Project 2025 as seen by a Pastor

Project 2025 as seen by a Pastor

July 28, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

 

 

 click here to see the video

 

When Empire star, Taraji Henson stepped onto the stage at this years BET awards ceremony in this show stopping dress, probably the last thing anyone expected to hear come out of her mouth was a powerful and loud speech about a presidential transition plan written by the Heritage Foundation, but that’s what we got. She even said, “I know I look good, but it is time for you all to pay attention!” For more than a year we have been hearing admonitions in the news that we should all read the 2025 Project but, realistically, it is nearly 900 pages long and it doesn’t read like Moby Dick or Gone With the Wind. 

 

Its chapters about how to revamp the federal government from top to bottom were written by 36 different conservative thinkers, 26 of whom served in the first Trump administration, some of whom had to do their writing from prison cells. Even though Trump claims to have no association with this huge document, clearly, it was written for his use by his own team who hope to be able to hit the ground running in a second Trump administration, accomplishing things he didn’t even dare to dream of in his first chaotic term in the White House. 

 

Trump is trying to distance himself from this manifesto, which was written by his close friends and associates, but Trump is mentioned by name on 190 pages of this tome, so don’t believe his lies. Still, who wants to ruin a perfectly good day by reading the political musings of people like Peter Navarro and Ken Cuccinelli? I don’t but if you had the moral strength to look up into Taraji Henson’s eyes, you would have seen her fury when she loudly demanded that we “look it up.” So, I did.

 

The 2025 Project is important. It is frightening. It contradicts the values that we spiritual people, people who believe in freedom, justice, and the equality of all people, and we must suffer a bit to be more aware of what the right wing of American politics would like to turn this country and its government into. 

 

There are 4 pillars to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate for leadership. This book is the outline of goals and objectives. The second pillar is a LinkedIn style catalogue of names of people with their ideology who can be hired by the administration. The third pillar is a kind of conservative academy, set up to train the conservative neophytes in how to run the government the way they want it run. 

 

And the 4^th is a literal playbook, outlining the steps to be taken in the first days of the next Trump administration to get all of this transformation started. 

 

Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and former president of the hair-growth for men club, outlines their objectives in the forward with 4 goals that have to be interpreted carefully to get past his sweet sounding language. 

He says that we are in the midst of a second American Revolution which, he added, could be bloodless if the left allows it to be…. Which is to say, they won’t shoot us unless we resist. 

 

The first of his objectives says: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. In the details of the book, we learn how this will be done – by closing the Education Department, allowing book burning and far right Christians to control the school curriculum. They also want to do away, not only with the abortion pill but with contraception, and even no-fault divorce, forcing even violent and toxic families to stay together. They also want to make pornography illegal, putting those who produce and sell it in prison . . . and you can bet that would mean anything that portrayed homosexuality or gender changes as being normal. And they want to ban invitro fertilization for reasons I cannot even guess. They seem to believe that you can actually legislate sexual orientation . . . which they intend to try to do. 

 

Their second goal, Roberts describes this way: Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. In their mind, the administrative state is the Civil Service, tens of thousands of federal employees who have job security. They want to consolidate all authority in the executive branch into the hands of the president who can dismiss anyone and replace them puppets who work at his whim. They want to take down the intelligence forces, the FBI and the CIA, those agencies that have investigated Trump and his organized crime connections. Dismantling the administrative state will also do away with most poverty programs, food assistance, public housing, and things the restrict your freedom, like student loan forgiveness. You know, like Jesus always said, “Do your best to punish the poor for being poor.”

 

Robert’s says that their third value is to, Defend our sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats. Which, again, when you dig into the book’s details, means not allowing people to come here from Muslim countries. It means stationing our armies on the border the Mexico to defend our border with lethal force, and putting the military in our city streets to defend our “bounty” which means the private businesses that might be looted or damaged in a protest. As well as shooting shop lifters or anyone else who threatens the assets of the rich. 

