Under Project 2025, Faith Must Align with State Ideology
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Under Project 2025 Your Faith Must Align with State Ideology
If you are Christian and believe that identity confers immunity from national alignment, that belief itself becomes the point of vulnerability, because conformity to a government defined faith standard will be required and very few believers will ever satisfy that standard.
Germany entered this same narrow corridor in the early 1930s not from open assault on Christianity but through procedural domination that narrowed acceptable belief, rewarded cooperation, penalized hesitation, and framed each restriction as reasonable and temporary, until churches learned to survive by self-adjustment before force was required. Project 2025 occupies that same gateway corridor now, not as abstraction or forecast but as active restructuring that places Christianity itself under state evaluation so completely unconstitutionally that by the time resistance becomes visible, the terms of religious freedom have already been rewritten and obedience normalized as the governing condition of faith.
On Sept. 28, 2025, a radicalized Thomas Jacob Sanford drove a pickup truck through the doors of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints meetinghouse in Grand Blanc, Michigan, killing four people, two by gunfire and two burned alive, and wounding eight others before police shot him dead in the parking lot. The FBI determined the attack was driven by explicit hatred of Mormons, whom Sanford described as “the antichrist” and a group he believed would “take over the world.”
Less than a month earlier, on Aug. 27, 2025, a gunman killed two children, ages eight and ten, and wounded twenty-one others at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. In Lexington, Kentucky, another attacker murdered two congregants at Richmond Road Baptist Church. At CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan, armed security stopped a would-be mass shooter carrying an AR-15-style rifle before he could reach children attending Vacation Bible School.
Between January 2018 and December 2024, the Family Research Council documented 1,384 acts of hostility against churches across the United States, including 415 incidents in 2024 alone, an escalation that coincides with bureaucratic reclassification in which ideological alignment governs institutional survival and churches are compelled to submit to a federal norm rather than rely on neutral constitutional standing.
Project 2025 supplies the enforcement architecture for this sorting by converting moral independence into institutional vulnerability and attaching consequence to deviation while extending protection to obedience, a governing rationale Vice President JD Vance has articulated plainly through claims that postwar liberalism dismantled social discipline by weakening religion, family, and inherited obligation, labeling contemporary liberalism a perverted version of Christianity while urging the restoration of a properly rooted Christian moral order as essential to the nation’s future and ignoring both the constitution and free will.
Vance has further embraced what postliberal philosopher Patrick Deneen defines as regime change, described as the peaceful yet vigorous overthrow of a corrupt liberal ruling class and the construction of a postliberal order, a vision that imposes a single moral framework grounded in Christian tradition and enforced through institutional power that strips religion of independent choice and repurposes it as social discipline.
JD Vance delivering a confrontational speech framing religion as a vehicle for political order rather than independent conscience. Source credit: Public campaign appearance photograph Getty Images or Associated Press
From the executive branch, these claims function as governing tests that sort institutions by ideological compliance, reclassify dissent as administrative liability, and translate through Project 2025 into enforceable practice by conditioning religious freedom on approved doctrine and constricting recourse for communities that challenge executive authority.
Jehovah’s Witnesses stand uniquely exposed because their religious practice includes refusal of loyalty oaths, rejection of military service, and abstention from compulsory civic ritual, all historically protected expressions of conscience that alignment based enforcement regimes now recode as bureaucratic rebellion, shifting exemptions into official discretion and contracting protection as loyalty is transformed from a civic expectation into an enforced requirement.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints face parallel exposure rooted in institutional independence expressed through centralized governance, extensive land holdings, private education systems, and global operations, a vulnerability laid bare by the Grand Blanc attack in which the assailant bypassed multiple churches to reach the Mormon meetinghouse, issued bomb threats minutes before the assault, and barricaded the door with a piano to trap congregants inside the burning building.
Ideological alignment now determines institutional treatment, granting administrative ease to compliant bodies while subjecting independent institutions to accreditation review, nonprofit compliance audits, land use obstruction, and tax examination, pressures that compound over time until autonomy becomes enforced conformity.
Muslim communities remain structurally exposed as public safety and national security frameworks place mosques and Muslim led organizations under permanent monitoring, reinforced by the fact that federal agencies have maintained files on mosques for more than a decade without evidence of criminal activity, permitting security rationales to eclipse religious liberty claims as oversight becomes normalized and relief increasingly scarce.
Jewish communities undergo internal sorting through unevenly applied alignment criteria that grant tolerance and discretionary protection to Orthodox congregations aligned with conservative social policy while delegitimizing Reform and Conservative congregations that defend pluralism, reproductive autonomy, and democratic norms through the reclassification of religious speech as political agitation and the selective application of antisemitism protections that convert moral witness into institutional risk.
Black churches with deep civil rights legacies face acute exposure when sermons or organizing address voter suppression, policing, inequality, or authoritarian consolidation, provoking state retaliation through the reclassification of religious activity as political and the deployment of enforcement mechanisms that include contested tax status, delayed zoning approvals, intensified compliance review, and eroded grant eligibility, a pattern made unmistakable in Georgia when federal funding vanished from three historically Black churches within months of hosting voter registration drives.
