Project 2025: When a Moral Vision Becomes an Administrative Program
White Theology and White Power XII
Project 2025 can no longer be analyzed only as a proposal for what a future conservative administration might do. Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, and by 2026 a substantial number of policies pursued by his administration overlapped with recommendations contained in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. That does not prove that Project 2025 caused every action, that the administration adopted the entire document, or that every conservative policy now in effect originated there. Many proposals reflected longstanding conservative priorities or positions Trump had independently advocated. But the transition from blueprint to government makes the project more important theologically, not less.[1]
Project 2025 was never a systematic theology, denominational confession, or Seven Mountain manifesto. It was a presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation and a coalition of conservative organizations. Its architecture included a policy agenda, a personnel operation, training for prospective appointees, and implementation planning. Its Mandate for Leadership addressed the machinery of government in detail: the Executive Office of the President, cabinet departments, independent agencies, personnel authority, education, health policy, energy, national security, regulation, and much more.[2]
That institutional description should come before theological interpretation. If every conservative policy preference is labeled Christian nationalism, the term loses explanatory value. Lower taxes, deregulation, restrictions on administrative agencies, stronger presidential control, school choice, immigration enforcement, or energy policy can be defended for constitutional, economic, or political reasons that do not require Christian theology.
The more revealing question is narrower: What happens when a particular moral vision is translated into the operating system of the state?
The Mandate’s opening promises included restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life and protecting what it called “God-given individual rights.” In its health-policy recommendations, the document called for protection of faith-based programs and for maintaining a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family in relevant programs. Elsewhere it advocated extensive changes involving abortion, sexuality, gender, education, religious liberty, and federal administration.[3]
Supporters can reasonably argue that religious citizens do not surrender the right to advocate public policy because their moral convictions are informed by scripture. Catholics may oppose abortion through Catholic moral theology. Black churches have brought explicitly biblical claims about justice into American politics. Jewish advocates may reason from covenant, memory, or religious law. Secular humanists may argue from autonomy, equality, or human flourishing. Democratic deliberation has never been morally neutral.
The theological problem therefore does not begin with Christians participating in government. It begins when one contested Christian account of human beings, family, sexuality, authority, or national order becomes the presumptive definition through which government classifies everybody else.
That distinction becomes clearer when policy moves from speeches to administration. A sermon can persuade. A platform can inspire. An agency definition determines how a regulation is interpreted. A grant condition determines who receives money. A personnel rule determines who may be dismissed. An enforcement priority determines which conduct receives governmental attention. A data category determines which people the state can see. Administrative power turns moral language into consequences.
This is the feature of Project 2025 that deserves more theological attention. Its ambition was not merely to win an election or publish a conservative wish list. Heritage described the project as an effort to prepare policy, people, training, and an implementation plan so that a conservative president could act rapidly once in office. The project’s theory of change was therefore administrative from the beginning.[4]
The second Trump administration has made that question concrete. On his first day back in office, Trump ordered the restoration of greater presidential control over “policy-influencing” positions in the federal workforce. Other executive actions ordered the dismantling of federal DEI programs, rescinded prior equity initiatives, and established a government-wide definition of sex as male or female for executive-branch policy. In 2026 the administration extended its anti-DEI program into federal contracting. These policies have their own legal and political histories, and their existence does not prove that White House officials simply copied Project 2025. But the overlap between portions of the administration’s agenda and the Mandate is substantial and publicly documented.[5]
Early in the administration, a Washington Post analysis found that more than two dozen presidential directives resembled Project 2025 proposals. By April 2026, PBS reported an outside tracker’s estimate that 283 of 532 domestic Project 2025 recommendations had been initiated or completed. Such counts depend on methodological judgments and should not be mistaken for a neutral measure of causation. Still, they make one claim difficult to sustain: Project 2025 is no longer merely a hypothetical document with no relationship to governing practice.[6]
The theological question is not whether every one of those policies is wrong. That would simply replace analysis with partisanship. Some Christians may support eliminating DEI programs because they believe those programs classify people unfairly by race. Some feminists who are not Christian conservatives may support defining sex biologically in particular legal contexts. Some constitutional scholars favor stronger presidential supervision of the executive branch for reasons having little to do with religion. Serious criticism has to distinguish those arguments from theological claims.
The more difficult issue is the cumulative one. When policies concerning family, sexuality, education, abortion, race, religious liberty, and executive authority are integrated into a larger narrative of national restoration, administration can acquire moral meaning beyond ordinary policy change. Government is no longer simply choosing among competing rules. It can come to be understood as recovering the proper moral order of the nation.
That language of restoration should make theologians attentive. Restoration to what, and according to whose account of the good?
