How Does Project 2025 Compare to the Beloved Community?

If you’ve been following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, you’ve likely heard of Project 2025.  

The project, created by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, rose to the top of the headlines once again this week when it was reported that the director of the project, Paul Dans, was stepping down and that the project wouldn’t be drafting any new policy ideas. This news arrived after former President Donald Trump and his campaign repeatedly tried to distance themselves from the project in increasingly aggressive ways. But what is this project in the first place?  

First unveiled in April 2023, and endorsed by more than 100 conservative organizations, Project 2025 is a 922-page document that serves as a to-do list for the next conservative president to accomplish. Activists, journalists, and many religious leaders have been warning the public for months about what they see as some of Project 2025’s more extreme policy proposals and the ways in which the blueprint would push our nation toward autocracy and Christian nationalism. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts even said, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the Left allows it to be.” It’s troubling that many on the far-Right are determined to enact this extreme agenda, even if for some that means violence.

While I’m encouraged that this policy agenda has now been deemed too politically toxic for the Trump campaign, the inescapable reality is that several parts of the 2025 agenda are identical to his campaign’s policy promises, including commitments around mass deportations, closing down the Department of Education, politicizing the Justice Department, and more. And the link between Heritage proposals and Republican administration policies is not new. Heritage Foundation proposals issued prior to previous Republican administrations have often been similar to what those administrations have actually done in office. Perhaps even more to the point, about 140 former Trump administration officials helped shape Project 2025 — or even wrote parts of it. These include six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries, four of his nominees to ambassadorships, several of his immigration officials, and his first deputy chief of staff.

In an explainer piece, Vox breaks down Project 2025’s priorities into three main areas: Concentrating power in the presidency, longtime conservative priorities, and a hardline religious-right agenda. 

As I said in my most recent book, A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community, our country needs to move beyond our broken and polarized politics to a shared moral vision — one that is grounded in a larger story of us, rooted in our common civic and religious values, and is capable of bringing people from across political and cultural persuasions together as one nation. The most promising moral vision for our country today is the same concept that animated the 20th-century’s Civil Rights movement: the Beloved Community. In a Beloved Community, everyone is equally valued and is able to thrive locally and nationally, and our growing diversity is embraced as a strength rather than something to be feared. In other words, a nation in which our promise of “liberty and justice for all” becomes a reality for all. 

Christians and people of all faith backgrounds (and no faith background) can and should disagree on the best ways to enact what each of us value most. But I fail to see any biblical justification for the vast majority of the proposals laid out by Project 2025. At a time when competing platforms and visions about the future of the U.S. are being issued across the political spectrum, I want to take the time to see how Project 2025’s priorities and prescriptions stack up to what I see as the principles — or Beatitudes — of the Beloved Community. 

Inequity vs. the imago dei 

My vision of the Beloved Community is to build a nation in which neither punishment nor privilege is viciously attached to one’s race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ability, or any other category of human difference that’s been used to divide and exclude. It’s creating a nation where everyone matters, everyone belongs, and everyone can thrive. That starts with commitments that honor the image of God, the imago dei, in each and every person, and the recognition of our mutual interdependence.

Project 2025 so often tramples on these commitments by seeking to eliminate the Department of Education; undermine Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work throughout the government; and roll back progress around women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. While I share the desire to strengthen families, the plan has a narrow vision of what families should look like and opposes policies that would alleviate many of the economic pressures and inequities that are hurting families of all types. Project 2025 has plans for major cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net programs. This is incompatible with my view that the Beloved Community requires us to work toward a nation and world that achieves dignity for all, in line with the biblical mandate to prioritize the welfare of the widow, orphan, immigrant, and people experiencing poverty. 

Exclusion vs. welcome 

When it comes to other longtime conservative priorities, my own sense of what it would take to build the Beloved Community often clashes with Project 2025’s wish list. For example, one of the Beatitudes of the Beloved Community is a commitment to radical welcome. As I say in A More Perfect Union: “In our best moments, America has been a refuge for the persecuted and downtrodden, believing that our strength derives from our compassion and commitment to radical welcome.” This posture should inspire efforts to transform our immigration system by providing an earned pathway to citizenship to undocumented immigrants, addressing the root causes of migration, reforming our asylum system to more efficiently process new cases, and implementing humane efforts to strengthen effective security at our border. In contrast, Project 2025 calls for measures such as banning non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing, even if they live with a citizen; creating a new “border and immigration agency”; resurrecting Trump’s border wall; and deputizing the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally. 

Environmental destruction vs. environmental stewardship 

Environmental stewardship is crucial to building the Beloved Community. Instead of the false theology of dominion, God commands that we serve and protect the earth, as articulated in Genesis: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (2:15). In the face of environmental degradation and rapid climate change, this commitment requires combatting environmental racism and reducing our carbon emissions. So, I note with alarm that Project 2025 aims to roll back environmental regulations and deprioritize the fight against climate change, in part by breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. 

Centralizing power vs. healing public trust 

If Project 2025 came to fruition, the presidency would hold more concentrated, unchecked power. The proposed policies would take power away from career federal civil servants — those who are not appointed by any particular administration and cannot be easily fired. Instead, it would give that power to political appointees — those more likely to go along with the president’s actions, since the president can dismiss them at any time, for any reason.  

The plan would also move the Justice Department, along with all of its law enforcement arms, like the FBI, directly under presidential control and would further undermine voting rights. 

Given Trump’s documented authoritarian rhetoric and instincts, these Project 2025 recommendations would embolden and enable authoritarianism. They also run directly counter to my view that building the Beloved Community in the U.S. will require us to revitalize and reinvent our democracy. As Christians, we should be wary of efforts to remove the checks and balances that enable us to restrain the abuse of power. Jesus consistently confronted abuse of power, wherever it cropped up: He condemned the greed of merchants in the temple, called out the hypocrisy of religious leaders, and challenged the brutality of Roman soldiers.

Instead of consolidating power at the top of the government, we must empower all Americans by fortifying voting rights and access, ensuring that we have a professionalized and depoliticized federal workforce, and increasing accountability for those in power. In A More Perfect Union, I warn that we need to move away from politicians of either party who prioritize “rapacious partisanship or cult-of-personality loyalty,” and counsel that it would be crucial in the years ahead for people of all political stripes to focus on “healing public trust and revitalizing the norms and institutions that are necessary for civic health.” In contrast, Project 2025 would push our nation toward autocracy rather than a healthier and more inclusive democracy. 

This is only a snapshot of the extreme Project 2025 agenda, a platform that seems more rooted in nativism, xenophobia, and ethno- and Christian nationalism than in the core values and priorities of Jesus. In Matthew 25, Jesus doesn’t mince words in proclaiming that both individuals and nations will ultimately be judged by how we treat and care for immigrants as well as people who are hungry, imprisoned, dealing with sickness, and many other forms of hardship. It is time that Christians of all stripes work together in the U.S. to advocate for polices and priorities that are consistent with those priorities and the moral vision of the Beloved Community. Only then can we become a country where we protect everyone’s dignity and freedoms, defend and uplift the most vulnerable, advance the common good, and embrace our nation’s growing racial diversity and religious pluralism.