Elon Musk does not read to most people as a religious man. The tech billionaire who is attempting to take over the entire federal government through his "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) was once even regarded as an atheist. In 2013, Musk scoffed at the idea "that there's some superconsciousness watching over our every movement." He argued that evolutionary theory was better than a supernatural explanation for making sense of our world. As he ransacks the federal government, trying to push out federal employees and lay waste to the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work, the last thing most people will assume motivates him is Christian fervor.
Over the summer, Musk told Jordan Peterson during an interview that while he's not "a particularly religious person," he would say, "I’m probably a cultural Christian."
For Musk personally, it probably doesn't. But his efforts to evacuate the federal government of the every day, non-political employees nonetheless serve a Christian nationalist agenda, which Musk is no doubt aware of. The secular-seeming brand of DOGE serves a useful propagandistic purpose by concealing how much Musk is following the Project 2025 playbook developed by Christian nationalists for the explicit purpose of remaking America in the fundamentalist image. Musk is the obnoxious, trolling face of the operation, but he works hand-in-glove with the Project 2025 author who called for an "army" of people with a "Biblical worldview" to replace the existing federal workforce. The explicit plan is to replace federal workers who Musk forces out with people who pass "ideological purity tests," largely based on their eagerness to make America something very much like a theocracy.
While Musk is snagging most headlines with his loud-mouthed antics, his partner in the federal purge operation is Russ Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who Trump appointed to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought has developed the justification for ignoring the clear language of the Constitution, arguing this is a "post-constitutional" moment, in which law-breaking is justified to impose his theocratic vision on the country. Having Musk cover for Vought is savvy. Polls may show people's approval of Musk sinking the more they see of him, but his clownishness and personal success probably soften people's willingness to see him as the threat he is. Vought, however, is every inch a type most Americans know well and loathe: the creepy religious fanatic.
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Project 2025 was clear that its primary goal was to "use government power" to "restore the American family," which is defined strictly in terms of male-dominated heterosexual couples with children. In its list of alleged threats to the "family," the playbook lists phrases like "sexual orientation," "gender equality" and "reproductive health." The document goes into elaborate detail about how federal offices can be used to implement this compulsory and narrow heterosexuality, from abortion bans to replacing reproductive health services with abstinence-only lectures to even reimagining child support programs to bully women into remarrying ex-husbands.
The secular-seeming brand of DOGE serves a useful propagandistic purpose by concealing how much Musk is following the Project 2025 playbook developed by Christian nationalists for the explicit purpose of remaking America in the fundamentalist image.
If one looks away from Musk to Trump officials who have legal appointments, the Christian nationalist agenda that Musk is assisting becomes more obvious. Last week, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced the suspension of rules barring discrimination against LGBTQ people in low-income housing and even homeless shelters. The move will especially affect queer teenagers, who are often homeless after being kicked out by right-wing parents. Turner justified putting teenagers on the street by declaring, in his official statement, that this is what "the Lord established from the beginning." Project 2025 called for HUD to end "corrosive progressive ideologies across the department’s programs." Drastically reducing the existing HUD workforce so MAGA apparatchiks could control people's housing access — based no doubt on their prejudices — is outlined in this vision.
The purge at the Department of Justice (DOJ) has largely been covered as part of Donald Trump's "revenge" tour against everyone who tried to hold him accountable for alleged crimes during and after his first term in office. That is absolutely part of it, of course, but it also helps lay the groundwork for the Project 2025 goal of using DOJ powers to force the Christian right's agenda on normal people. Trump's new attorney general, Pam Bondi, has already been hinting in public that she is open to using federal prosecutors to prosecute doctors who mail abortion pills to women in states where clinics have been forcibly shut down. Louisiana is queuing up her first opportunity, by demanding the extradition of a New York-based doctor to their state, where they plan to put her on trial for providing abortion pills to a Louisiana teenager.
If Bondi bites, as legal experts Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo explained at Rewire News, that opens the door for a broad Christian nationalist agenda outlined in Project 2025 to terrorize people for providing birth control, sex toys, or even sex education materials. The document argues that prosecutors can revive the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that criminalized the mailing of "obscene" materials, which were broadly defined to cover all of these items. Project 2025 does not hold back from characterizing even basic sex education in this way, defining obscenity so broadly that even providing a "how to use a condom" manual — online or in a paper pamphlet — would be enough to be charged with a crime. Flushing the DOJ of good lawyers, so that they can be replaced with far-right hacks who hate birth control and queer people, is a first step to making this theocratic vision a reality.
If that sounds preposterous, it's worth noting that demonizing contraception and sex ed was central to Musk's illegal efforts to end USAID. He and Trump both repeatedly attacked a program in Mozambique that provided $5 million in contraceptives, though they inflated the number exponentially to make it $100 million and falsely claimed it was going to "Hamas" instead of young women in Africa. They've also suspended HIV-prevention drugs from being distributed overseas to anyone who isn't a pregnant or breastfeeding woman, who are at risk of transmitting the virus to babies. Anyone who isn't a baby is clearly considered deserving of death, because Christian fundamentalists believe you only get the virus through "sin."
Musk's past atheism and tendency to sleep with many different women hasn't stopped him from warming to the Christian right's loathing of sexual freedom. He's started echoing Christian right propaganda that paints the birth control pill as dangerous and unnatural. His friend, fellow tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has heavily invested in publications that promote the far-right Christian view that sex is only for marriage, and within marriage, it's only for procreation. (Thiel exempts himself from following his own prescriptions, as he's married to a man.)
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Musk isn't ready to say he believes in God, but this shift to the right on sexual health issues is part of his larger embrace of Christian nationalism. Over the summer, he told Jordan Peterson during an interview that while he's not "a particularly religious person," he would say, "I’m probably a cultural Christian." He tried to frame this as a positive thing, with vague claims to believe in "the teachings of Jesus," but as Victor Tangermann of Futurism pointed out, this is ridiculous. Pointing to Musk's "long track record" of treating other people like dirt, hoarding wealth, and stoking discord, Tangermann writes, has nothing to do with the Jesus "who deeply opposed wealth inequality and supported the poor and outcasts." As David French at the New York Times pointed out, the illegal cuts to USAID have taken money from "Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad."
But Musk has indeed embraced the cultural mores of Christian nationalists, whose faith is less about Jesus and more about using power to enforce their racist, sexist, and anti-queer views on the rest of Americans. Musk is obsessed with raising the birth rate and has explicitly noted, "the more religious, the less educated, and the poorer, the higher the birth rate." It's not much of a leap to see what his conclusion is: that to drive up birth rates, he needs to make ordinary people poorer, less educated, and more religious. He may not believe in God, but he certainly finds it useful to force right-wing Christianity on others as a means of control.
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