In America 2025, DEI programs are in trouble. Remember Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? CNN recently interviewed seven “DEI experts and industry leaders” who gave these definitions:
- Diversity is embracing the differences everyone brings to the table, whether those are someone’s race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability or other aspects of social identity.
- Equity is treating everyone fairly and providing equal opportunities.
- Inclusion is respecting everyone’s voice and creating a culture in which people from all backgrounds feel encouraged to express their ideas and perspectives.
Bill Leonard
The report noted, “Critics say DEI programs are discriminatory and attempt to solve racial discrimination by disadvantaging other groups, particularly white Americans.”
DEI in the New Testament
Concerns about DEI are nothing new. Recently, I went looking for signs of such in the New Testament, and there it was in Acts 10:44-48. When the Holy Spirit got “poured out” on our Gentile forebears, it set off one of the church’s first great theological controversies, questions of how to define a follower of the Jesus Way in a religion that began in Judaism.
Anybody who’s been to Sunday school more than two Sundays knows the early Christians started out arguing — over sex and marriage, food and funding, who Jesus was and wasn’t, and who could and couldn’t be in Christ. As always, theology, doctrine, even salvation, became inseparable from biology, race and ethnicity. Just like now.
Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish. No, really, studies show.
Growing up in Texas, I’m sure I always knew that, but the way my Baptist Sunday school teachers sometimes described Jesus you’d think Nazareth was somewhere between Abilene and Lubbock. It took me awhile to get all that straight. The Acts text takes us straight to Jesus’ Jewishness and the debates that grew out of it, a distinctiveness we 21st-century Christians often rush past, minimize or ignore altogether.
Gentile inclusion was a radical idea.
There were certain gospel exceptions in Jesus’ own encounters — the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan “woman at the well,” the Cyro-Phoenician woman, a Roman Centurion or two. And didn’t Jesus himself say he was sent first “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?” Wasn’t his first recorded sermon in the synagogue? Didn’t he ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and go straight to the temple?
“When the Holy Spirit showed up, diversity kicked in quickly.”
All the apostles were Jewish, as were the women who “followed him from Galilee,” stayed at the Cross until it ended, and discovered the empty tomb that first Easter morning. He was the Messiah, the Christ of God. Simon Peter blurted that out early on in their association.
So, for many of Jesus’ tried and true followers, if you wanted to be a “Christian” you first had to be Jewish. But when the Holy Spirit showed up, diversity kicked in quickly.
Acts chapter 10 really begins a few verses earlier with Simon Peter’s visionary experience on the roof of a house in the Mediterranean town of Joppa. He’s up there at noon; lunch isn’t ready, so he falls into “a trance,” envisioning a “huge sailcloth” full of all kinds of animals, “whatever walks, crawls or flies,” the text says. (Sounds a little like the buffet at Golden Corral.) Sure enough, a “voice” tells him: “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.” (This is obviously no vegan vision.)
Simon Peter, the “Prince of the Apostles,” is so orthodox that he refuses to obey the “voice,” even when he knows whose voice it is.
“No, Lord, no,” he argues, “I have never eaten anything profane and unclean.”
And then the divine rejoinder: “What God calls clean, who are you to label unclean?”
“Even Simon Peter, the disciple of denseness, gets it.”
Thus the Gentilization of the Jesus Way begins. And even Simon Peter, the disciple of denseness, gets it, at least for the moment.
Filled with the Spirit
Next thing we know, Peter, now in Caesarea, preaches a sermon after which some Gentiles are “filled with the Holy Spirit.” In fact, the Spirit struck them so hard they spoke in tongues and went around praising God — in public!
That’s when it got scandalous. Acts says “the circumcised believers … were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” Apparently not one of them had dared to think the gospel was so earth-shattering, so radical that even the Gentiles might benefit! Who’d have thought?
And Peter asks the circumcised crowd a question that stretches all the way to us: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
In those words and from that moment, we learn something about the nature of this good news of Jesus: It isn’t simply inclusive: “You people have to become like us before we’ll take you to the water.” It is expansive: People don’t have to become like us to find their way to God’s grace.
Grace
Grace goes where we’ve never even considered going; to people and situations we thought couldn’t find it. Let’s face it, one of the major diversions the church has indulged in for 2,000 years involves “withholding the water” from all kinds of folks for all kinds of reasons.
“Grace goes where we’ve never even considered going.”
Sometimes it has to do with class. Seventeenth-century Anglicans were scandalized by the actions and beliefs of the early Baptists, particularly their baptismal practices. Anglican rector Daniel Featley believed Baptists were, among other things, an “impure and carnal sect,” as evidenced by their obsession with immersion baptism that permitted men and women to enter the water together — often in the evening. In his argument with the Baptists, Featley wrote:
All the sacraments of the Church … ought to be administered without giving any just scandal. But the resort of great multitudes of men and women together in the evening, and going naked into Rivers, there to be plunged and Dipt, cannot be done without scandal, especially where the State giveth no allowance to any such practice.
The state even legislated against them! (Sound familiar?) Baptists profanely and promiscuously threw open the door to all kinds of people and practices that were proletarian, immoral, illegal and unorthodox — an inclusive spirituality that violated multiple socio-sexual norms in the name of salvation.
In 18th-century America, when Anglicans and other Protestants sought to convert slaves, they were opposed by slave owners who said baptism made their chattel even “worse slaves,” “fostered rebellion rather than piety,” and made slaves “more proud and saucy.”
One South Carolina woman wrote her slave-baptizing pastor: “Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to heaven and must I see them there?” Another young South Carolinian reported he never took Holy Communion “while slaves are received there.”
Withholding the water is often inseparable from the culture-undergirding bigotries of race, politics and class.
Two thousand years after Peter’s post-Pentecost sermon, the issue is not Jewishness. The phrase “circumcised brethren” isn’t about biology, it is about spirituality — how we view others and respond to those who seem most outside our realms of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Right now, let’s not give up on diversity, equity and inclusion even if our “state giveth no allowance to any such practice.” It’s still astounding that any of us — Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight, neighbor or stranger, Republican or Democrat — can be overtaken by God’s grace. Well, isn’t it?
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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