Every government necessarily acts on moral judgments. Laws against racial discrimination express moral judgments. Environmental laws express judgments about responsibility to future generations. Labor protections, civil-rights statutes, abortion laws, marriage laws, tax laws, and welfare programs all embody views about rights, obligations, harm, family, property, and human flourishing. There is no escape into a morally empty state.
Pluralist democracy asks a different question: whether government can pursue moral purposes while preserving equal citizenship for people who reject the majority’s moral or theological premises.
That is where religious liberty itself becomes a revealing test. Christian conservatives have often been correct to insist that religious liberty is more than permission to worship privately. Churches, schools, charities, businesses, and individuals can face genuine conflicts between law and conscience. A liberal society needs doctrines and institutions capable of protecting conscience.
But religious liberty becomes asymmetrical if it is defined primarily as the freedom of Christians to resist rules they reject while the state simultaneously narrows the freedom or standing of people whose identities, families, or convictions fall outside the preferred Christian moral framework. A theology of religious liberty should be strongest when it protects the dissenter one believes is wrong.
The same test applies to executive power. Project 2025 argued for stronger presidential direction of the executive branch and greater control over a bureaucracy its authors regarded as politically unaccountable. Supporters can ground that view in Article II and democratic accountability. Critics worry that weakening civil-service protections and concentrating control in the presidency can reduce institutional independence and make government easier to politicize.[7]
For this series, the decisive question is not which side wins an abstract debate over the unitary executive. It is whether Christians evaluate governmental power consistently. Would they endorse the same concentration of presidential authority if the president used it to advance a moral vision they considered profoundly wrong? A theology of power that celebrates institutional restraint under an opponent but discovers nearly unlimited executive energy under an ally has confused constitutional principle with political usefulness.
This is where Essay 12 connects to the Seven Mountains discussion. Project 2025 is not the administrative wing of the New Apostolic Reformation. The two should not be collapsed. Their organizations, theological vocabularies, constituencies, and methods differ. What they share is a question that has followed this series from Constantine forward: what happens when Christians stop thinking mainly about witness within society and begin thinking about the institutions capable of ordering society?
The answer cannot be that Christians should never govern. Nor can it be that Christian convictions must remain outside public policy. The stronger Christian answer is that power remains morally dangerous even when people we trust possess it.
That principle is deeply biblical. Israel’s kings were not exempt from prophetic judgment because they ruled Israel. David could be chosen and still be rebuked by Nathan. A ruler could accomplish a divine purpose without becoming morally self-authenticating. The biblical tradition does not make access to power proof of righteousness.
Project 2025 therefore matters to this series for a reason larger than the controversies surrounding any individual recommendation. It demonstrates how a moral vision becomes durable when it is embedded in offices, personnel systems, definitions, budgets, grants, regulations, and enforcement. Theology need not appear in every agency memorandum to shape the assumptions under which the machinery operates.
The theological task is consequently more demanding than asking whether Christians have obtained influence. Christians must ask what their influence becomes after it acquires administrative force—and whether they are willing to place the same moral and constitutional limits on their own side that they demand when power belongs to someone else.
The next essay turns to Donald Trump and the biblical figure of Cyrus. That analogy raises the personal version of the same problem. Project 2025 asks how Christians interpret institutions that advance their moral priorities. The Cyrus argument asks how they interpret the ruler who makes those priorities possible.
Notes
[1] Comparisons between Project 2025 and the second Trump administration show substantial overlap but should not be treated as proof that Project 2025 was the exclusive source of administration policy. Trump also campaigned on policies that overlapped with the Mandate, and the conservative policy traditions behind many proposals predated Project 2025.
[2] The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2023). Heritage described Project 2025 as a transition effort built around policy, personnel, training, and implementation planning.
[3] Mandate for Leadership, introduction and Department of Health and Human Services chapter. The document explicitly discusses “God-given” rights and recommends protecting faith-based recipients while maintaining a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family in relevant programs.
[4] Heritage’s own description emphasized assembling trained and vetted personnel and preparing an implementation agenda so a conservative administration could begin acting immediately.
[5] Executive actions issued beginning January 20, 2025 addressed policy-influencing civil-service positions, federal DEI programs, earlier equity initiatives, and federal definitions of sex. A March 2026 order extended the administration’s anti-DEI policy to federal contractors.
[6] A January 2025 Washington Post analysis identified Project 2025 similarities in 28 of 52 early presidential directives. In April 2026, PBS NewsHour reported that a Center for Progressive Reform tracker classified 283 of 532 domestic Project 2025 recommendations—53 percent—as initiated or completed. These figures measure identified policy overlap according to particular methodologies; they do not by themselves establish causation.
[7] In the Mandate’s Executive Office of the President chapter, Russ Vought argues for forceful presidential direction of the executive branch and criticizes the independence and power of the federal bureaucracy.
