Despite Donald Trump’s repeated insistence during the 2024 election that he knew nothing of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and was not planning on implementing any of its suggestions (even noting that some of its claims were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal”), the Trump transition has tapped a number of people linked to Project 2025 to serve in the incoming administration.
Trump’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell T. Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025. His presence doesn’t just speak to the influence that Project 2025 boosters can expect to enjoy during Trump’s second term. His appointment to the OMB also serves as a harbinger of the kind of religious rhetoric that is likely to suffuse the White House and the overall MAGA media landscape in 2025.
In private, Vought has stated the need to “rehabilitate Christian Nationalism.” In public, he has claimed that American “rights and duties” come from God. The think tank he heads, called the Center for Renewing America, drafted memos in early 2024 prioritizing a Christian nationalist agenda. Project 2025 employs similar rhetoric, emphasizing the centrality of Christianity to US policy and governance.
Much of what Vought says, and what Project 2025 echoes, aligns with the rhetoric of the New Apostolic Revolution, a far-right religious movement that has ties to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and seeks to enshrine biblical principle in US law. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a flag associated with the NAR hanging outside his congressional office.
There will, for very good reason, be a great deal of news coverage dedicated to the religious rhetoric employed by Vought and other Project 2025 contributors in and around the Trump Administration — including the rhetorical and policy overlaps between groups like the NAR and high-profile politicians like Speaker Johnson.
What journalists, academics, and cultural critics can expect of religious rhetoric in 2025 dovetails into what should be done about that rhetoric. Put very simply, commentators should not assume that religious-sounding language coming from Trump’s orbit is conventionally religious. Conversely, commentators should not assume that secular-sounding language coming from the Trump orbit is conventionally secular.
To tackle the first half of that assertion, a great deal of language that looks a lot like Christian Nationalism isn’t actually calling for theocracy; it is secular minoritarianism pushed by secular people, often linked to rightwing cable and other media with zero meaningful ties to the church or theological principle.
Even when the language is ostensibly advocating for biblically grounded governance, very basic assumptions about what the language means need closer interrogation.
Most critical is the assumption that Christian-inflected proclamations about the need to protect the family, Christianity, and America center on love of God and the related desire to spread the Christian faith. What I show in my forthcoming book with Mark Brockway is that this language often centers, instead, on hatred of an amalgamated, shape-shifting, ultimately invented liberal devil that maps, as convenient, onto “the left,” the Democratic Party, “elites” somehow aligned with Marxism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awokening.” Spreading the Christian faith isn’t the point; fighting the liberal devil is. This devil is ultimately secular, based on things like DEI initiatives and the existence of trans people, and is also the quasi-religious antagonist in a decades-old cosmic showdown between the ultimate good of “real” America and the ultimate evil of leftists hell-bent on tearing it asunder.
The centrality of the liberal devil, often explicitly couched in the language of evil, Satan, and demons, is what undercuts the equally inaccurate assumption that secular-sounding language targeting “the woke/radical left” or “transgender ideology” or, to quote Russell Vought, “a woke and weaponized” federal government is indeed wholly secular. These denunciations follow the same rhetorical pattern and contain the same apocalyptic fervor as those draped in the rhetoric of religion. The liberal devil is the same; the difference is whether people are using the word God to talk about it.
Attacks on the liberal devil — which can just as easily be directed against conservatives and Christians who run afoul of MAGA — is another trend we can expect to continue into 2025 and beyond. We will not be able to respond appropriately or fully appreciate the Battle of Revelation Lite being waged on Donald Trump’s behalf if we remain stuck in a binary position of religious or secular belief, religious or secular speech. What is happening, and will keep happening, is something else entirely. We need to start describing it as such.
Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.