 

And he ends these lofty goals with the most hypocritical statement of all saying that they want to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely- what our constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” Does that mean that women should be able to exercise their God-given individual right to manage their own reproductive life? No, obviously they don’t want women to have that liberty. And does that mean that people should be able to love the person they choose to love? No, not if you are gay, lesbian, trans, or anything that does not fit into their cisgender world view. And does it mean that our children get to exercise the liberty to go to school or a movie or a city park without fear of being murdered by some AR-15 wielding lunatic? No, of course not, even though we have more than 100,000 gun deaths per year now, nothing will come between these fanatics and their freedom to own lethal weapons. The blessings of liberty seem to redound only to their very narrowly defined minority of the white, privileged, conservatives. 

 

As the constant speculation about whether Biden was going to drop out of the race after his abysmal debate performance, the news media seems to be giving Project 2025 more air time and at least reporting on pieces of it, what else can you do with a tome so large as this one but to try to feed it to the public, one bad tasting bite at a time. Still, I will echo Taraji Henson’s emphatic demand that you look it up. 

 

No one wants to read 900 pages of this fascist stuff but if you will just give it 30 minutes of you time for three or four days in a row, you will get a sense of just how dangerous this proposed conservative civil war is.

 

Why do conservative Republicans want to replace what is left of our democracy with an authoritarian, dare we say, “fascist” government, consolidating the power of the president, making him immune to prosecution and turning our President into a king? People sometimes turn to an authoritarian leader when they are afraid, afraid of foreign invasion, of an economic depression, or some other social disruption. 

 

But we are the strongest nation in the world, militarily and economically. Unemployment is at a record low. The stock market is at a record high. What problem are they trying to solve with this reactionary move to erase the social progress make in women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and ecological protections? What are they afraid of? You undoubtably have your own answers to that question but their agenda makes it clear to me that they are afraid of empowered women, they are afraid of racial and religious minorities claiming equal place in our society, and they are terrified of the normalization of gender and sexual orientation diversity. 

 

Clearly, for them, making America great again is an appeal to going back to a previous era. Maybe back to the 1950’s when segregation was legal, abortion was illegal, and gay people were still in the closet. Maybe they want to go back to the early 20^th century, when women couldn’t vote and Jim Crow laws were in force. I wouldn’t be surprised if they may want to go back to a pre-Civil War era. That may seem to be unthinkable to you now but then we have never had a king in America before so we just can’t predict where the safe boundaries would be in a world where a sociopath like Trump could become king. 

 

It has been a long time since I have felt that I had to anchor every sermon to a passage of scripture. I don’t feel any compulsion to do so today, but I find the decision of ancient Judeans to have a king to be relevant. If you do not remember Israelite history very well, let me remind you that there is a debate that goes on in Hebrew scriptures, both in praise of their famous kings and in condemnation of the whole concept of having a king. 

 

Remember, Moses was a religious leader but not a king. Joshua was a military leader but not a king. For the first centuries of Judaean history, their leadership came from wise men and women who were called “judges.” They looked to their tribal and community leaders until they asked their most prominent prophet, Samuel, to choose a king to rule over them. Samuel resisted and took the matter directly to God who, we are told in I Samuel chapter 8, was dead set against the idea but God was willing to let the people make their own mistakes. According to the text, God told Samuel to do it but to first give the people this warning. 

 

¹⁰ So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹ He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, ¹² and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³ He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴ He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵ He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶ He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle^[b] and donkeys and put them to his work. ¹⁷ He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸ And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.”

 

The language is obviously from a small nation that existed 3000 years ago but the basic message remains the same. If we may free and fair elections something we can ignore or refuse to obey. If we allow our courts to make our leaders impossible to hold accountable to any legal standards, if we empower our executive branch to tax, wage war, and pick a ruling class that must be supported by the majority, we will be sorry that we did it, and once you do it, it is very difficult to undo it. 

As slopy and inefficient as democracy is, as Winston Churchill famously said, the worst form of government except for all of the others. An imperial presidency may scratch the itch for power on the part of those who are afraid of the eclipse of white male privilege, but it sure to be bad news for everyone else. 

In this pastor’s opinion, we should do whatever we can to help to protect our system of democracy with checks and balances and accountability to moral standards expressed in law, even for members of the supreme court and whoever lives in the White House. That is, of course, just my opinion but it enjoys the status of also being right.

