While mostly avoiding mentions of "God," the platform functions as a wishlist for conservative Christians

Jul 10, 2024

On Monday, the Republican National Committee released its 2024 platform—a list of what their party stands for heading into the election. It was newsworthy in part because they just ditched the whole process four years ago, ceding their goals to pretty much whatever Donald Trump wanted to do while blaming the pandemic for short-circuiting the drafting process. They told people to just look back to the 2016 platform if they wanted to know where the GOP stood on various issues.

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There’s plenty in the new document that’s concerning, especially for atheists who care about church/state separation and the rise of Christian Nationalism in the GOP. But you may not recognize that if you just do a basic search for the word “God,” as one conservative noted:

(It was actually mentioned 15 times in 2016. He accidentally counted the word “Godzilla.&rdquo It’s not an apples to apples comparison, though. The 2016 document was a detailed 66 pages. The 2024 document is a highly summarized (and open to interpretation) 16 pages. Republicans know damn well the more they reveal about what they want to do to America, the less popular they become, which is why you won’t find many specifics. Even those two mentions of “God” aren’t particularly telling; one of them says that, with “Trust in God’s Good Grace,” they’ll Make America Great Again. The other says the GOP’s foreign policy plan will protect our “Rights under God.”

But make no mistake: This document, just like the previous one, is a gift to Christian Nationalists. This is essentially the same platform conservative Christians would have written, except GOP strategists went through and made it sound more palatable. For anyone who understands how they work, however, it’s not hard to read between the lines.

Let me show you.

Chapter 1, regarding inflation, mentions the need to “Stop Illegal Immigration.” (Yes, really, that’s in the inflation section.)

But under Trump, that meant a Muslim ban and a preference for Christian refugees over those of other faiths, something even many Christian leaders condemned. Trump said in a speech last year that he would reinstitute that policy, insisting with a heavy dose of bigotry, “if you don’t like our religion—which a lot of them don’t—if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in.” You get one guess as to what “our religion” is.

Chapter 4 calls for Republicans to “support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.” Chapter 7 promotes “Universal School Choice in every State in America,” voucher programs, and homeschooling.

We’ve already seen how this plays out in red states that have adopted similar voucher policies: Less money for public education and billions of dollars for private, usually Christian, schools. Homeschooling, too, is usually a conservative Christian affair. What are these prongs of the platform if not calls for more religious indoctrination?

The education bit doesn’t end there. Chapter 7 also includes a section condemning “CRT and Gender Indoctrination,” with a demand to defund schools “that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children.”

To the right, though, that amounts to punishing schools that teach comprehensive sex education or read books with LGBTQ characters or references to sex and drugs. In that sense, they want public schools to resemble evangelical megachurches, keeping kids in a bubble when knowledge might break the spell.

It gets even more blatant in Chapter 7 when they call to “reinstate the 1776 Commission, promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education, and veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education. We will support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization.” A similar section in Chapter 8 calls for restoring “Classic Liberal Arts Education.”

All of that, in essence, means downplaying the history of slavery, rejecting literature that speaks to many young people today because the author isn’t white or male or straight, and adopting the sort of fake history propagated by Christian pseudo-historian David Barton. As Republicans have repeatedly claimed, America’s “Founding Principles” are synonymous with their version of Christianity.

Chapter 7 also says Republicans will “champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school.”

Both of those things, of course, are already legal. Church/state separation groups have never gone after people who pray or read the Bible in school; the problem is when teachers, coaches, or administrators push their religious beliefs on everybody else. Louisiana recently passed a law forcing the Ten Commandments in every classroom, to the delight of the GOP, and yet the same paragraph ironically says Republicans will “stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.”

Chapter 8 opens with a call to promote the “Sanctity of Marriage,” which has come to mean marriage between one man and one woman (who aren’t related, unless they are, and only if they’re adults, unless God says otherwise).

The Supreme Court has already hinted that it’s ready to overrule Obergefell and allow red states to deny gay couples the right to marry. That’s something conservative Christian groups have been demanding for decades; no matter what surveys show about the growing acceptance of marriage equality, even among religious groups, right-wing leaders have been eager to reverse those civil rights gains.

