Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

If You're Here from HuffPo, Welcome!

I created this image after my conservative Christian mom told me I should “get off my soapbox” and quit speaking out about the dangers of Christian Nationalism. While her words stung, they also emboldened me.

Hello to everyone, but especially new subscribers! If you came here from the Huffington Post last week, welcome! My name is Tiffany, and I’m a photographer and writer from rural Western Montana. My Roman Empire is Christian Nationalism and the dangers it presents, so when I heard about Project 2025 back in April I decided to dedicate an entire weekend to reading it and taking notes.

Did I finish the entire 920-pages with some breaks? Yes. Did I need to take some anti-anxiety meds in order to get through it? Also yes.

I know what it’s like to live under Christian Nationalism because that’s how I spent the first 37 years of my life before my husband and I finally had enough and left church culture for good.

As I wrote in HuffPo, while some white evangelicals believe in equality among sexes, most, including my church, pushed a concept known as complementarianism. It means men and women have different but complementary roles. Men are supposed to be the providers and protectors, while women are the nurturers and supporters. Complementarians believe the Bible backs these differences.

Ironically, growing up, I rarely felt protected by the men in our church. From a young age, my female peers and I were told we had the power to cause men to “stumble into sin,” which is a nicer way of saying that our young bodies would cause them to lust. The accusation was confusing because it simultaneously infantilized us and accelerated us into adulthood. Though many of us weren’t even old enough to think about sex, we were now told we had to be responsible for it.

It seems men in evangelical culture are told they can control everything but themselves.

Evangelicals use words like “protection” to violate and control women when really, the only people they protect are other men in power.

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I left the church and began speaking out because I couldn’t raise my kids in the same toxic paradigm I grew up in. And the same goes for America. I speak out because I don’t want America to live under religious dogma the way I used to. That’s exactly what Project 2025 is — forcing citizens of our country to live under christofacist rule. Under another Trump administration, gone are the days of religious neutrality outlined in the First Amendment, which promises the United States will neither establish nor prohibit the free exercise of religion. If Project 2025 comes to be, it will be a nightmare most of us can't understand.

I remember the heart palpitations as I read Project 2025 and realized the dystopian reality it would bring to my LGBTQ+ friends and family.

Photo of a Pride Parade by Dennis Webber Photography

I remember being devastated about Project 2025 erasing a woman’s right to choose and controlling who in this country is worthy enough to adopt, including allowing religious foster and adoption agencies to discriminate against families without a mother and father in the home.

I remember worrying that my kids wouldn’t get the same education that I did, which was already whitewashed to erase the horrors of Native American genocide and manifest destiny, the Christian justification of taking land through slaughter. Now, in their attack against “woke,” conservatives want to erase words like fairness, justice, and equity. That is if they allow poor and middle-class children to get an education at all. Project 2025 aims to abolish the Department of Education altogether.

In fact, if Project 2025 comes to pass, public school will never be the same. It promises to strip funding from schools that it deems “too woke” and give the funds to private religious schools. So much for the separation of church and state. It would eliminate Head Start, abandoning the 800,000 pre-school aged children who are served by the program every year. It even wants to severely limit school meal programs.

Then there are the hard fought labor protections. Project 2025 would stop public employees from unionizing, destroy overtime protection, cut off infrastructure spending, which has created hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, and even demolish child labor laws.

CHILD LABOR LAWS.

Ah yes, conservatives, take us back to the good ol’ days when children as young as 4 were covered in soot and died of black lung disease before their 18th birthday.

Group of breaker boys (coal-mining workers). Pine Street, 1911. Found on Reddit

Trump has already said he will use the US armed forces to enact revenge on his political enemies, and Project 2025 makes that possible by making the Department of Justice “nothing more than a personal litigation and prosecution weapon for Trump.”

There isn’t a category of people Project 2025 doesn’t harm, except mega corporations and their grossly wealthy male CEOs. We have to stop it. If American Democracy were a board game, Project 2025 flips the board. Pieces go flying, chaos ensues. Then only way to keep the board on a level playing field is to vote for Harris-Walz and vote blue down ballot.

If you’re new here, welcome. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Onward Democracy Defenders!

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