(Second in a series)

The Heritage Foundation’s proposals in Project 2025 for hijacking the federal government in a new Donald Trump administration includes injecting religion into all aspects of American life to realize a long-held dream of Christian nationalists.

Russell Vought, a leading force behind the plan, who served in Trump’s first administration, was secretly recorded last month by a Centre for Climate Reporting team posing as wealthy donors saying that conservatives have been “too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation.” U.S. laws “are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

Vought, who heads the Center for Renewing America (CRA), claims that the U.S. “was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life,” Politico reported. He wrote in Newsweek that, as a Christian nation, “our rights and duties are understood to come from God. It is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state but not to the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.”

Christianity came with the 102 English settlers on the Mayflower on Nov. 11, 1620. They were Puritans and Separatists following John Calvin’s theology who came not because they were abandoning Christianity but to break with the Church of England. But, even then, the matter of faith was not fully settled.

Sixteen years later, Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, was banned from Massachusetts Bay for declaring that government has no right to interfere in religious matters (or confiscate Indigenous lands). Williams, who abandoned Puritanism and became a Baptist, went on to establish what became the state of Rhode Island where people of all faiths were welcomed. He called for “a wall or hedge of separation” between what he described as “the wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church.”

Of course, Christianity was not the only religion when the settlers landed. The Indigenous peoples had their own faiths but they were considered heathen savages who should be exterminated to make way for the people of God. Africans had their own forms of worship, including Islam, but they were regarded as being cursed in the Bible and could be justifiably enslaved.

That intolerance informs the demonizing of migrants, who are mostly “non-white.” They are seen as the existential threat to the society that grew from the early settlement, especially by Christians who became nationalists. Most migrants are Christians but Trump dubs them murderers, rapists and the insane who are “poisoning the blood” of European Americans.

Christianity remains overwhelmingly dominant, numbering about 230 million in a population of 330 million, and they worship in some 350,000 churches. But Christianity is only one of about 350 faiths in the country. It has never been an official religion – unlike, for example, in Iran, a theocracy with a legal system based on Sharia whose authority derives from the Qur’an, Muslims’ holy book.

That is because, while the U.S. Constitution does not mandate separation of church and state, the First Amendment, which was ratified in 1791, does. It states, among things: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — the Establishment Clause.

“The idea of separation of church and state ensures the government cannot exercise undue influence over Americans’ spiritual and religious lives,” journalist David Callaway, wrote in Freedom Forum. “From ending school mandated prayer to banning the government from coercing Americans to participate in religious activities, the wall of separation has been an essential tool in building a freer democracy. And this uniquely American approach has resulted in one of the most religiously diverse nations in history.”

But, Callaway noted, the Establishment Clause does not bar religion from politics or public life: “People are free to bring their religious convictions into the public square precisely because the government must treat all faiths equally. This includes politicians who are free to express their religious beliefs — but not to sponsor legislation based solely on religious convictions.”

Vought and others are not proposing American Sharia but something close to it. They insist that political authority must flow from the Bible. They argue that Americans are losing their religious grounding, creating a “crisis of belief brought on by social and technological change and by growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution,” posing a threat to “Protestant Christianity, the dominant American creed.”

In response, Callaway wrote, “A loose coalition of Protestant ministers began to style themselves as ‘fundamentalists’ – defenders of Christian orthodoxy and foes of modernism. Their aim was to return the nation to God.”

The Establishment Clause itself came under attack in 1925 in Tennessee by state lawmaker John Washington Butler, a clerk for a group of “primitive Baptists.” He introduced a bill, which became law, forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” including “that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

The “Butler Act” was challenged in court after the authorities charged John Thomas Scopes, a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, with a misdemeanor for using a state-approved textbook “that included a short passage on evolution,” Michael Luo wrote in a New Yorker book review.

Scopes was convicted but the Tennessee Supreme Court voided the conviction on a technicality. Also, the Legislature later repealed the Butler Act and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against another anti-evolution law in Arkansas. The Justices affirmed that the First Amendment “mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”

Luo was reviewing Brenda Wineapple’s new book, “Keeping the Faith.” In her preface, she argued that the Scopes case had put democracy on trial — “As it would be again in our time: teachers being told what or how to teach; science regarded as an out-of-control, godless shibboleth; books tossed out of schools and libraries; loyalty oaths; and white supremacists promising that a revitalized white Protestant America would lead its citizens out of the slough of moral and spiritual decay to rise again, regardless of what or whose rights and freedoms might be trampled.”

Scopes was just a temporary setback, Wineapple wrote, and fundamentalism “would resurface, over and over, during that century and decidedly during the next.” In fact, it has been reborn “as a revanchist, militant force” that “partly underpins the cultural conflict that threatens American democracy today.” That “cultural conflict” recently produced a Louisiana law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools and a directive from Oklahoma that the Bible be incorporated into school curricula. It is the driving force behind the campaign to replace public schools with charter schools and underpins the Republicans’ sustained assault on LGBTQI+ rights. It informs the misogyny of Trump and his running mate JD Vance in keeping with the belief that a woman’s role in the home is to be “barefoot and pregnant” — which would prevent divorces, among other things.

That trend is a forerunner of what can be expected if Christian nationalists have their way. Whether they will depends on voters. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that 54 percent of all adults knew nothing about Christian nationalism. An additional 16 percent had heard “a little” about it but not enough to form an opinion. Some 24 percent had an unfavorable view and five percent a favorable view.

Polls indicated that at least 76 percent of Christian nationalists voted for Trump in 2020. They are almost certain to do so again but are still not enough to re-elect him president by themselves. In any case, it is almost certain that, even if Trump loses, his followers who want to officially declare the nation Christian will endure. They, like supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, are “not going back” — the former saying they want to see Christianity triumph, the latter insisting they are defending American democracy.