written 28 July, 2024
published 4 August, 2024
A 2024 Gallup poll on Religion in US found 68 percent identify as Christian (33 percent Protestant, 22 percent Catholic, and 13 percent other Christians), 7 percent as other religions, and 22 percent listed no religious preference (3 percent didn't answer). This is a sharp difference from 50 years ago when 87 percent identified as Christian, 6 percent as non-Christian, and only 5 percent had no preference.
In that same time frame, church membership declined from 73 percent to 45 percent, primarily among Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Weekly church attendance declined as well, with 57 percent now attending "seldom or never". While this decline is mostly young adults, it includes older adults who previously attended.
It is important to distinguish between the message within each spiritual tradition, and the man-made, dogmatic rules of the religious organizations, which arise with growing political and financial power. I suspect attendance decline represents growing dissatisfaction with the heavy dogma, and outright hypocrisy, that oppresses what is essentially a personal investigation of spiritual reality.
There are more than 200 Christian denominations in the US, and over 45,000 globally, all distinguished by the different dogmas they profess. At the extremes, religious sects fight, and kill, members of other sects, and even members within their own sects, who are defined as "heretics". Wars between Christian denominations have killed over 100 million Christians, and many more "unbelievers", all in the self-righteous assurance that they do the "work of God".
It was in reaction to this long-standing religious barbarity that the founders of America prohibited Congress from enacting a state religion (which would prioritize one sect among the many), but saw nothing wrong with having religion in American culture. But the same self-righteous assurance that has historically led to religious wars, is alive and well in the today's "Christian nationalist" extremism, a foundational part of the current GOP, explicitly expressed in the Project 2025 document.
The Center for Renewing America, a member of the Project 2025 advisory board, was founded in 2021, by Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official. They have "a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society", and lists “Christian nationalism” as one of the major priorities of a second Trump term.
Project 2025 claims that centralized government “subverts” families by working to “replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,” as evaluated by their narrow biblical interpretation of "natural" versus "unnatural". For the “well-being of the American family”, it attacks gender ideology, arguing “these theories poison our children", and assaults the "traditional" nature of men and women.
The plan calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to “maintain a biblically based, social science reinforced definition of marriage and family,” arguing that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” It objects to “nonreligious definitions" of marriage and family as put forward by the Respect for Marriage Act, claiming that all family forms apart from “heterosexual, intact marriage", involve higher levels of instability. It further claims that Biden’s administration is “hostile to people of faith".
The religious orientation presented in Project 2025 is inspired by the most conservative arm of Catholicism, and fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism, the two religious sects most in decline in America. The orientation is judgement, guilt, fear, and punishment, based on dogma, not the spirit of love at the core of Christ's teachings. This push toward theocratic autocracy is a last gasp of a dying perspective.
At least 30 percent of America does not even identify as "Christian", and of those who do, the majority are not fundamentalists. For anyone who lives any form of a spiritual path, you know the foundation is personal and interior, between you and however you view the larger divine. It is arrogant and offensive to have any one group pushing their specific, limited narrative on everyone else, thinking they have “the one and only truth”.
Educate yourself about the GOP Project 2025, by searching for "Project 2025 document", or find summaries. If this is a world you don’t want, talk about Project 2025 to everyone you know, so we are aware of what is coming. The more people see what is in the plan, the more motivated they become to work to make sure it never comes to pass.
