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.
18 thoughts on “Why I Quit a Christian Organization Over DEI”
With all due respect to the writer and the obvious financial difficulties associated with quitting a job, why keep the job? I’d have quit the job as well as the volunteer position. It’s hard to justify quitting the one and not the other; it’s all fruit of the same poisonous tree. Or it may be time to confront the situation and force the employer into a firing followed by a lawsuit. If the employer cites a state or federal law in its defense, name the government as a co-conspirator in the lawsuit. I know none of this is easy, but we can’t just sit back and take it.
Oh, yes-- I love the phrase "war on competence" becaue that's exactly what all of this is. My own field of information technology is riddled with incompetence, which is why even big companies are hacked left and right, but Big Tech just fiddles with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while Rome burns. The number one problem in IT is incompetence, but to hear it from the powers that be, you'd think it was DEI.
Galatians 3:28.
What more needs to be said than to answer every DIE initiative with that verse?
Ugh. When will conservatives learn to fight? Posts and pictures that keep the culprit anonymous don’t help at all. We need to NAME them to SHAME them.
Agreed. Where is the courage? Not only is the subject kept secret, but the author is also anonymous. What, did this take place in Communist China?
But never mind my comment. I wrote it without thinking it through. I see that the author is protecting his or her job. The points made are excellent. Please excuse me.
Be not fooled. The terms “anti-racist” and ‘anti-racism’ means not opposition to racism, they mean perpetuating a substitute racism–just as ‘anti-Christ’ means a substitute for Christ, i.e., a false god.
Anti-racism is to be deplored. It’s a fraud.
Maybe I missed it but can you tell me the name of the organization? I contribute personally to and fund-raise for an organization that serves precisely such people. If it’s the same one, my funds and efforts would cease if attempting to get it to eschew the anti-Catholic DEI regime failed.
Thanks,
Bob
Proponents of DEI are dishonest racists. You can’t be in favor of EQUITY race discrimination which is taking things away from people because of their race and giving them to others because of their race, then turn around and tell people that you’re INCLUSIVE. It’s dishonest and racist.
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Like a lot of liberals I agree with your objections, but it’s strange that the only thing you remember about the George Floyd protests are “riots”. For one thing, Pope Francis weighed in. I ask you: Was he correct in what he said?
What did Pope Francis say about it, and in what way did he say it?
Pope Francis, being desperately unfamiliar with the Anglosphere in general, and with contentious cultural matters within the U.S. particularly, would likely have had nothing well-informed to say about the wicked criminal George Floyd and his public self-deletion. But if he avoided anything specific to the case, the Roman pontiff’s comments might have been worth repeating.
Until Fernandez took over the DDF, anything Pope Francis said in public on such topics tended to fare poorly except when, and only to the degree that, the statement was an exercise of his authentic magisterium on a topic of faith or morals. His off-the-cuff comments during in-flight impromptu questions, particularly, have often been unedifying. It was like consulting an early version of Chat GPT: You wouldn’t want to trust the output for anything critical.
That said, I don’t know what Pope Francis’ comments were, regarding Floyd. For all I know, it was just the right time to consult a stopped clock. Were they insightful?
Pope Francis is usually very wrong in what he says…numerous times
Odd that CS deletes respectful comments from liberals but does not delete references to George Floyd’s “self-deletion”.
Presumably race would not be the ONLY consideration. I’m perplexed why the author is ok with diversity based on “professional experience, geography, age, or some other metric” but not race or (probably) gender. Are there somehow more perspectives dependent on “professional experience, geography, age or some other metric” than race? It seems to me that the perspective of Black Christians might indeed be very different than White Christians in some/many regards. And is the author suggesting there are no Black candidates equally or more qualified than the least qualified White person on the board??
John,
One problem is that “diversity” along racial or sexual lines tends, in the U.S. today, to be a back-door method for hard-leftists to enforce ideological conformity within an organization. The classic example is how Clarence Thomas is counted as “white” by left-wingers, for the purposes of rating the “diversity” of SCOTUS. The man’s history and accomplishments count for nothing: He “isn’t black” because, in the eyes of a leftist, he’s the wrong sort of black man.
There’s also the intrinsic contradiction implied in seeking “the best candidates” while imposing quotas which narrow the basis for selection along multiple lines, creating an artificial shortage. The math doesn’t work out.
But set that aside. The leftism is, I think, is the chief issue: One cannot interact fruitfully with persons who are intentionally equivocating, and who have no interest in conveying truth via language; and yet that is precisely the SOP of the DEI crowd. It is their dogma, more often caught than taught, that “words are violence,” that verbal expressions “contain no lexical value” but exist purely as “exercises of power, and thus, of oppression.”
That’s why as soon as the syllables “racial diversity” are pronounced, the conversation is over. When you hear those sounds, you know that you are no longer interacting with someone communicating in good faith. It would be giving them too much credit to call them “liars”; for a liar at least wishes you to believe what he is telling you, even if he knows it doesn’t correspond to reality. The leftist doesn’t believe in any objective reality apart from power relationships, and often is pleased that his uses-of-language have no determinate meaning. That isn’t the point, for him! The point is to make the other guy shut up, and it’s all one whether he falls silent from confusion, or embarrassment, or because he’s being lynched by a mob, metaphorically or otherwise.
Every now and again, an innocent bystander tries to use the same words or phrases in an honest and well-meaning way. I’m presuming you’re in that category, John.
But the DEI crowd are, as a rule, not that sort. They’re using combat-tested weapons of institutional takeover and hoping their “marks” don’t know how their schtick works. Propaganda works best against the poor schmucks who think they’re arguing their side in a fair debate. It’s really more like “feeding a troll.”
The anonymous Guest Contributor seems to have learned that lesson already: Good for him, that he didn’t take the bait.
Totally agree. I have ceased completely contributing to one “Catholic” organization and placed another on financial probation (waiting to see if they repeat an intemperate remark in their literature). I have since noted that there are a number of organizations that remain loyal to their original mission so my total charitable contributions remain roughly the same. No one should feel uncomfortable for leaving what they did not sign up for.
Donald, could you name names? I desire to contribute to the “right” Catholic organizations, yet am wary of which ones…
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