Despite Donald Trump’s words repeated insistence during the 2024 elections, he knew nothing about the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 project and did not plan to implement any of its suggestions (even noting that some of his claims were “absolutely ridiculous and appalling”), the Trump transition called on a number of people linked to Project 2025 to serve in the new administration.

Trump’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell T. Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025. His presence not only speaks to the influence that Project 2025 proponents can expect to have benefit during Trump’s second term. His appointment to OMB is also a harbinger of the type of religious rhetoric that is likely to permeate the White House and the entire MAGA media landscape in 2025.

Privately, Vought declared the need to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism”. In public, he asserted that American “rights and duties” come from God. The think tank he leads, called the Center for Renewing America, memos written early 2024, prioritizing a Christian nationalist agenda. Project 2025 uses similar rhetoric, emphasizing the centrality from Christianity to American politics 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 who has ties to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and seeks to enshrine the biblical principle in American law. House Speaker Mike Johnson has a flag associated with the NAR hang out his congressional office.

There will be, for very good reasons, much of the media coverage devoted 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 prominent groups. politicians like President Johnson.

What journalists, academics and cultural critics can to wait for of religious rhetoric in 2025 corresponds to what should be do about this rhetoric. Put very simply, commentators should not assume that religious-sounding language coming from Trump’s orbit is traditionally religious. Conversely, commentators should not assume that secular-sounding language coming from Trump’s orbit is conventionally secular.

To address the first half of this statement, language that sounds a lot like Christian nationalism does not actually call for theocracy; it is secular minorityism pushed by secularists, often linked to right-wing cables and other media without any meaningful connection to the Church or theological principles.

Even when the language ostensibly advocates biblically grounded governance, the very fundamental assumptions about what the language means require closer examination.

Most critical is the assumption that Christian-leaning proclamations about the need to protect the family, Christianity, and America focus on the love of God and the consequent desire to propagate the Christian faith. What I show in my upcoming book with Mark Brockway, is that this language often focuses, on the contrary, on the hatred of an amalgamated, shape-changing, ultimately invented world. liberal devil which corresponds, appropriately, to “the left,” the Democratic Party, “elites” aligned in one way or another with Marxism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awakening.” Spreading the Christian faith is not the issue; fighting the liberal devil is. This devil is ultimately secular, based on things like DEI initiatives and the existence of trans people, and it is also the quasi-religious antagonist in a decades-old cosmic showdown between the ultimate good of the “real” America and the ultimate evil of leftists determined to tear it apart.

The centrality of the liberal devil, often explicitly formulated in the language of wrong, SatanAnd demonsis what undermines the equally inaccurate assumption that secular-sounding language targeting “the woke up/radical left” or “transgender ideology” or, to quote Russell Vought, “one awake and armed“The federal government is indeed entirely 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 use the word God to talk about it.

Attacks on the liberal devil — which can just as easily be directed at conservatives and Christians who clash with MAGA — are another trend we can expect to continue through 2025 and beyond . We will not be able to respond appropriately or fully appreciate the Battle of Revelation Lite carried out in the name of Donald Trump if we remain stuck in a binary position of religion Or secular, religious belief Or secular discourse. What is happening and will continue to happen is something else entirely. We need to start describing it as such.