“This is a big win for Christians,” the Rev. Franklin Graham told the BBC shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory in November. “We believe the president will defend religious freedom where the Democrats would not.” But the new Trump administration’s focus on attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies has begun to ensnare Christians and limit their religious freedom.
Last week, for example, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia threatened to withhold job opportunities from Georgetown Law students unless the school scrapped DEI initiatives.
You can’t read the Gospels and not come away with a strong sense of God’s preference for diversity, equity and inclusion.
“As a Catholic and Jesuit institution, Georgetown University was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths, cultures, and beliefs promotes intellectual, ethical, and spiritual understanding,” Dean William M. Treanor wrote back. “Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”
Georgetown isn’t alone. Diversity, equity and inclusion are deeply rooted ideas in Christian teaching. You can’t read the Gospels and not come away with a strong sense of God’s preference for diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet under the Trump administration, living out those ideas will now invite harassment and targeting of Christians and Christian institutions.
DEI initiatives that promote religious inclusion in government agencies — including for Christians — have also been affected. During the first Trump administration, employees at the State Department formed GRACE, a resource group for Christian employees. Now, under Trump 2.0’s anti-DEI crusade, GRACE has been instructed to pause its operations.
Government and academia celebrating diverse religious expressions benefits people of all faiths. By dismantling these programs, Trump’s policies, ironically, strip away layers of protection from Christians and leave them vulnerable.
The irony only deepens when we examine the president’s public pronouncements. On one hand, Trump has vowed to eradicate “anti-Christian bias” and protect religious freedom. On the other, his aggressive dismantling of DEI initiatives has a chilling effect on institutions that have historically nurtured pluralistic dialogue.
The same administration that claims to liberate Christians from “woke” interference is, in practice, dismantling the institutions that allow for a vibrant, contested and ultimately more robust expression of faith. When students and employees are forced to choose between their academic or professional futures and the diversity of thought that enriches their community, the promise of religious liberty becomes hollow. When federal agencies begin questioning the value of DEI — even as they purport to protect religious liberty — the result is a dangerous conflation of diversity with disloyalty.
Thankfully, other Christians are fighting back.
“We live in times in which feelings that to many had seemed to be outdated appear to be re-emerging and spreading,” Pope Francis said during Trump’s first administration. “These feelings, then, too often inspire real acts of intolerance, discrimination or exclusion that seriously harm the dignity of those involved, as well as their fundamental rights, including the very right to life and to physical and moral integrity. Unfortunately in the political world, too, it happens that one gives in to the temptation to exploit the fears and the objective difficulties of some groups and to make misleading promises out of shortsighted electoral interests.”
In Trump’s second term, Francis’ words remain as true as ever. Exploiting racial and religious grievances for electoral interests is as essential to the MAGA movement as it is contrary to the Gospel. It’s not just the White House targeting government and academic DEI programs. Far-right groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom are targeting corporate DEI programs. A “loose confederation” of conservative faith-based private funds and state pensions are marshaling half a trillion dollars of investments to influence company behavior, according to one estimate shared with Bloomberg News. But, thankfully, other Christians are fighting back. The Rev. Jamal Bryant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church near Atlanta, and other Black faith leaders are calling on their congregants not to shop at Target during Lent because of the company’s decision to end some of its DEI initiatives. “We’re going to break the spirit of racism and sexism,” Bryant said. “The spirit is encroaching back into our community, back into our country and back into our corporations who are intending to take us back into the 1950s.” Attacking Christian institutions for their support of diversity, equity and inclusion strikes at the heart of what it means to follow Christ. The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when Christians across the country stand up to this bullying.
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons is vice president of programs and strategy at Interfaith Alliance and the author of "Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity." 
