WASHINGTON (RNS) — As Russell Vought, the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, testified June 9 before the House Appropriations Committee, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, asked an unusual question — one that seemed far afield from President Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which Vought had come to Capitol Hill to discuss.
“You identify yourself as a Christian nationalist, correct?” Pocan asked, citing Google search results about Vought.
Vought responded that he is an evangelical Christian, but said he did not believe the question was pertinent. When Pocan pressed, Vought referred vaguely to “debates in the think tank world about what it means to be a Christian nation” before the two moved on.
The moment was remarkable both for its awkwardness and for what went unsaid: Vought’s reticence before lawmakers notwithstanding, the OMB director has spent years voicing passionate support for Christian nationalism.
“We are a Christian nation,” Vought said in a 2022 address to Intercessors for America, a conservative Christian group. “We talk about under God, we are a Christian nation, we were meant to be a Christian nation. We have lost that. That means that, yes, we love religious liberty, but to the extent that we don’t even have Christians that talk about how we’re a Christian nation, something’s wrong there.”
It’s part of a history of religious rhetoric that has gotten relatively little attention since Vought resumed leadership of the OMB, where he has played a subdued but significant role in what may be the largest winnowing of the U.S. government in history. As Elon Musk made headlines for shuttering USAID and laying off thousands of federal workers, Vought’s office has quietly administered mass firings in an apparent attempt to implement Project 2025, a massive policy document produced by the Heritage Foundation that Vought is credited with chiefly authoring.
A Project 2025 fan in the group’s tent at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. The Project 2025 effort is being led by the Heritage Foundation think tank. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
But lost in the debate over government cuts is how Christian nationalism provides the ideological foundation for Vought’s plan to gut federal government and curtail immigration through the expansion of executive power. Or, as Vought once put it, implementing a vision for America that insists “Western civilization does not work without the underpinnings of a Judeo-Christian worldview.”
A Connecticut native, Vought graduated from Wheaton College, a prestigious evangelical Christian school in Illinois, in 1998. He came to Washington to study law at George Washington University and began his political rise as a legislative assistant for former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a conservative mainstay of the Senate in the 1980s and ’90s. After years serving as a functionary on Capitol Hill, Vought joined Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation.
Vought did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story, but has made no secret of his suspicion that the U.S. is becoming hostile to Christianity. Nominated to be deputy budget director in Trump’s first administration in 2017, he was grilled by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at his confirmation hearing about a blog post he had written defending the firing of a Christian professor at Wheaton who had donned a hijab and said Muslims and Christians “worship the same God.”
When Sanders asked whether parts of the post were Islamophobic, Vought stood firm. “Senator, I wrote a post based on being a Christian and attending a Christian school that has a statement of faith that speaks clearly in regard to the centrality of Jesus Christ in salvation,” he said.
Vought later framed the exchange as evidence of increasing hostility toward Christians. “It was one of those early indications that the heat is turning up” on religious conservative like himself, Vought later told Intercessors for America.
