Project 2025 - The Nuclear Family Whether You Like it or Not

By John Ehlers - Published 12-12-25

Background

Project 2025 is multi-pronged  program developed by the Heritage Foundation as a Christian Nationalist framework for the second Trump administration to use in its quest to control Americans and American society.

While it has become better known (if not fully understood), even less understood is that it is based on a philosophy known as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.”  This is a conservative Christian ideology within evangelical Christianity holding that there are seven aspects of society that believers must dominate in order to create a society oriented to Christianity.

The seven are: Family, Religion, Education, Business, Media, Government, Arts & Entertainment.  Our focus here will be on the FAMILY “mountain,” but we need to recognize that these are not stand-alone areas of interest.  They are interrelated and even interdependent upon one another in various ways.

To understand Project 2025, one must first recognize that it is a “top-down” approach to organizing everything.  Note: While the plan calls for gaining “dominion” over each sphere, the goal is to dominate and control the activity within that area of interest.  The ultimate goal is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

Project 2025 and the Family

Project 2025 defines the family as a male father, a female mother, and a child or children. This nuclear family is regarded as a “sacred institution” ordained by God.

According to the authors of Project 2025, while parents control the lives of their children at home, they must also be able to control their lives outside the home by dominating all other spheres of life. The parents depend on others to help educate them (the Education sphere), protect them (Government), and inform them (Religion, Media). The goal is to impose “a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family” in all of these spheres.

Their efforts include placing Christian Nationalists on school boards, favoring homeschooling, influencing school curriculums, banning books, promoting laws defining what constitutes a family i.e., opposing same sex marriage, promoting laws outlawing abortion and IVF, to name a few.

The authoritarian approach within the family (dominant dad, submissive mom and obedient children) is predictive of support for authoritarian and autocratic leadership in society and government as a whole.

While Christian Nationalists claim to be pro-family, the impact of their policies and the laws they support is not pro-family and is definitely not pro-women. Here’s how seemingly unrelated policies espoused in Project 2025 work to the disadvantage of women and families.

Without financial independence, women lack what they need to be safe, self sufficient, and successful. Poverty is a policy consequence caused by lack of commitment to advancing policies to promote equal pay, raising the minimum wage, expanding child tax credits, universal paid family and medical leave, affordable and accessible childcare, and reforming federal assistance programs. Most importantly, women must be able to control their bodies and have affordable access to healthcare (and specifically reproductive healthcare) designed for girls and women.

Lack of access to affordable health care is a consequence of increasing poverty rates for women and girls. Reductions in healthcare funding such as for reproductive healthcare services obviously affect women disproportionately.

Enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act would prohibit the sending of “abortion producing materials” through the mail. This effectively bans medication abortion which may force poorer women to carry a child to term even though they cannot afford the medical expenses related to a pregnancy or to provide for the child once it is born.

Cutting the Head Start Program, free lunch programs, and eliminating Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, decreases investment in children from low-income households. Project 2025 also seeks to limit access to affordable housing for families with children by imposing work requirements, time limits, and other eligibility restrictions.

Limiting reproductive choice is achieved by dramatically increasing surveillance of, and criminalization risks for, pregnant women, including by mandating data collection for all abortions in the country. This includes tracking people who get abortions and threatening to cut funding for states that refuse to participate in surveillance. This will exacerbate harm to Black women and other women of color who are already subject to over-surveillance and criminalization.

Targeting reproductive health care providers increases prosecutions of healthcare professionals who provide abortion care. Just the threat of prosecution already undermines high-quality maternity care by forcing many providers to leave states with abortion bans, creating new maternity care deserts. These actions will cause more fear and pain for Black women who are already three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

Gutting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would leave millions women without health insurance and healthcare protections. Women are the primary consumers of healthcare, and losing ACA protections would disproportionately threaten their overall health, economic security, and peace of mind as they lose access to primary care, maternity services, and mental health care.

This is not a comprehensive listing of how Project 2025 negatively affects women, but it is proof that Project 2025 is neither pro-family nor pro-women.

Why is it so important to be pro-women and women’s rights? An old adage says, “Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a girl and you educate the future.”

It is not a stretch then, to say, “Sow equal opportunity and support for women and girls and you will reap a stronger, healthier, more prosperous nation. And may we say, a more diverse nation. That’s definitely not a Project 2025 goal.