Project 2025

by Dr. David Sanders

I have a general rule when it comes to the length of books I am willing to read. I don’t remember how this personal rule started. It may have been the three times I tried to read the entirety of Robert Pirsig’s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in high school. There have been a few exceptions, but on two attempts, I didn’t persevere all the way through William Powers’ 612-page opus The Overstory. The only book I read cover to cover besides the 1,000+ page Torah, was the 900 page scholarly biography of Shabbatai Tzvi (The Mystical Messiah), by the preeminent scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem.  It was a fascinating academic inquiry into the messianic aspirations of this false Jewish messiah, whose eventual apostasy in 1666 led to a cataclysm for Jews the world over.

The Heritage Foundation has recently released its 900-page tomb, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is being referred colloquially as “Project 2025.” I will not be breaking my rule to read it from cover to cover. I would commend you to read, as I did, a few chapters, and in particular chapter 14 (some 50 pages) in which Roger Severino lays out a robust agenda for the Department of Health and Human Services (renamed the Department of Life) to “protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities.” This robust agenda is in part a political manifesto and more so, a fundamentalist religious desideratum that assails, among other rights, the reproductive rights and choices of women as well as the rights of gays and lesbians to marry and form families.

The ideologues behind “Project 2025” and the new “America First” are gathering bricks for the reconstruction of what they call conservative walls and laws and simultaneously wielding a sledgehammer to laws that reflect the long-standing Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state.

Why has that wall of separation been so essential to the experiment we call democracy? While religion can be a unifying force of love and acceptance it has proven, time and again, and in America as well, to be tyrannical, especially regarding the rights of women and minorities. Jefferson, and many of the founders of America, despite their patriarchal attitudes, were prescient enough to not want to privilege any religion and its laws as a mandate for a country dedicated to freedom and preserving the rights of all its citizens.

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people,” said Jefferson while serving as President of the United Sates, “which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

When women’s rights are subjugated, so falters the ideals of democratic values. When minorities rights are suppressed, so fails the value of democratic ideals. When the separation of church and state is not upheld, the interests of those who see themselves as the zealots of divine truth, and often divine retribution, ascend and control others.

Read Chapter 14 and whatever other of the 30 chapters of Mandate for Leadership. Catch your attention. You will find the authors of this 900-page tomb, lamenting against the freedoms Jefferson and others envisioned for an America they could not have foreseen, but inspired. The evolution of consciousness is not a straightforward path.

What we can be certain of is the necessary upholding of human rights which begins with granting equality to those whose judgments and choices are defined by their own moral compass or in accord with the religious doctrine they follow.

That is what is first about America—as far back as 1791, the first words of the Bill of Rights states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those freedoms come first.