All the Devils are Here

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas, 101.6 × 127 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Wikimedia Commons

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a huge storm at sea wrecks a ship and causes a character to cry out, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!”

That’s pretty much what we have in Project 2025, a storm of right-wing policy proposals that would wreck our American democracy and turn it into a dictatorship.

Throughout my career as a theologian, I have come to define “hell” as “the farthest you can get from God.” If I, as a Christian, say that “God is love,” then the farthest you can get from God is hate, a kind of concentrated, even focused, cruelty.  

Project 2025 is an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan (the merging of conservative Christianity and the state) that is not only politically conservative, it is, at times, astonishingly cruel.

Project 2025 would even further restrict access to abortion. To me, that means continuing the attack on women’s bodily autonomy, the right to make decisions about their own reproductive life, and could endanger women’s lives if they have, for example, an ectopic pregnancy. The plan wants the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop promoting abortion as health care and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to stop promoting, and approving, requests for manufacturing abortion pills. Safe and legal abortion even when medically necessary is on the chopping block.

Mark my words. Safe and effective contraception will soon be eliminated as well.

Cruel.

Project 2025 proposes removing protections for LGBTQIA persons. Why? Gratuitous cruelty in my view. It proposes the federal government remove terms such as "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" from records and policies, as well as rescind policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics."

As the grandmother of a transgender child, I find that proposal evil, as is the other litany of discriminations this would allow.

Here are some other cruelties in the more than 900 pages of Project 2025:

Selling public housing out from under the poor.

Raising the Social Security age to 70.

Promoting fossil fuels and curtailing efforts to combat climate change.

And, just in case you wondered, the ever-popular obsession of the right-wing with nuclear weapons is found in the proposal for the US to “modernise, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal”.

From the dawn of the nuclear age, the far-right wing has lusted after the nuclear doomsday scenario. I wrote about this in “God and Her Survival in the Nuclear Age” several decades ago.

The barely concealed yearning to have the power to destroy many lives, perhaps even the life of the planet itself, is an ultimate evil.

If you don’t fall in line, it is no stretch to assume with the new “imperial” presidency approved by the Supreme Court, a right-wing president could use National Guard Troops to quell protests.

There is a huge storm on the horizon and if we allow the people who crafted this destructive proposal into power it will be a genuine shipwreck of our democracy.

The constant references to Christian values is, frankly, blasphemous. Project 2025 is about as far from the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth as you can get and the whole proposal is genuinely evil.