Adventist Denomination Voices Concerns Over Project 2025
This election year has proven to be a heated competition, with many fearful of one particular byproduct of a far-right think tank – Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation, a known conservative group that has had a heavy hand in Republican policies, released the 1,000-page plan a few months ago and has since elicited powerful responses from First Amendment experts.
Project 2025 contains policy recommendations that many find concerning if not dangerous, such as the elimination of the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and others. The motivation behind the plan is to enforce conservative values that center Judeo-Christian beliefs as the only recognized religion, creating policy choices that would remove the separation of church and state.
Extreme right-wing factions created the policy, hoping to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” and “build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration,” as stated on the Heritage Foundation’s official website.
The policy that raises the most concern for Seventh-day Adventists has been the plan’s intent to recognize Sunday as the Sabbath, creating “an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act by requiring workers to be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.” This policy would essentially enact the “Sunday Law,” a point drawn from Revelation 13, which predicts laws passed attacking religious liberty. Jonathon Berry, former acting assistant secretary of policy at the Department of Labor and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, wrote, “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day.”
Many Seventh-day Adventists have raised the alarm for policies such as this for their dangers on not only Sabbath observance but also on the possible infringement on First Amendment rights. Melissa Reid, the associate public affairs and religious liberty director for the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, was quoted in “Inside Project 2025” in The Tennessean,
“Project 2025’s ‘Sabbath Rest’ proposal raises a host of issues for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the most glaring being that it raises serious Establishment Clause concerns. The bottom line is that Congress shouldn’t be in the business of legislating to encourage religious observance.”
Adventists facing down the possibility of the long-feared “Sunday Law” are not only wary of Project 2025’s interference with Adventism’s doctrine but also our advocacy. Reid is quick to note that Seventh-day Adventists have “a long history of advocating for a strong separation of church and state.” Reid also states that, “We believe that one of the very best ways of protecting religious freedom for all Americans — regardless of what they believe or don’t believe — is for the government to keep its thumb off the scale when it comes to any issue of faith or religious doctrine.”
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