The Phoenix Declaration: Where The Good Life = The Holy Life

We saw this phrase in Project 2025, but Christian Nationalists deploy it everywhere.

To honor this week’s multiple boycotts, I scheduled a series to run during the boycott period. I’m working less while hopefully still educating Americans. All newsletters will be paywall-free during the boycott period. To support this effort, I hope those who can afford to will consider upgrading to paid.

Photo by chris liu on Unsplash

Yesterday, we began our journey through the Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration. I started with a supplemental document authored by Ryan Anderson PhD, President of The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a DC-based Christian Nationalist theocratic think tank.

Readers who missed it may click the link below to catch up:

A Phoenix Declaration of Indoctrination

The Phoenix Declaration has already been approved for use in Florida public schools, but their intent is nationwide adoption. It is vital that more Americans grasp the Christian Nationalist intent undergirding this document.

---

Over the past five decades, Christian Nationalists have been clever. They studied what their enemies believed by attending the universities where their enemies learned. (Anderson has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University.) In order to craft a palatable, benign-sounding language, they had to understand what most Americans heard when a person said things like the truth, liberty, and freedom.

Then Christian Nationalists spent several decades sharpening those words into a language that conveyed their precise meaning to others who spoke it while sounding non-threatening and even reasonable to those who didn’t.

---

Last year during my coverage of Project 2025, I made much of its early use of the phrase THE GOOD LIFE.

My 5 February 2024 newsletter explained how Christian Nationalists mean THE CHRISTIAN LIFE or THE HOLY LIFE when they use the term THE GOOD LIFE. Readers who weren’t around barely 10 days into this space’s existence can find that newsletter below:

Project 2025's Christo-Fascist Language

Anderson’s endorsement of the Phoenix Declaration invokes the phrase THE GOOD LIFE. I extracted the final part of his section entitled THE GOOD LIFE below:

Because we need some fundamental, truthful conception of the human good and its variegated nature, an account of human nature and human flourishing, if we’re going to educate human beings.

Here’s the reality: Every theory and approach to education has an account of human nature and human flourishing, either implicit or explicit, either true or false. Rousseau has an account; Randi Weingarten has an account; Aristotle has an account; Augustine and Aquinas have accounts. Some are better than others. And when I say a theory of human nature, I mean a theory both of our potentialities and capabilities, and of our fallenness, frailties, and fallibility. Augustine has a leg up on Rousseau there. If every theory of and approach to education is based at least on an implicit account of human nature and flourishing, I want a true one, and I think it better if we’re explicit about it. (SOURCE: The Heritage Foundation - not linking to them)

Remember, to Christian Nationalists THE TRUTH = THE BIBLE/GOD’S LAW.

Therefore, Anderson’s use of the word truthful above means Biblical. Truthful is WCN code for Biblical virtually every time a Christian Nationalist invokes it.

Christian Nationalists do not view human beings as good. To them, the truthful (Biblical) position on human nature is that human beings are inherently sinful. (This is Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin, to which we will return shortly.)

Since Eve ate the fruit first in the Garden and tempted Adam to fall with her, human nature can never be good; humans can never flourish on their own. Hence his reference to our fallenness, frailties, and fallibility, all stand-ins for our sinful nature, sin, and/or Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin.

Augustine has a leg up on Rousseau here.

I pulled out that sentence and highlighted it again, because I want to make Anderson’s intent completely clear. While he invokes secular thinkers most educated Americans will recognize, another trick WCN extremists have honed over decades to distract the masses, he is whole-heartedly endorsing that public school children be taught everything I outlined previously:

• The Truth = The Bible/God’s law/Christian Nationalist interpretation of God’s law

• Truthful = Biblical

• Human nature = Humans cannot be good because they are sinful. (Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin: Eve ate the fruit first and tempted Adam to fall with her.)

• Formation = Forced Christian Nationalist Religious Indoctrination

• Liberty and Freedom = Acceptance of the Christian Nationalist path to the One True God/the rejection of one’s sinful nature (The only true liberty or freedom is the liberation from one’s sinful nature via one’s acceptance of the One True God. Forgive me for continuing to hammer this point, but it is central to understanding what WCNs mean by any terms that include the words liberty and freedom, anywhere they are deployed.)

When Anderson says I want the truth, and I think it’s better if we’re explicit about it, he’s being explicit for those who speak this language while misleading everyone else. Make no mistake: He is using Christian Nationalist language to call for taxpayer-funded forced religious indoctrination in America’s public schools and applauding the Phoenix Declaration for this intent.

---

Now that we’ve spent a couple of days translating some of the Heritage Foundation’s Christian Nationalist language as it relates to the Phoenix Declaration, read Anderson’s next excerpted section “Moral Formation in K-12 Education:”

K–12 education will never simply be about knowledge in some limited sense of imparting information. It will always be formation in the largest sense possible…As students spend the majority of their waking hours at schools, they’re not just learning book knowledge, they’re learning what it means to be human. Not simply learning to read but learning how to be human. Which also means learning morality…all of the educational choices we make at school are also moral choices, and these choices ineluctably contribute to the moral formation of students…Every aspect of the curriculum will form a student’s reason and will, his or her knowledge and morals. And for that matter, I’d add that these choices influence students’ tastes, their aesthetic judgments and preferences—these aren’t given either, but need to be formed.

Based upon everything we’ve covered the past two days, what do you think Anderson is saying in the above paragraph?

I’ll give readers another translation key:

Moral/Moral Choices/Morality = the Christian Nationalist interpretation of The Truth/The Bible/God’s Law

In today’s video, I’m reading everything we’ve covered so far with the translated language. Follow along with the original text and listen to the translated language as I read it.

If Americans are going to defeat Christian Nationalist theocrats, we are going to have to become experts and doing this kind of translation in real time. All the time. For as long as it takes.

---

Please join me tomorrow to continue this journey, which will surely outlast this week. I don’t want to belabor a seemingly minor Heritage Foundation publication, but we have too much language fodder here. It encompasses too many other areas under WCN theocratic attack. And too few Americans still understand the stakes, let alone grasp this corruption of language.

I hope to see you tomorrow.

---

So many more Americans need to see this work. Please share this newsletter with everyone you know to help them start hearing what Christian Nationalists are REALLY saying.

---