Watkins is the best selling author of the memoir "Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-- Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace"
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Since January, I have been writing about Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy document spearheaded by the far-right Heritage Foundation. Unlike many who cover this work from a policy perspective, I write about it as a Christo-fascist manifesto to transform our democracy into a Christian Nationalist theocracy.
Why am I qualified to make such a claim?
I am a product of Christian Nationalism. In the 1970s and ‘80s, my parents joined a Christian Nationalist church in rural South Carolina. They enrolled me in its kindergarten, and I spent 13 years studying history and science from textbooks printed by Bob Jones University and watching my pastor affiliate our church with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
During my formative years, I was indoctrinated in the Christian Nationalist belief system that underpins today’s Republican Party. Christian Nationalist Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito have infiltrated our legislative and judicial branches. According to the nonpartisan research firm PRRI, Christian Nationalism has solid support in all 50 states.
But what is Christian Nationalism?
Christian Nationalists operate with several core beliefs:
- America was founded as a white Christian nation.
- The founders were Christians who steeped our Constitution in the Bible.
- The Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God.
- Because it is inerrant and infallible, the Bible is God’s perfect law and the basis for their definition of morality.
- Whenever a human law conflicts with God’s perfect law, it is a Christian Nationalist’s job to overrule the human law and replace it with God’s law.
- Many believe God cursed Black and Brown people in the story of Noah, aligning followers with white supremacists. Southern proponents of chattel slavery promoted this idea, and Southern pastors continued preaching it after the South lost the Civil War.
- They are indoctrinated to never compromise, making Christian Nationalists dreadful politicians. They believe everyone must follow God’s perfect law to the letter.
In my early 30s, a confrontation with a family member caused me to question my Christian Nationalist upbringing for the first time, leading me on a decade-long journey to unravel this indoctrination. Years of study, personal growth and therapy have prepared me for my current mission: To educate Americans on what Christian Nationalists mean when they use words and why so many of Project 2025’s words are coded Christo-fascist language.
Take Project 2025’s “Four Promises.”
"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 rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls 'the Blessings of Liberty.'”
As we unpack their four promises, keep their definition of morality in mind: The Bible is God’s perfect law. Anything that violates God’s perfect law is immoral and must be destroyed.
Let’s examine what that means in the first promise.
“The next conservative president must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics — the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”
The use of the words “natural” and “ unnatural” is deliberate. It means to use the Bible as the basis for our laws and is drawn from Biblical verses (Romans 1:26-27 KJV):
“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
Thus, the Christian Nationalist definition of family is one man married to one unrelated woman with as many children as God gives them. To them, anything else is unnatural and therefore immoral. Project 2025 honors this definition of the family throughout.
In the second promise, the authors make one thing clear: They must dismantle the administrative state to force every American to live by their Christian Nationalist interpretation of the Bible.
They own this stance in Project 2025:
“The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite. Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored.”
Christo-fascist Republicans do not acknowledge any law that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible. They don’t care about an issue’s popularity with voters; they don’t pay attention to polls. They will install loyalists who will carry out Christian Nationalist directives and will ignore the will of the American people.
In many red states, this is already happening. From abortion bans to restrictions on transgender rights to book bans and more, gerrymandered red states are forcing their citizens to live in the country Project 2025 envisions.
In the third promise, many readers focus on far-right dreams to reject and deport as many immigrants as possible. But they miss this Christian Nationalist gem:
“Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic.”
The “book of human nature” is the Bible.
For years, liberals have asked me why the right hates education and expertise. I can’t speak for everyone on the right, but I can speak for Christian Nationalists, who hate education and expertise because they believe everything humans need to know is contained in the Bible, the book of human nature.
The fourth promise is a masterclass in hidden Christian Nationalist language. It reads “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
“When the Founders spoke of the ‘pursuit of Happiness,’” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of Blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like. Many find happiness through their work. Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world. Still others find themselves happiest in their local voluntary communities of friends, their neighbors, their civic or charitable work.
"The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
When Christian Nationalists speak of living a good life or living one’s best life, they don’t mean career success, upgrading a home or car, work promotions, or dream vacations. Living a good life, in Christian Nationalist terms, is living a holy life, a godly life, the Christian life.
Hence, they bury a Biblical concept from Romans — to do not what we want but what we ought — into their fourth promise. This concept is based on the idea that all humans are born with flawed urges. Fighting those urges means doing what we ought, i.e. their interpretation of what God commands in the Bible, whether or not we follow their faith.
Project 2025 is packed with coded Christian Nationalists’ language. For decades, they have learned how to transform their religious zealotry into benign words and phrases that resonate with voters. Americans would be wise to learn this language and refuse to vote for those who speak it.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
