For six years, I served on the Board of Directors for a Catholic-founded non-denominational Christian charity that serves adults with intellectual and physical disabilities. The organization provides homes, support, and a truly good life for these individuals, and I was made a better person by forming mutual relationships with the community. I also gained much out of the professional experience of serving on the Board.
Recently, however, I made the decision – ultimately, not a hard one – to quit this organization. Not just to leave the Board but to end all volunteer activity and financial contributions immediately.
What caused this sudden change? The organization’s slow but complete embrace of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) ideology was at deep conflict with my own Christian values.
How it ended
At some point this past fall, Board members had been asked to take an anonymous self-assessment on items like our understanding of the financials, responsiveness of the staff, and other items of good nonprofit governance. One question stood out to me: Is the Board diverse enough? The implication, of course, was not diversity based on professional experience, geography, age, or some other metric. It was a purely racial question, asking if the Board was too white.
I wrote: “I prefer [organization] to recruit Board members based on the gifts and talents they bring, rather than skin tone.”
In a normal time, this preference would be considered a normal desire. In essence, I was asking if we can judge people based on their character and abilities rather than the color of their skin. You know, Martin Luther King, Jr. type of stuff.
Naively, believing the organization’s widely broadcasted goal of inclusion was sincere, I believed such a comment would spark conversation and reflection. Boy, was I wrong.
On the next Board call, when the anonymous survey responses were reviewed, I was in for a shock. The response? As the executive director told us, “This comment made a lot of people uncomfortable.” There was much head-shaking and sighs over my apparently problematic comment.
To reiterate: my request not to judge people – let alone make hiring and recruiting decisions – based on their race, made people “uncomfortable.” Since when does comfort take precedence over what is right? But more was to come: an announcement that the organization was also taking a look at its use of certain language. For example, what does “professional” really mean? Is the word “triggering”? The question was asked if we should we stop using that type of word. You may have noticed that DEI is also a war on competence.
Because of this comment, the Board would undergo further DEI training. As I like to call it, mandatory re-education. As the Maoists would call it, a struggle session.
So, I had had enough. The values clash was so deep that I could not go back. Shortly thereafter, I sent my email of resignation and stopped my monthly pledge payments and all volunteer involvement.
Going further back
For me, this event was really the straw that broke the camel’s back, as opposed to being the first incident of DEI cult behavior. The organization started its slow dance with critical race theory back in 2020, as many organizations did, after the death of George Floyd and subsequent riots. The nation allowed those riots to hold us hostage, and a flurry of irrational decisions were made, including the decision to normalize race-based segregation in the name of “equity.” This same organization embraced race-based segregation, under the guise of “affinity groups.” On multiple occasions, employees, volunteers, and Board members were invited, based on their race, to be a part of a “conversation” about…I’m not sure what. Racial grievances for non-whites, feelings of guilt for whites? I wouldn’t know, I didn’t attend the whites-only meeting.
I will add here that of the senior staff, all are white, with one exception. I should have asked when we were going to “diversify” the staff, as well.
There were other red flags. During Board meetings we had to read “anti-racist” literature (What does this have to do with serving people with disabilities?), and a diversity commission was established. I still don’t know what the commission did, other than instigate things like the affinity groups and generally agitate racial division within the organization.
Trying to make change from within
I tried in small ways to push back and provide a more sane and normal counter-perspective. For example, in the heat of the 2020 riots, the executive director sent out an email to the Board, “in grief and protest” calling for “reflection and change” at the “killing of George Floyd and the manner in which the protests have been handled by law enforcement and politicians.” The missive went on with the usual catch phrases: black lives matter, systemic racism, time for change. Oddly, the missive also called on everyone to “review our own self and reflect upon what changes we must make.” Collective racial guilt is necessary for any DEI initiative to succeed.
I decided to respond. I emphasized my own concern with how coverage of and excuses for the riots normalized violence broadly as a response to injustice. I noted that in fact five black Americans had died in the riots to date, and they were not killed by racism. Their communities, businesses, and livelihoods were destroyed, something which would take a generation or more to recover, further entrenching cycles of poverty. I concluded with the truth that addressing the actions of all those, of any race, who use vulnerable moments to exploit suffering people and sow greater division is imperative.
The director did not respond to my email.
Similarly, last year, in another anonymous survey, yet another question was asked about whether the organization was engaging in enough diversity initiatives. I honestly gave my response that the racially segregated affinity groups were, to use my exact word, shameful. I never received a response.
In the end, my decision to leave was easy.
Christianity and DEI are incompatible
Christians are called to look at, and pursue, all that is true, good, and beautiful. DEI is none of these things but, in fact, as a philosophy, is the opposite. It is a mass experiment in gaslighting what we all know to be true: that to reduce a person to their race is blasphemous. DEI is a lie, is not good, and breeds nothing but ugliness.
I write this anonymously because I have no desire to shame the organization. They have chosen their path, and so be it. They are another drop in the bucket of organizations captured by this pseudointellectual rot, usually at the insistence of a small group of leaders at the top, often in HR.
I do hope they can get away from these practices and return to more Christian values. More importantly, I certainly hope that their race-based hiring practices don’t endanger the lives of the intellectually and physically disabled individuals they serve, when staff is prioritizing skin color over valuable medical experience.
I left, also, because I don’t want to be held responsible for taking part in discriminatory and immoral hiring practices. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating affirmative action and at a time when numerous companies and academic institutions are being held to account for their discriminatory hiring practices, persisting in engaging in racial discrimination is terrible business sense. That this statement has to be made in the 21st century is bizarre.
However, and more importantly, I write this anonymously to protect my job. Like many people, my workplace is a nonstop obstacle course of woke, politically correct corporate policy which actively creates division along lines of race and belief while simultaneously depriving employees of resources they need (like actual professional training). While we have a gay movie club and a gay book club (I am not joking – these are considered those “affinity groups” again) and have hosted both a drag queen happy hour and a man cross-dressing as a woman (who was invited to speak to the company about what it means to be a woman), I wouldn’t dream of suggesting, for example, starting a Bible study or prayer group. Given the climate of intimidation for everyone to toe the company line, I can’t imagine that anyone would attend a Bible study, anyway.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a myth, plain and simple. This ideology is one of the most successful psychological operations ever foisted on the American people. The philosophy of DEI is a lie, in the belief that DEI “centers,” to use a woke term, inclusion. Not everyone is included in DEI. Just those who are true believers in the cult.
What is truly at the heart of the conflict with Christian values, though, is the obsession with identity. Christianity, and Christians, must reject race essentialism as just another one of the enemy’s lies. Our identity is indeed not our race – our identity isn’t even where we came from, our personality, our career or our hobbies. Our truest identity is that we were made in God’s image, and loved into being. That’s it. None of the DEI machine can stand if that is admitted, which is why DEI and Christianity are in permanent conflict.
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