Chapter 8 also says the GOP will “condemn antisemitism,” which is effectively code for going after people who grieve over the slaughter, by the Israeli government, of countless innocent Palestinian people. All the while, Republicans engage in their own gross antisemitism anytime they accuse Democrats of being “Soros-backed” or get their allied lobbying groups to spend millions of dollars to defeat politicians who don’t support everything Benjamin Netanyahu wants.

Chapter 9 makes clear that the support of God really means support of Christianity. In a section on “religious liberty”—excuse me, “Religious Liberty”—the mask comes right off:

To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.

At last, the religious group that represents 99% of Republicans in Congress might finally get a leg up in society. It’s almost laughable to think Christians are harassed and persecuted when the reality is that conservative Christians are often the ones harassing and persecuting everyone else outside their tribe.

There is, as expected, a section on promoting “Life.” At least when it comes to people who aren’t alive. (Republicans don’t care if guns kill the living.)

The idea that the 14th Amendment can be used to prosecute anyone who has or assists with an abortion, from the moment of conception, has long been a fantasy of conservatives. And no matter what the document says about power going back to the states, it’s contradicted by the idea of going after “Late Term Abortion” (the timing of which is undefined and often involves extremely dire circumstances). Republicans want a national ban on abortion. If they can start by making “late term” the cutoff, it won’t be hard for them to keep lowering the bar all the way down to conception. In other words, this, too, is a part of the platform guided by conservative Christian (and Catholic) beliefs. It’s foolish to pretend Republicans don’t want to ban abortion across the board; they just don’t want to deal with the backlash. That’s why they’d prefer to put this in the hands of the courts they hand-picked rather than legislate it. (The most extreme voices against abortion rights were perfectly fine with what the platform said because they know exactly what’s going on here.)

The same can be said for the very next paragraph involving the GOP’s push to end “Left-wing Gender Insanity,” which means punishing trans youth for the crime of existing, overriding what medical experts say is the best path for their care, and exaggerating how any of that would affect other Americans.

All of this is to say: It doesn’t matter how often the platform mentions “God.” It doesn’t matter if the platform doesn’t explicitly call for a national ban on abortion, as some Christian groups have been whining about. The platform is still a massive gift to the Christian Right.

None of this is surprising. It’s what we’ve come to expect from the GOP. If you’re not voting for Joe Biden—or whichever Democrat ends up on the ballot if he steps down—this is what you’re supporting. A throwaway vote for a third party candidate, or a decision to stay at home because Democrats aren’t doing everything you wish they would, makes it more likely that this platform will be adopted.

That’s why it’s beyond parody that the leader of one particular atheist group is celebrating this platform.

Atheists for Liberty is a conservative group led by people who have been accused of sexual misconduct, exhibit immature behavior, internalize misogyny, spread right-wing misinformation, and prop up conspiracy theorists. They promote themselves at places like CPAC but have yet to leave any real footprints in that movement or the atheist one.

Here’s what the head of that organization said in response to the claim that the Republican Platform of 2024 was less godly than the one from 2016 because it didn’t mention “God” as often:

“Progress.” Progress?! Where?! The only way you could say that is by looking at some superficial and meaningless metric for religiosity and never reading what they actually wrote.

I read it. I showed you what’s in it. That’s more than I can say about this useless organization that wants so desperately to pretend like it’s having an impact within the GOP. (It’s not the first time they’ve tried to spike the football at the 50-yard line.)

It wasn’t just the group’s leader; it was the group itself:

Imagine how utterly ignorant you have to be to think this platform is a victory for a Secular America. That you’re “winning the war” as the GOP becomes increasingly theocratic. That the Republican Party of 2024 is somehow less religious than it used to be. That another Trump presidency would represent a step forward for church/state separation instead of a leap backwards into the eagerly awaiting arms of Christian fundamentalists. That this platform, along with the devastation laid out in Project 2025, is “progress” for anybody outside their bubble.

You can’t do any of those things and still claim to value critical thinking.