How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians
With an assist from Elon Musk and his DOGE squad, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration. For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated — Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.
Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve completely co-opted the strategies of the Black civil rights movement.”
Trump’s war on “woke” is a realization of decades of political organizing that has always had civil rights in its crosshairs. Despite rhetoric about religious liberty, backsliding on civil rights and the far-right push to usher in a Christian theocracy are inextricably linked — and they always have been.
Over the last month, Trump has moved swiftly to turn white evangelicals’ grievances into policy.
In a series of executive orders, the president undid decades worth of civil rights protections for marginalized communities brick-by-brick. He froze the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, eliminated all DEI roles in the federal government, and dismantled equal opportunity executive orders barring racial discrimination in employment.
On the flip side, he formed the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force.
“What’s especially powerful about this tactic is that civil rights laws already exist. They already are fundamental to our legal system,” said Reyna. “So if they could find a way to leverage those existing laws in order to protect whiteness in America, they’re going to be more likely to be successful.”
“We essentially have kind of a MAGA-controlled Republican Party, that is, both in terms of its ideas and its demography, a white Christian Nationalist Party,” said Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute. “The end game is the installation of an authoritarian regime that’s about power and money and an oligarchy — and the ultimate end of that is the end of American democracy as we know it.”
https://theintercept.com/2025/02/22/trum...il-rights/
With an assist from Elon Musk and his DOGE squad, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration. For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated — Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.
Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve completely co-opted the strategies of the Black civil rights movement.”
Trump’s war on “woke” is a realization of decades of political organizing that has always had civil rights in its crosshairs. Despite rhetoric about religious liberty, backsliding on civil rights and the far-right push to usher in a Christian theocracy are inextricably linked — and they always have been.
Over the last month, Trump has moved swiftly to turn white evangelicals’ grievances into policy.
In a series of executive orders, the president undid decades worth of civil rights protections for marginalized communities brick-by-brick. He froze the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, eliminated all DEI roles in the federal government, and dismantled equal opportunity executive orders barring racial discrimination in employment.
On the flip side, he formed the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force.
“What’s especially powerful about this tactic is that civil rights laws already exist. They already are fundamental to our legal system,” said Reyna. “So if they could find a way to leverage those existing laws in order to protect whiteness in America, they’re going to be more likely to be successful.”
“We essentially have kind of a MAGA-controlled Republican Party, that is, both in terms of its ideas and its demography, a white Christian Nationalist Party,” said Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute. “The end game is the installation of an authoritarian regime that’s about power and money and an oligarchy — and the ultimate end of that is the end of American democracy as we know it.”
https://theintercept.com/2025/02/22/trum...il-rights/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
