The Heritage Foundation is back with a new plan for remaking America in its own image. The think tank which masterminded Project 2025 released a new issue paper last month, this time focused on, as the title puts it, “Saving America by Saving the Family.” Where Project 2025 focused on dismantling and rebuilding public structures and government institutions in a bid to strengthen conservative, Christian nationalist political power, the group’s new initiative establishes a roadmap for remaking a more personal institution: the family.
As with Project 2025, the lens applied to Heritage’s self-assigned task of remaking the American family is replete with Christian nationalist facets: the group has a very specific vision for what it believes a family should look like, and the policies laid out in the new issue paper are designed not just to incentivize that specific vision of a family, but to disfavor any alternate kinds of family structure.
“To end America’s family crisis, policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice, driven by two truths,” the paper’s introduction reads. “The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.”
Children are important, and years of social science research shows that what they need most is stability, empathy, and attention from their caregivers. Right off the bat, the new Heritage plan dismisses those decades’ worth of findings in favor of the group’s own unevidenced beliefs about what helps children thrive: heterosexual marriage and biological custodial parents. In the report, Heritage refers to this structure as the “natural family.”
“They use that phrase a lot in the report, specifically to refer to a heterosexual couple who is going to have children, ideally in their 20s,” Elena Trueba told me when we spoke last week. Trueba, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School who writes insightfully about American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, also posted a video about the paper late last month, which prompted me to reach out and talk to her about it.
Over the course of nearly 200 pages, the conservative think-tankers lay out what they see as a problem, and what they believe to be the solution. The problem? Family in decline, fertility rates falling, non-marital partnership rising, and society drifting further from the patterns established in Leave it to Beaver. The solution: policies to incentivize younger marriage and younger child-bearing, absent any of the social safety nets necessary to make those things possible for most.
Many parts of the Heritage paper are warmed-over bits of pablum from the 1990s-era conservative fixation on the family, supercharged a quarter of the way through the subsequent century by the rise in Christian nationalism and the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office. The authors wring their hands about career-focused women postponing having children, about the “LGBTQ agenda”, and about how women simply aren’t having enough babies in general. They pepper their writing with charts about declining church attendance, increasing numbers of unwed mothers (a chart the authors felt necessary to segregate by race), and the overall decline in marriage rates.
The paper blames the decline in fertility, starting in the 1970s, on “the surge of women entering the workforce, the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s, and the nationwide legalization of abortion in the 1970s.” To hear them tell it, Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 was a horror film.
Throughout, the authors make no bones about their desire to see women forsake career advancement in favor of having children young and often, to see young people embrace traditional marriage ahead of cohabitation, and to see these young couples raise their gaggles of young children in religious settings – for purely family-centric reasons, no doubt. This is the desired family structure that the authors describe as the natural family.
In contrast to the idea of the natural family, the authors posit what they refer to as “consent-based” relationships, described as including “casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce.”
“This is something Heritage has been writing about for a while,” Trueba told me. “This consent-based model includes other types of family structures, like gay couples, like couples who purposefully aren’t going to have children, any other kind of family structure like that.”
“So, when they’re talking about privileging and supporting this type of family,” she said, “they are necessarily excluding other kinds of families.”
Though the paper’s authors studiously avoid referring to their desired “natural” family as white, there is a constant thrum of racial anxiety vibrating just below the surface of every page. Given my general inclination to see racism in most conservative policy positions, I asked Trueba if I was reading too much into it, or if she had also noticed the vibes.
“Absolutely,” she said. “You look at a plan like this, they’re not going to explicitly say, ‘we would like to support traditional white families.’ They’ll just say, ‘we would like to support the natural family, the two-parent family, the stable family,’” she told me, rattling off the euphemisms. “And then they refer in the paper to, you know, we want to stop advantaging single mothers in urban areas.”
“A paper like this just says there is one kind of family that we want to support. We’re not going to name the other kinds of families we don’t want to support, but we’ll let you guess what they are.”
In that regard, I’m sure the paper’s authors will be glad to know that they accomplished something very much like Leave it to Beaver: segregation is never mentioned, but it’s there in every frame.
Ultimately, “Saving America by Saving the Family” isn’t really about the family at all. Rather, it’s a proposal for a complete overhaul of the welfare state, wrapped in family values for presentation.
“This is a lot of language about how much we love the family disguising major welfare structure and reform,” Trueba told me. “And that’s been a pet project of Heritage for decades. They’ve been wanting to take an axe to the welfare system basically since as soon as it was created.”
Though they bury it deep in the paper, the authors aren’t particularly shy about proving Trueba right. “Congress should redesign welfare benefits to promote work and marriage, and structure them so that the public can grasp their cost and resist left-wing efforts to expand them,” the paper says. “This, in turn, will encourage more marriage and self-support.” The authors propose “radically” restructuring existing welfare programs and cutting benefits in order to “break the cycle of dependence.” They frame this as supporting families.
The vision for the country laid out in “Saving America by Saving the Family” dovetails neatly with the broader vision described by Project 2025: orderly, hierarchical, Christian-inflected but not weighed-down by Christ’s exhortations to feed the hungry or welcome the stranger. Like Project 2025, the paper is a product of Christianity as American folk religion, a faith stripped of its theological particulars, reduced to an identity marker, both shibboleth and simulacrum. The version of the family found in the paper is not a description of anything in the Bible – in which marriage usually included a dowry and often included multiple wives – it’s just a description of the Jim Crow fantasies which a wide swath of the right-wing now considers traditional.
The one saving grace about “Saving America by Saving the Family” is that it’s just a think-tank paper and is not yet a bill in Congress.
“Heritage can’t make any of these policies,” Trueba told me. “I see people posting about this and saying, you know, ‘oh my gosh, Heritage is going to put us in marriage reeducation camps,’ and I don’t think that’s on the table quite yet,” she laughed.
But, as she was quick to point out, Heritage’s place outside of government does not limit the influence they can exhibit within it, and that’s cause enough to take the proposals in the paper seriously.
“Heritage has been an incredibly influential voice on the right,” she said. “They’ve had a lot of their policy proposals for Project 2025 and many, many editions of the Mandate for Leadership series put in place by Republican administrations.”
“I think it would be a mistake,” she told me, “to not take this plan very seriously.”
