David Quinn
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) is one of the great catch-cries of our time, and President Donald Trump now has it firmly in his cross-hairs. DEI policies have become extremely widespread and are to be found in businesses, the public sector, universities, and even the military. To some extent, ‘DEI’ has a Christian impulse behind it, and this is probably why a lot of Christians sympathise with it, but DEI also has problematic aspects.
Let’s start though by explaining DEI the way its best proponents do, Harvard University, for example.
On the website of the Harvard Business School, DEI is defined as follows:
“Diversity: The presence and participation of individuals with varying backgrounds and perspectives, including those who have been traditionally underrepresented.
Equity: Equal access to opportunities and fair, just, and impartial treatment.
Inclusion: A sense of belonging in an environment where all feel welcomed, accepted, and respected”.
Context
In an American context, what might be a group that has been “traditionally underrepresented”, has not been fairly and justly treated, or made to feel “welcomed, accepted and respected”? The most obvious example is black people.
Brought to America as slaves (half a million of the 10 million Africans brought across the Atlantic during the years of the slave trade ended up in what is now the United States), they started at the very bottom of society and have not climbed as far up the social ladder as they ought to in the meantime. African-Americans are still disproportionately likely to suffer multiple social disadvantages, which is a product of racism, past and present, the fact that they started out as slaves, and now widespread family breakdown.
DEI is intended to ensure that groups like black people are fairly treated in business and elsewhere.
This entirely syncs with Christian values. Christianity teaches that the “last shall be first, and the first shall be last”. DEI policies therefore have a Christian basis, even if this basis is rarely or never acknowledged.
What then, can the problem be? It very much depends on how DEI policies work out in practice and what kind of worldview is being promoted alongside them.
For example, at first glance, Marxism seems to have elements in common with Christianity. It promotes fairness and equality. It wants to lift up the downtrodden. We can see why many Christians, including priests and religious, have been attracted to one or another form of socialism down the years.
A great, authoritarian State was built in the name of establishing equality”
The reason Marxism was not embraced by more Christians is that it was extremely anti-religion, regarding religion as a delusion, an ‘opium’, that stopped the downtrodden confronting their real circumstances.
Another reason is that it was purely materialistic in outlook and therefore rejected all possibility of the supernatural.
A third reason is that it turned out to be anti-freedom. A great, authoritarian State was built in the name of establishing equality.
A fourth reason is that it promoted a highly divisive view of the world that treated everyone either as an oppressor or oppressed. It saw the world through a ‘class warfare’ lens and promoted hatred of the ‘ruling class’ and anyone with substantial properly.
DEI (also called ‘wokeness’) is not anti-religion per se, nor does it see the world in purely materialistic terms. But it does share two problematic traits in common with socialism, namely it can end up attacking fairness in the name of ‘fairness’, and it has a strong tendency to divide the world into either the ‘oppressed’ or the ‘oppressors’.
Unfair
How can it ever be unfair to promote ‘fairness’? Here is an example. In American universities, thanks to the very high marks they often achieve, Asian-Americans are overrepresented in comparison with their numbers in the population, and African-Americans are underrepresented. Therefore, a lot of American universities deliberately devised admission policies that artificially reduced the number of Asian-Americans gaining a university place, and artificially boosted the number of African-Americans gaining one. This is sometimes called ‘affirmative action’.
Needless to say, Asian-Americans believed this policy was very unfair. Why should they be held back to address past wrongs? And anyway, haven’t they been victims of discrimination as well?
We can see now how DEI in practice can begin to go off the rails”
In 2020, Californians voted by a wide margin to reject ‘affirmative action’ policies. This is despite California being a very liberal State. More recently, the US Supreme Court struck down these same race-based admissions policies in US colleges.
So, the question from a Christian point of view is whether it is fair to discriminate against one group (in this case the likes of Asian-Americans) in order to advance another group, in this case African-Americans?
Likewise, is it fair to discriminate against men in hiring and promotion practice in order to advance women?
We can see now how DEI in practice can begin to go off the rails and become very controversial indeed.
A second aspect is even more controversial, and that is the tendency to divide the world into oppressor and oppressed groups. On the ‘oppressor’ side of the ledger are men and white people above all. White people, and white men in particular, have benefited historically by being ‘oppressors’ and therefore must be pulled down, says this theory.
Other groups – women, gay people, racial minorities – must take their place.
Supremacy
We then begin to hear a lot about ‘white supremacy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. Even if you are anti-racism and never discriminate against anyone based on colour, the mere fact of being white, puts you at an advantage, it makes you ‘privileged’, which means you benefit from ‘white supremacy’ even if you are not aware of this fact. This is why the whole system must be pulled down and changed, at least according to the most hardline DEI proponents.
But declaring whole groups guilty like this is deeply unchristian. Christianity views us an individuals. We are guilty of our own sins, and we can repent and be forgiven for those, starting off again with a clean slate. Ideas of ‘group guilt’ are totally contrary to this. If you are white, you are an oppressor until such time as a totally equal world is created. But how much discrimination must be inflicted on those ‘guilty’ groups in order to get there? Would the attempt to cure injustice cause even more injustice?
These are the questions we must consider before uncritically embracing DEI policies. The general impulse behind them is good and Christian in many ways, but in practice, DEI policies can become both unfair and unchristian.
When socialism first arose, Pope Leo XIII came up with a Christian response, namely the encyclical Rerum Novarum. Perhaps we need to come up with a Christian version of DEI that promotes fairness, but not through unfair practices and a divisive worldview?