Project 2025 is a document that details plans to dismantle the institutions of democratic government in the United States if Donald Trump is elected President in 2024. If you are at all aware of American politics, you have heard that Project 2025 details plans by Donald Trump to replace officials throughout the federal government with his cronies, and to convert the US Department of Justice into a weapon of retribution subject to his personal whims, persecuting Trump’s political enemies under a veneer of legal prosecution.

You probably also have heard about how Project 2025 includes plans for Donald Trump to round up millions of people in the United States and place them in detention camps where they would live in “temporary facilities such as tents”. These massive camps would be established under a policy called “Credible Fear”. This is the actual language that Trump’s top political backers are using. They call their plan “Credible Fear”, written out with capital letters to make it clear that Credible Fear won’t just be a goal, but an explicit government program.

What you probably haven’t heard about are the plans detailed in Project 2025 to give Christian leaders the power to force strict religious laws on all Americans. Last week, this podcast described language in Project 2025 declaring that the pursuit of happiness in America should be replaced with compulsory religious worship. Project 2025 announces the plan for Donald Trump to replace freedom with Christian theocracy, stating that “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought,” so that no American will be free to follow their own consciences, but will only be “free to live as his Creator ordained”.

It sounds extreme to say that Donald Trump will create a Christian Nationalist dictatorship if he is elected President in 2024, but these threats come straight from the leadership of Trump’s political movement. Just yesterday, Donald Trump was twice asked by Republican television personality Sean Hannity whether he would become a dictator if elected President. Twice, Trump refused to promise not to become a dictator.

Trump pointed to Hannity and stated to the audience, “He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one.”

There we have it from Donald Trump’s own mouth: A declaration that he will be a dictator starting on day one of his presidency. Can anyone honestly believe that a man who makes himself dictator will only do so for one day? A dictator who remains a dictator for only one day is a dead man walking who will be arrested, put on trial for treason, and executed for that crime. Once political leaders hold the power of a dictator in their fists, they never release it willingly.

The creation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship over the United States would have practical consequences far beyond simply the requirement of all Americans to submit to the authority of Christian religious leaders.

This week, this podcast will explore another aspect of Project 2025 that you probably haven’t heard about: Plans by Donald Trump under Project 2025 to replace scientific medical research with a new Christian religious organization within the US federal government that would sharply restrict access to medical care.

If I speak to you the phrase “public health” your attention may begin to drift. It sounds abstract, devoid of passion. I beg you not to make that mistake, because in this case, the politics of public health are not only a matter of literal life and death. Public health sits on the boundary between freedom and fascism. It is a battleground between fact and delusion.

When people ask why the United States of America is careening toward Christian Nationalist totalitarianism, they often overlook the long history of fascist tendencies within American culture. However, it is plain that violent right wing ideology has gained an unusual strength within the last few years. One of the most obvious catalyzing events in the growth of American fascism has been the COVID-19 pandemic, which destroyed the illusion of cultural consensus and normalcy, detaching Americans from their communities and leaving their confusion and anger to fester in isolation.

Many Americans understood that sacrifices were necessary during the pandemic for the sake of public health, keeping as many Americans alive as possible. Almost as many other Americans, however, cultivated a superstitious blame of the public health institutions that protected our lives. For these Americans, the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, became the focus of outlandish Christian Nationalist conspiracy theories, including the belief that the CDC was a tool of demons who were using vaccines to mark Americans as servants of Satan.

Given this Christian Nationalist demonization of the CDC, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump and Project 2025 have identified the CDC as a target for destruction. Project 2025 has come up with a plan to hobble the CDC by pairing it with a new governmental religious bureau with the power to undermine the CDC’s science with faith-based alternatives to medicine.

Project 2025 states:

“The CDC should be split into two separate entities housing its two distinct functions. On the one hand, the CDC is now responsible for collecting, synthesizing, and publishing epidemiological data from the individual states—a scientific data-gathering function. This information is crucial for medical and public health researchers around the country. On the other hand, the CDC is also responsible for making public health recommendations and policies—an inescapably political function.”

The Project 2025 plan continues:

“These distinct functions should be separated into two entirely separate agencies with a firewall between them. We need a national epidemiological agency responsible only for publishing data and required by law to publish all of the data gathered from states and other sources. A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.”

The purpose of this part of the Trumpist Project 2025 plan is intended to give religious fears about souls more credence than practical medical science. The plan declares:

“What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved? The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.”

When Project 2025 states that the CDC must “stay in its lane”, it is severely reducing the framework of the CDC. Project 2025, under a new President Trump, would restrict the activities of the CDC to scientific medical data-gathering, while creating a new government office, run by religious authorities, with the authority to control public health policy without any regard for science.

Under Project 2025, the supernatural fantasy of saving souls would be elevated above the facts of biological science.

The idea of striking a balance between lives saved and souls saved is chilling. The implication is that the federal government of the United States should sacrifice human lives in order to protect Christians from feeling uncomfortable.

The idea that Project 2025 puts forward is that there should be some amount of human death in order to promote the power of religious organizations. Project 2025 proposes that religious leaders should be given federal governmental authority to calculate the amount of death required to serve religious purposes in the United States.