Mainline Protestant denominations experience parallel constriction as Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ congregations find moral critique evaluated for political usefulness rather than religious conscience, reshaping sermons, governance, and public witness through sustained pressure that disciplines expression and narrows institutional life.
Churches that openly welcome LGBTQ congregants, perform same sex marriages, or ordain LGBTQ clergy remain among the most exposed as authorities reclassify these practices from protected religious expression into ideological noncompliance and impose tax scrutiny, licensing challenges, and withdrawal of regulatory deference, converting inclusion itself into actionable grounds for enforcement.
Progressive Catholic parishes and religious orders that oppose state violence, reproductive coercion, or mass deportation are subjected to selective scrutiny not imposed on conservative Catholic entities aligned with state priorities, while the nonreligious are simultaneously implicated as institutional neutrality erodes and public life increasingly reflects a favored theological framework that marginalizes conscience without faith.
Project 2025 enforcement advances at the points where religious life relies on protection from the state, expanding exemptions for aligned institutions, withdrawing protection from dissenting communities, and establishing a hierarchy in which ideological alignment commands deference and nonalignment triggers persecution.
Officials now reclassify faith communities that criticize executive authority or mobilize civil rights as political actors, a maneuver that weakens constitutional protection and exposes institutions to routine regulatory enforcement in which tax exemption operates as leverage, sermons are treated as evidentiary material, and public moral speech invites retaliation rather than redress.
Faith affiliated schools, seminaries, and universities are drawn into the same enforcement web through accreditation pressure, licensing challenges, and funding threats explicitly tied to ideological compatibility, a trajectory reinforced by JD Vance’s repeated calls for Republicans to seize institutions, including universities, make them work for our people, and exercise power ruthlessly in pursuit of goals he has described as explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti regime, and aimed at forcefully capturing institutions.
Aligned institutions are rewarded with bureaucratic latitude, while those that refuse alignment are subjected to sustained friction and state persecution as delays accumulate, compliance becomes self-enforcing, and organizations narrow language, restructure governance, and internalize obedience as the condition for continued existence.
Germany in the 1930s maintained outward religious normalcy while quietly conditioning institutional protection on alignment, extending privileges to cooperative institutions and isolating dissent through bureaucratic control as Protestant institutions aligned with the German Christian movement were granted legitimacy and security.
Identification system used in Nazi concentration camps, displaying the colored triangle badges imposed on prisoners whose beliefs failed to conform to state doctrine, including religious groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses marked with the purple triangle, a bureaucratic mechanism that converted nonconforming faith and conscience into criminal identity before physical punishment followed.: Source United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Chart of concentration camp prisoner badges (Kennzeichen für Schutzhäftlinge in den Konzentrationslagern) USHMM Collections and Holocaust Encyclopedia
Dissenting clergy were methodically marginalized through seminary closures, revoked publishing licenses, and expanded surveillance, while Jehovah’s Witnesses were reclassified as political dissidents for refusing loyalty oaths and military service, resulting in mass imprisonment that other faith communities dismissed as exceptional rather than instructive, even as Catholic clergy who criticized state policy were arrested despite earlier assurances of protection.
When wartime pressures arrived, national security rationales supplied the justification for expanded enforcement as authorities imprisoned dissenting clergy, dismantled the Confessing Church, sent Jehovah’s Witnesses to concentration camps, and pushed Jewish religious life from suppression into eradication, revealing how ideological alignment that begins as a strategy for preservation hardens into dependency once compliance is normalized and resistance structurally foreclosed.
That same bureaucratic logic governs religious life under Project 2025 as officials assess faith communities and the nonreligious by ideological alignment rather than conscience, impose conditional protection, assign tangible risk to independence, and expose institutions that mistake silence for safety by revealing that the gateway shaping institutional fate has already shut, with alignment solidifying into dependency and survival collapsing into obedience before resistance can form.
What remains is not uncertainty but timing, because scrutiny now reaches every faith community, no denomination remains insulated, and no religious institution avoids the approaching demand to conform to Project 2025’s ideological requirements or relinquish its standing, a process that advances as inevitability rather than announcement, narrowing safety to compliance and dissolving the boundary between belief and state authority until faith itself operates only at official discretion.
If you believe your faith or lack thereof is protected, it is because the gateway has already closed behind you, opening onto ideological control where conscience survives only under tyrannical government authority.
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Sources
Heritage Foundation
Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project
https://www.project2025.org
American Civil Liberties Union
Project 2025 Explained
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/project-2025-explained
PBS NewsHour
What Is Postliberalism? How a Catholic Intellectual Movement Influenced JD Vance’s Political Views
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-postliberalism-how-a-catholic-intellectual-movement-influenced-jd-vances-political-views
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The German Churches and the Nazi State
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jehovah’s Witnesses Under Nazi Rule
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jehovahs-witnesses
Family Research Council
Hostility Against Churches in the United States
https://www.frc.org/issueanalysis/hostility-against-churches-is-on-the-rise-in-the-united-states
Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI Detroit Update on Shooting and Fire at Grand Blanc LDS Church
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/detroit/news/fbi-detroit-update-on-shooting-and-fire-at-grand-blanc-lds-church
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