“Let each of you look not to your own interests,” Paul wrote to the Philippians, “but to the interests of others.” Then and now, the greatest challenge for the Christian, no matter how pious, is putting others’ interests ahead of ours. Jesus Christ invites us to daily acts of self-sacrificial love, especially when it’s hard. An ear lent to an annoying relative or friend calling for the third time in a week. Giving money to a stranger on the sidewalk who doesn’t smell so good. Pulling over for a tailgating, headlight-flashing motorist and letting them pass us.
Please don’t tell me it’s not hard. You know that it is, every time. Those tempted to keep our time and resource to ourselves tend to build systems that do the same. So the Golden Rule has to apply to institutions, too. If people of African descent are underrepresented in a workforce or student body, for instance, we have to decide who’s to blame. It’s either some problem with the underrepresented group — their inherent lack of fitness — or the weight of centuries of injustice. Since it’s of course the latter, we should want to make amends.
By the same logic, if a trans or non-binary high school student wants access to a sports team so they can compete, or a safe bathroom so they can relieve themselves and wash their face, they either deserve it, or they don’t. If we decide they don’t, it means we’ve decided that there are too few such people to merit special treatment, or that “trans” and “nonbinary” are categories the majority has the right to reject, as the current administration now has. If we are doing justice by counting noses, it’s good to remember the high priest Caiaphas, who was willing to sacrifice one person, Jesus Christ, for the sake of everyone else. A decent society tries to make decent decisions about anyone made in the image of God who is being left out.
It would be better if we could reach a consensus about what the baptismal covenant means by “the dignity of every human being,” about how abundantly diverse humanity is. But we are still too prone to judge those who are different. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice programs are ways of enforcing the Golden Rule for institutions and governments. I’m sure not all the programs are perfect. But a decent society needs them. Because it’s hard for those with privilege to understand the predicament of those who have spent their whole lives being oppressed or marginalized.
During COVID, I had a conversation with some parents about the controversial DEI program at their children’s school. One parent said that the school’s values had always been rooted in love. Wasn’t love enough? I replied that we would have to go back and ask every alum of color and every nonbinary alum if they had felt the love in their mostly white, binary school. However sympathetic my conversation partners might have been to the argument, it wasn’t enough to persuade them that DEI, which at schools is designed to help open young minds and hearts to the extent of difference and the imperative of equality, was worth keeping.
Foes of DEI are celebrating this week. Many of President Trump’s executive orders are designed to defund or abolish federal DEI programs. According to news reports, a key agency at the Department of Defense has paused plans to observe Black History Month, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and the Holocaust Days of Remembrance. Trump and his apologists will say that they just want to be fair to everyone without regard to difference. But fairness is not actually the value at work. It it’s beginning to look more and more like suspicion, resentment, and hate being leveraged for political advantage at the highest level by an administration which, amid the flood of documents it is extruding, has misplaced the one that says everyone was created equal and has a God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
At his press conference today, the president actually blamed Wednesday’s air disaster on DEI. He essentially said two planes collided because someone besides ostensibly better performing able-bodied white males had stepped into jobs at the FAA or slipped into ATC seats. Trump’s media choir also blamed DEI, and therefore the usual non-white male suspects, for what they described as a poor official response to the Los Angeles fires, where dozens died and millions were traumatized. The Trump-Vance campaign’s blood libel against Haitian Americans has waxed into official condemnation of whichever non-bro they decide to finger for a tragedy.
It’s hard to overstate the danger of this kind of politics and rhetoric. They’re also anathematic to half of us. Imagine instead the national leader who, whatever their beliefs, resolves each day to do the best they can for the largest number of their constituents, whoever they are, however they’ve been created. This doesn’t dictate immigration or domestic policy. It just describes our shared humanity, which admittedly should tempt us to more compassionate policies. Perhaps that’s why some people try so hard not to love their neighbor.
But doing so is our destiny. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Whether they’re Christians or not, leaders who appropriate the energy and ultimate truth of Paul’s 2,000-year-old revelation and lean into our covenants of national unity and equality will find hearts on millions of sleeves, and millions of votes on the table — people desperate to be led back to the United States of America.