Religion and Politics – Natural Bed Fellows

Religion and Politics – Natural Bed Fellows    July 14, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

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Back in the good ol days when even state universities had a budget for inviting famous speakers to campus to expose their young audience to influential thinkers, Western Kentucky University hosted William Buckley, the famous conservative host of Firing Line, and the originator of the National Review, to speak to a packed house of teenagers from rural Kentucky. 

 

I was an 18 year old freshman in 1974 and though I had never watched Firing Line nor picked up a copy of the National Review, I was in the audience. He didn’t talk about his recent trip to China with President Nixon when these two global super powers were just starting to talk to one another. He didn’t rail against liberals, gay people, or hippies so much as he just compassionately gave a lot of young people some advice about how to live a meaningful life. 

 

I remember two things he said that evening. One was that he had no respect for anyone who slept more than five hours a night but the other thing I remember was more useful. He said, “You have been warned not to talk about either politics or religion in a polite society. The problem with following that advice is that you will never learn how to have a civil conversation about things that are as important as religion and politics.” 

 

Those were the days when Republican and Democratic members of the congress could publicly debate about the civil rights movement, voters rights, desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion, and at the end of the day they would collect their spouses and children and everyone would get together for an ice cream social. 

In the 80’s, Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neil, and conservative icon, President Ronald Regan, had a pact that they were “friends after 6 p.m.” 

 

A correspondent once brought this up to President Obama a decade ago, suggesting that maybe he should get a drink with Mitch McConnel, to which, Obama replied, “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnel?”

I get it. I wouldn’t want to spend Happy Hour with Mitch McConnel, or Donald Trump, or, if it were even possible, Ronald Regan, but I know that somehow we have to get back to a place where we can sit down at a Thanksgiving dinner and have a polite and meaningful conversation about politics and religion, at a table where people don’t agree but where they can come to understand one another better. 

 

Once public discourse becomes laden with angry accusations, name calling, and dismissive characterizations, people tend to become more devoted to their prejudices and rather than being shamed or bullied into changing, they tend to deepen their devotion to increasingly radical viewpoints. 

 

We Unitarians are fond of declaring that “love is my religion,” which would be wonderful if it were true, but I am afraid that all too often the larger truth is that “acquiescence is our religion.” We don’t talk about religion and politics with people who disagree with us, we just avoid potentially controversial conversations to avoid conflict. And I get that. There are times to just walk away to avoid starting an argument for which there is no meaningful end but peace without some mutual understanding isn’t really peace, is it? It is more like surrender, or maybe indifference. Let me suggest a thought exercise.

 

I’m writing this several days after the first presidential debate in which President Joe Biden, rather than reassuring voters that he is ready and able to serve another term in office, demonstrated an example of every Democrat’s worst fears. He seemed to be very old, confused, and weak. 

 

So, in the aftermath, many were calling for him to back out of the race so that someone in better shape to both win the fall election and succeed in office over the next few years could take his place. Others adamantly defended him saying that he has been an excellent president for almost four years and a weak debate performance should not be made more important than his years of laudable accomplishments. 

 

The stakes in the November election are very high. We see what Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have done to the court and to the country. We have reason to fear the approximate end of Democracy and the onset of a truly weaponized judiciary if Trump is allowed to win this election.

 

I suspect that all of you have decided in your own minds whether we should all support Biden through the fall election or hurry up and pick a replacement candidate, but could you sit at a table with several people who had an opinion different from your own and discuss the merits and liabilities of either choice? 

This matter may have been settled by the time this sermon is posted but it is still up in the air, could you listen to both sides of the argument? There is no guarantee of success in either choice and no matter which way we go, Trump might win, and we will never know that if we had taken the other path, we might have been successful. The stakes could hardly be higher. The outcomes could hardly be more uncertain. Could we discuss our views without demanding that everyone agree with us? Can we defend our view without implying that those who don’t agree with us are unintelligent or uninformed? Could we strive to understand the point of view of those who differ with us and patiently try to make ourselves understood based on discernable facts and readily available information? 

 

If we can, then, I submit, that would be evidence of love. In my estimation, that would be a conversation worth having. Not all conversations are worth having. I’m not going to give much time to anyone who is convinced that the Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor. And, just because you have a civil relationship to offer to someone doesn’t mean that they have one to offer to you but one thing is certain, if we avoid talking about the hard stuff, no one ever learns, no one ever changes, and we all fail.

