As the U.S. presidential election draws near, it is imperative that Black Americans let their voices be heard about a crucial issue: The Christian supremacist movement driving Project 2025 is a highly racialized global operation intent on destroying the economic and social gains of Black people in America and Africa.
A 920-page policy mandate drafted by many of Donald Trump’s allies, including the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 outlines a sweeping plan to overhaul the U.S. government, centralizing power within the presidency.
In America, the objective of Project 2025 is to dismantle the infrastructure of the civil rights movement and annihilate Blackness as a political identity. The insidious tactics by far right conservatives include: driving voter suppression initiatives, ignoring gun violence in Black communities, promoting the heavy policing of Black bodies, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, criminalizing reproductive health options, and demonizing trans people, which has a devastating impact on Black transwomen.
Bishop Joseph W. Tolton
As a young boy growing up in Harlem during the 1970s, I vividly recall the rise of Christian nationalism as my mother watched daily episodes of “The Praise The Lord Club,” featuring TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the infamous couple whose sex and money scandals led to their downfall during the late 1980s. As a young child, I observed that the Bakkers only featured African Americans who were singers and dancers on their TV show.
More perplexing, they never expressed much interest in the problems that I saw every day, but they were routinely concerned about hunger and poverty in Africa. We lived across the street from a drug treatment center, and I was also exposed to the heroin problem plaguing our community. Apparently, the Bakkers were not aware of this or any of the other realities impacting inner cities across the U.S. How could they see Africa and yet were blind to the plight of African Americans? At the age of 11, I knew that something was wrong with this picture, but I couldn’t quite square my mother’s trust in these characters with my questions.
Fast forward to 2024, and the impact of Project 2025 is already being felt across the globe. In Africa, the playbook is politicians “on the take,” working in partnership with willing clergy to create mass moral panic around “homosexuality,” distracting Africans from focusing on economic sovereignty as their core social concern. The intended outcome is to compromise democracy across the continent, siphoning Africa’s resources and permanently damaging the connection between Africa and African Americans.
It is no accident that an anti-homosexuality bill appeared in Ghana in the aftermath of the Year of Return in 2019 when the nation extended a global invitation for people of African descent to come home. More than 7,500 African Americans made the journey to Ghana, marking the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans arriving in Jamestown, Va. Ultimately, this intentional separation of Black people globally is meant to deny the international call for reparations.
A colonized Christianity that muzzles social activism and promotes domestic African culture wars is evident, for example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It has 75 percent of the world’s cobalt deposit—the most essential ingredient in our basic devices, including our cell phones. But sadly, ruthless autocrats, self-interested ecclesiastical leaders, thirsty business executives, and foreign powers are all determined to control the distribution of Africa’s resources and the wealth that it can produce.
In Kenya, during the last three months, young people have built an anti-corruption movement to push back on government theft and excess. Still, protected by the influence of the country’s conservative evangelical Church, President Ruto is turning the military on these generation Z activists all while local media coverage has been categorically shut down.
Similarly, In Tennessee, Black Lives Matter protests have been uniquely criminalized. In Florida, the same has happened with DEI activities. Affirmative action for colleges has ended. In all of the aforementioned cases, the future progress of Africans and African Americans is being dramatically compromised by the Christian supremacist playbook.
Following the U.S. presidential election, it will be essential to plan for a long-term strategy to uproot the grip of Christian supremacy around the globe. First and foremost, Africans and African Americans must unite in building a faith-inspired, intersectional, pan African social change movement featuring young leaders.
If elected president of the United States, Vice President Harris would be in a key position to strengthen the tremendous progress the Biden administration made in building reciprocal bi-lateral relationships across Africa. Vice President Harris was well received during visits to both Ghana and Zambia and was critical in implementing the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in 2022.
As president, she would be also be invited to partner with an alliance of pan-Africanists such as Interconnected Justice, The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, and The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries to combat the global implications of Project 2025 by centering African Americans as advisors on U.S.-Africa foreign policy; creating regular forums for progressive African and African American activists to connect; and recommitting to Biden’s U.S. policy to advance LGBTI rights globally as human rights.
(Bishop Joseph W. Tolton is President, Interconnected Justice +1-646-765-6960 Jtolton@icjustice.org)