This plank in the platform of Project 2025 would create a new government bureaucracy, a US government Bureau of Religious Medicine, staffed by unelected officials that would have the authority to make scientific data subservient to religious dogma. The mission of this new governmental body would be to save souls.

Who would be qualified to be employed at this new federal Bureau of Religious Medicine? It wouldn’t be doctors or scientists. They aren’t trained in saving souls, after all. The government Bureau of Religious Medicine would be staffed and controlled by priests and preachers.

Of course, not just any priest or preacher would be granted the power to make religious decisions of life and death. The people in control of the federal Bureau of Religious Medicine would certainly be almost exclusively Christian priests and preachers.

The history of chaplains in Congress makes this plain. There has never been a non-Christian chaplain employed by either the House of Representatives or the Senate. On rare occasions, a Jewish Rabbi, is allowed to make a brief appearance, after gaining the approval of the Christian chaplain. Leaders of other religious groups aren’t allowed at all.

In the same way, the Bureau of Religious Medicine that will be created if Donald Trump is elected will be a Christian Nationalist government office, designed to give Christian priests and preachers the power to censor and stifle medical science.

Where would this policy of Christian Nationalist faith healing end?

The attack against scientific medicine at the CDC by Donald Trump and Project 2025 is not just about settling scores from the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CDC deals with a broad range of public health issues related to both acute and chronic disease, as well as disease prevention. Christian Nationalist church leaders have long desired to stop the practice of many aspects of these public health programs that do not match their narrow religious views.

For example, the scope of the work of the CDC includes sexually-transmitted diseases. Christian Nationalists want to restrict access to condoms and comprehensive sexual health education.

The CDC also conducts scientific research into the impact of environmental factors on the development and spread of disease. What’s more, the CDC has provided scientific assessment of the health impact of air pollution from fossil fuels and gigantic wildfires exacerbated by global climate change. Christian Nationalist leaders believe that climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are welcome signs of the coming of their long-awaited Apocalypse and the bloody second coming of Jesus.

The CDC also conducts scientific analysis of the spread of dangerous pathogens through commercial food production and distribution. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the CDC conducts scientific research about safety in corporate workplaces. Christian Nationalists believe that government programs of workplace safety and regulation of the food supply are demonic Communist plots.

Many Christian sects believe that the practice of scientific medicine is unholy and should be completely replaced by prayer. They believe that parents should not take their children to see doctors, even when they are dangerously ill. Under Donald Trump and Project 2025, these Christian sects could have the power to use the new federal government Bureau of Religious Medicine to restrict children’s access to proper medical care in the name of Jesus.

Project 2025 was written by a collection of right-wing political leaders that includes Pam Pryor, the leader of an organization that calls itself the National Committee for Religious Freedom. This organization states that Christian religious groups should have the power to control the practice of medicine in the United States, advocating for “The rights of medical professionals, clinics and hospitals, to apply religiously-informed standards in their care for patients, including in their professional judgments on how to protect human life, heal the body, strengthen mental health, and avoid harm to human dignity.”

Applying religious standards for medical care is dangerous. Health is not a matter of religious belief. It is a matter of biological reality. If Project 2025’s federal Bureau of Religious Medicine gained the power to allow hospitals to enforce religious standards for health care, we could soon see professional mental health care replaced by exorcisms and seances. We could see up-to-date immunotherapies for cancer replaced by prayer circles.

The Christian Nationalist plans of Donald Trump and Project 2025 to replace medical science with religious dogma are not merely a contradiction of the promise in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights to protect Americans from establishment of religion. Project 2025’s government Bureau of Religious Medicine would create widespread death, disease, and misery.

Hospitals and medical doctors should not be encouraged to replace medical science with religious rituals, but that’s just what Donald Trump, Project 2025, and the National Committee for Religious Freedom want to do.

The National Committee for Religious Freedom is a signatory of Project 2025, and supports the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2024. It doesn’t support true religious freedom. Instead, it seeks power for Christian Nationalists to limit the freedom of any American who refuses to obey the religious edicts of right-wing Christian leaders.

Public health is easy to take for granted precisely because it is a responsible and reliable means of improving both the length and quality of human lives. Public health officials don’t wear fanciful costumes and sing flamboyant songs and tell stories about magical beings who will save people’s lives if we just believe hard enough that they exist. Public health officials conduct rigorous scientific studies that identify the most effective and safe medical therapies.

Donald Trump and Project 2025 want to compromise the work of public health professionals in order to cater to the ambitions of their Christian Nationalist supporters. They seek to establish governmental offices of Christian power as tools of social control. Their specific plans are to use Christian Nationalism to replace our democracy with a dictatorship.

These plans aren’t secret. They’ve been written down by Project 2025 and spoken about by the Trump for President campaign.

Our response must be as unrelenting as the efforts of the Christian Nationalists, but different in kind. In response to the superstitious rantings and ramblings of the Christian Nationalists, we must speak with strength of purpose, but also with a clear and rational defense of the value of scientific medicine and professionalism in public health.