cuts to social programs, and inhumane waves of brutal deportations.
The Harris campaign looked down on this analysis of Project 2025’s relationship to a hypothetical Trump-Vance administration. It was not politically expedient. However, the election season has long passed; the second term of President Donald J. Trump is no longer hypothetical.
While the threat of fundamentalist Christian nationalism is real, and many of Trump’s allies do support Project 2025, we cannot view it with tunnel vision. To effectively love our neighbor by defying what comes next, we need to have a clear, full view of the new government, its power players and the policies that fulfill their demands. To do this, we need to look beyond the rhetoric surrounding Christian nationalism and see the big picture.
Kaleb Graves is a CBF minister and educator living in North Carolina. He earned a master of divinity degree from Duke Divinity School in 2023 and is currently pursuing a master of arts degree in psychology.
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