Decoding Project 2025's Christian Nationalist language

[Nevilledog]

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/19/decoding-project-2025s-christian-nationalist-language/

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, characters engage in doublespeak, a way of distorting language to obscure its true meaning. Christian Nationalists have mastered their own doublespeak. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s manifesto for transforming our government into a Christo-fascist regime.

Christian Nationalists are taught to be “in the world but not of it.” This means they are called to live alongside the world’s non-Christians, but they are called to remain separate and apart from secular behavior and influence. One way they attempt to remain apart is with language. They speak in a language I call Evangelicalese. I grew up in the world of Christian Nationalism. Evangelicalese was my second language.

By studying Project 2025 and the specific language Christian Nationalist politicians use, we can translate the words they say into what those words really mean to them. A Christian Nationalist’s use of a word or phrase may mean something very different to someone outside their community. It is vital to grasp what Christian Nationalists mean when they say things. because they deploy Evangelicalese to hide extreme positions in plain sight.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading Project 2025.

On pornography

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. - Project 2025, page 13

To many media outlets, this was a throwaway paragraph. Why would anyone make more of it? The average American understands pornography generally includes mediums like adult websites, adult films, fetish sites and similar.

*snip*