Simon Pierce has done us the favor of collecting substantial parts of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and commenting on them. [1] My own interest here is to look at the relationship between the recommendations made by the Project (hereafter, the Report) and the perspective in which those recommendations appears to be most at home.

I am beginning with a section Pierce calls “Christian Nationalism.”  Here is a quotation that appears on page 453 of the Report.

For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond, as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance between lives saved and 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.

We have here, two questions and a declaration.  The first question has to do with the proper balance between lives saved and souls saved.  The second question provides the context for that clearly unanswerable question.  It says that mitigating risk [the reference is to the risk of exposure to COVID 19] may be a good thing, but it must be balanced off against the closure of churches.  We’ll get to the declaration later.

The Report, in posing the question in the form that they do, appear to believe that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can know whether there are souls; what will happen to them if they are not saved, and the role that the churches play in saving them.  How the CDC could be thought to know those things escapes me and the idea that they should lay down the requirements for the proper treatment of souls is even more bizarre.

There appears to be a call for balancing.  On the one side, we have souls saved; on the other, we should, in all fairness, have “lives saved.”  We do not, of course.  On the other hand side we have only an amount of “risk mitigation.”  If you think that is a less political formulation, I suggest that you try to call up a protest banner reading “Increase Risk Mitigation Among Our Black Citizens.”  So we do not have, in this paragraph the call we ought to have that the government decide wisely between saving lives and saving souls.

That option is rejected in several ways by what I referred to above as the declaration.  It is: “The CDC has no business making such inherently political assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.”

I agree with the Report that requiring public institutions to close during the worst of the pandemic is political.  The CDC is a political body and doing what it can to save lives is part of their mandate.  It did not have, the last time I looked, [2] a similar mandate for souls and if it did have, it would need some public process for deciding between the merits of the two.

The call, then, that the CDC be required by law to “stay in its lane” would be a call for it to save the lives it can without coming into conflict with Christian organizations who have access to national power.  The “lane” of the CDC could be defined as being medical rather than political, which I am sure is what the Report had in mind.  But when the question is whether Christians ought to be allowed to infect their neighbors as they please provided they can continue to gather in churches, the idea that the CDC ought to stay in its lane, does not seem to be an idea Americans generally would warm to.

[1]. Pierce’s book is called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  It was published by the author in 2025.

[2] These things have been changing rapidly and I have not looked today.