A Distinction Without Separation
Project 2025 has a plan. It also has a religion. This is the movement engine — the people, the institutions, and the holy-war rhetoric behind the blueprint.
The phrase in the title is not ours. It is how an Opus Dei-affiliated institution describes the proper relationship between church and state on its own website: “a distinction without separation, a union without confusion.” This page grades the record behind Project 2025’s architects — Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo — on their own documented ties, admissions, and words.
What this page is about
Project 2025’s policy content is documented in They Published the Plan. This page is about the engine: the religious project behind the blueprint, and the two men most responsible for it. Kevin Roberts, who built Project 2025, has documented ties to Opus Dei-led institutions — including, by his own admission, weekly mass at a center run by an Opus Dei priest. Leonard Leo, who built the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, describes the fight in the language of spiritual warfare.
Everything below is graded on the primary record — FACT on the ties, admissions, quotes, and the agenda. The larger claim, that traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals have converged into a single governing movement, we present as this page’s argument, graded SOME SMOKE, not as a proven coalition.
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A Distinction Without Separation.
Project 2025 has a plan. It also has a religion. The movement engine behind the blueprint — Kevin Roberts, Leonard Leo, and their own words on church and state.
The record, in order
Every dated event on this page, assembled chronologically. The page may cover events in a different order for the narrative; this is the straight timeline.
- 2022Leonard Leo — 'barbarians, secularists and bigots' under 'the influence of the devil'
- Sep 2023Kevin Roberts — Heritage president, Project 2025 architect, and his Opus Dei-linked institutions
- Jul 2024'A distinction without separation, a union without confusion' — church and state, in their own words
- Jul 2024Project 2025 — 100+ groups, and a foreword by the Vice President
- Jul 2024Traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals, converging on one project
The architect and his faith
Roberts’s Catholicism is not the story; the documented institutional ties are. We report them as ties and spiritual affiliation — not membership.
Kevin Roberts — Heritage president, Project 2025 architect, and his Opus Dei-linked institutions
FACTKevin Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation and its lobbying arm Heritage Action, and the public architect of Project 2025. His ties to Opus Dei-led institutions are documented and, in one case, self-reported: Roberts acknowledged in a September 2023 speech that for years he has attended weekly mass at the Catholic Information Center, a Washington institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington. He led the John Paul the Great Academy, whose patron is Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, and he was involved in an Opus Dei-affiliated high-school leadership program in Austin, Texas, per a site that tracks Opus Dei members' activities. We report these as close ties and spiritual affiliation; we do not assert Opus Dei membership, which is not publicly claimed. The Guardian, which reported the ties, characterizes Opus Dei as a 'radical Catholic group' — that description is the Guardian's, and we attribute it rather than adopt it.
- The Guardian — 'Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei' (July 26, 2024): the CIC weekly-mass admission, the John Paul the Great Academy, and the Austin program
- The Heritage Foundation — Kevin D. Roberts, PhD (official bio: president of Heritage and Heritage Action)
'A distinction without separation, a union without confusion' — church and state, in their own words
FACTOn the website of an Opus Dei-affiliated institution, the relationship between church and state is described not as separation but as 'a distinction without separation, a union without confusion.' The formulation borrows the language the Church uses for the two natures of Christ and applies it to the state — a theological argument against the separation of church and state, stated plainly on the record. We quote it because it is their framing, not ours.
“a distinction without separation, a union without confusion”
The financier, in his own words
We do not need to call Leonard Leo an extremist. We can simply quote him.
Leonard Leo — 'barbarians, secularists and bigots' under 'the influence of the devil'
FACTLeonard Leo is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society and a principal architect of the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority, at the center of a vast conservative dark-money network. In a 2022 speech accepting the Catholic Information Center's John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo described his political opponents as 'vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots' who were 'under the influence of the devil.' The words are his; the framing is explicitly one of spiritual warfare. Reporting on his public speeches has noted he casts the political struggle as, in effect, a war with the devil.
“vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots”
What the plan would do — and who wrote its foreword
Project 2025 — 100+ groups, and a foreword by the Vice President
FACTProject 2025 is a plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend federal policy: limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights, dismantling the Department of Education, ending diversity programs, and increasing government support for 'fertility awareness' methods rather than more reliable contraception. JD Vance — a Catholic convert — wrote the foreword to Roberts's book, originally titled 'Dawn's Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,' retitled 'Taking Back Washington to Save America,' whose release Roberts postponed in August 2024 amid the Project 2025 controversy. On Trump: the plan was authored largely by former Trump officials and allies, but his campaign publicly disavowed it during the 2024 race — we note the ties and the denial together.
- The Guardian (July 26, 2024) — the '100+ groups' agenda summary (abortion, LGBTQ+, Department of Education, diversity programs, 'fertility awareness' vs. contraception)
- The Guardian — 'JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader's upcoming book' (July 24, 2024)
- They Published the Plan — our investigation of Project 2025's policy content
The thesis: a convergence, not a conspiracy
Traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals, converging on one project
SOME SMOKEThe larger argument this page makes is that a traditionalist-Catholic current — the Opus Dei-adjacent institutions around Roberts and Leo — has converged with the broader evangelical Christian right on a shared governing project, of which Project 2025 is the clearest expression. The theologian Massimo Faggioli describes Opus Dei as part of a movement of U.S. conservative and traditionalist Catholics who see this political moment, and the prospect of 'woke ideology' prevailing, as 'fundamentally changing the nature of America, western civilization and Christianity.' We grade this convergence SOME SMOKE, not FACT: it is a documented alignment of agenda and rhetoric, and it is our analytical read — not a proven, formally organized coalition. The evidence is the shared platform and the shared language, not a membership roster.
A plan to run the state, and a reason to
The Corporate State hub documents a project to staff and run the government like a company, on a foundation of professed natural hierarchy. This page supplies the missing half of that story: the moral engine. When the men building the blueprint describe the separation of church and state as a doctrinal error, and cast their opponents as barbarians under the influence of the devil, the deregulatory, anti-DEI, anti-contraception planks stop reading as disconnected policy preferences and start reading as a single program with a theological spine. We have stopped short of calling that program theocratic in our own voice — but we have put its architects’ own words on the record, and invited the reader to weigh them.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- The Guardian — Kevin Roberts’s close ties to Opus Dei-led institutions; the church-state quote; Leo’s 2022 CIC-award speech; the Project 2025 agenda (July 26, 2024)
- The Guardian — JD Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book (July 24, 2024)
- The New York Times — on Leonard Leo’s network and his “barbarians, secularists and bigots” language (Sept. 18, 2024)
- The Heritage Foundation — Kevin D. Roberts, PhD, official bio