 

Let me try another illustration on you: In a plea deal, Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been released from a British prison where he had served nearly 6 years after having spent a decade avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There are those who believe that Assange was a hero of journalism and free speech and others who believe that he was guilty of some of the worst espionage crimes of this century. 

I have been conversations where the mere mention of his name divided the room into adamant factions. The relevant question in his case is not whether he is a really great guy or not. I don’t know anyone who really wants to carry his banner in a debate about character but was his release of stolen documents a journalistic coups, exposing war crimes and holding the American government accountable for having hidden and lied about these crimes, or is his dump of thousands of pages of classified documents a crime that placed many secret undercover agents in grave danger? 

 

Well, he did both, didn’t he? Which is more important, exposing the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute soldiers who murdered journalists and first responders on the battlefield in Afghanistan, or leaking information that could expose undercover sources? Chelsea Manning, who provided the information to Wikileaks, and Assange have both served years in prison for this leak but the soldiers who murdered journalists and medics were not punished, and, for that matter, the New York Times and several British and European news sources that published the leaked material were not charged with any crime. How can Manning and Assange be guilty, and the media just gets a pass? 

 

I could argue either side of this issue though, as you might imagine, I lean towards supporting leaking information about war crimes in order to keep our government or any other government honest. To that point, bronze statues of Assange, Manning, along with Edward Snowden have been erected in Berlin in praise of their courage . . . Germans know about the danger of allowing a government to operate in secrecy under the disguise of propaganda.

 

I have heard a number of people I really like get very mad about this issue but what I have never heard is a civil conversation among people who have honest disagreements about it. That is a conversation I would love to be a part of but to date, any attempt at discussing the facts becomes a partisan condemnation of either the leakers or the government. 

 

I don’t think that there is a rational defense for Trump’s theft of classified documents that have been left in disarray in unsecured storage. I don’t think that there is a honest defense to be mounted in that case, which is, I’ll suggest, why a Trump supporting judicial system is making certain that the case will either never be heard in court or at least it won’t be heard in time to influence this fall’s election. But if I am wrong, more than a thousand of you will hear me saying this this week, so, in a civil manner, please, tell me how I am mistaken. 

 

There is an anonymous modern proverb that I really love that says: We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. The internet will repeatedly tell you that this is a quote from either Socrates or Plato but, because it is a priority in my life to defend the corpus of Greek philosophy, I can assure you that this didn’t come from Socrates or Plato or any other ancient source but whoever said it doesn’t need a false attribution to support it because it is painfully and obviously true. The reason we can’t get some cases to trial is the same as the reason we can’t have a civil conversation about some controversial topics . . . it is because someone is afraid of the light. That, I contend, is shameful.

 

Over the past several years, I have enjoyed a good deal of attention from listeners of my posted sermons, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. So it should come as no surprise to hear me tell you that from time to time, I would be contacted by the pulpit committee of a church that was searching for a new pastor. I never actually was offered a call from any of those churches because, before we ever got to the point of an actual interview, someone on the committee would be charged with letting me know that if I were to be offered that job I would have to first agree to not talk about at least 90 percent of what I have talked about for the last 15 years. 

 

I cannot claim that I am always right, in fact, I would disagree with a number of things I have said in the past; but I can claim that I have always been honest and if a church is not willing to be exposed to an honest exploration of matters of ethics, well, who would want to work for a church that is afraid of the light?

 

Folks, I am aware that most of you who generously give me a few minutes of your time every couple of weeks, do so expecting to agree with me. Trust me, when I go to our local Unitarian Church on Sunday mornings, the primary reason that I go is because I want to sit in a room for an hour in this deeply red state, surrounded by people who largely see the world the way that I do. I also need to feel that I am not all alone in the world. But it just might be that the most important messages you hear are the ones in which you had to endure a difference of opinion. Don’t only seek confirmation of your own bias. Remain willing to step into the light and heat of honest disagreement on important topics. The only way out of our current dangerous political and ideological quagmire is to engage one another in the light of honest dialogue.

 

My favorite British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, left us with this hope, he said:

I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, that it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels, but to people possessed of wisdom and courage. 

 

I suggest that we give ourselves to that hope.