The Madness of DEI in the Church: A Case Study in Irrationality
When the Church begins by auditing skin tones and sexual diversity rather than confessing Her sins, a new Jesus has appeared.
The 2023 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) audit commissioned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is worth displaying in a museum as the apotheosis of Commissariat ideology in the US.
The auditors sense the danger of their own proposals, insisting repeatedly and very defensively that DEIA must be “grounded in Scripture,”
…in the event of a conflict between the Biblical basis for DEIA and other bases from secular sources, the Biblical basis shall control. This approach will guard against the erosion of support for DEIA that is already occurring in various business, political and legal arenas of the United States; by contrast, the Word of God is eternal, and religious policies are generally protected by the First Amendment, so a DEIA policy rooted in God’s Word should be safer than if it were grounded on other foundations.1
The insistence that Scripture must rule is neither sincere nor confident, especially given the ELCA’s fast-and-loose history with the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions. The authors know they are burrowing into the Church with an alien unrighteousness that has nothing to do with Christ and what He established to give the good news to the world until his return. Consequently, the audit manhandles 1 Corinthians 12:12–26, John 6:37, John 14:23, Leviticus 20:8, Luke 5:37–39, and Isaiah 43:19 with the zeal of a Chekist examining the “revolutionary conscience” of Kulaks.
Augsburg Confession VII
AC VII defines the Church with stark simplicity: it is the gathering of saints where the Gospel is pure and the Sacraments are rightly administered. Unity, likewise, is defined with precision: agreement in the Gospel and the Sacraments is sufficient. Everything else (rites, customs, and organizational forms), etc., belongs to First Article arrangements, settled by negotiation and consensus. We don’t look to Scripture to tell us about the width of stoles or musical arrangements.
ELCA’s DEIA audit is driven to madness by these restraints.
Throughout the report, the Church's crisis is portrayed not as doctrinal confusion or sacramental neglect, but as a failure to make new friends. Apparently, “diverse individuals” feel “invisible,” “merely tolerated,” or alienated from “power structures.” The solution is not to apply Scripture, organizational changes: definitions, percentage goals, mentoring requirements, reporting systems, procurement targets, and accountability measures designed to ensure that no group remains “underrepresented”.
The ELCA already has active quotas, “requiring 10% of the members of assemblies, councils, committees, boards, and other organizational units be persons of color or whose primary language is not English”.
The Augsburg Confession does not say the Church is the place where everyone feels noticed and appreciated. It states the Church is the place where Christ gives Himself. “Belonging” is not a theological state created by institutional design and interpersonal progress; it is an objective external reality bestowed by God through Baptism, Absolution, the preached Word, and His Body and Blood. A person can feel alienated and still be fully part of the Church; they can also feel fully affirmed and yet remain outside of saving faith.
The main measure of the audit, which is a burning-in-the-bosom level of “felt inclusion”, is therefore not just secondary; it is completely irrelevant to the Christian Church. To pursue such inclusion is to set the pulpit and altar aside in favor of slide rules and committee resolutions. Consequently, the Church’s unity is no longer something given by Christ and confessed around Word and Sacrament, but something to be striven for, measured, and managed by technocrats who implement and calibrate policies.
AC VII is clear that unity cannot be produced, only confessed. A right confession already embodies the full and unmitigated diversity of the human condition, which is a matter of the heart (Gen. 6:5, Mat. 15:18-19, Mark 7:6), not of quotas for racial, language, or sex metrics. A DEIA audit is merely an exercise in adding titanium dioxide to the whitewash for the tombs.
The Body of Christ as percentage targets
The audit heavily relies on 1 Corinthians 12, especially Paul’s emphasis that the “weaker” members of the body are “indispensable.” This is rhetorically impactful but theologically foolish.
Paul’s argument has nothing to do with representation. He is rebuking a congregation that despises those whom it perceives as inferior. It’s not harboring a gematria demanding ratios based on immutable traits and social customs.
The presence of God’s Spirit in the church is unity’s cause, not division’s origin. Yet few things have caused more division in the church’s history than this or that person or group’s claims to possess the Spirit in special measure. The Spirit is given to each for all. At that time, the Spirit of God gave gifts of languages to communicate with new people as He had at Pentecost, as well as gifts of administration and preaching (called “prophesying” here) and many other gifts. There is no particular distinction between the office of the ministry or any other work in the church in this chapter because the issue is not an issue between clergy and laity, but among a body that does not think of itself as a body. Instead, the Corinthians think of these gifts as individual attributes. The apostle is clear that the gifts are for the benefit of the body (1:7). Division is rife whenever people envy one another’s gifts rather than developing their own. This envy, sometimes called “equality” by modern people, is why Paul asks rhetorically whether everyone has a particular gift (11:28–30), because many want to be everything in the church and cannot stand to be what God has given them. Their lack will become evident in the next chapter when they fail to have that gift that should be common to all in the Body of Christ: love that holds all together.2
The audit clearly redefines “indispensable” to mean having the right to participate in governance and to smuggle in the state’s version of legally protected classes for privileged treatment. From that distortion, the entire anti-Biblical machinery is built with all manner of targets and criteria linked to DEIA activities that measure progress toward politically determined demographic outcomes, rather than preaching Christ’s atoning sacrifice.
Augsburg Confession VIII
AC VII tells us what the Church is, and AC VIII tells us what the Church will never become before the Last Day: a morally or spiritually optimized community that represents a stock photo image or politician’s will. The visible Church, ACVIII reminds us, contains hypocrites and evil persons, yet remains the true Church because the Gospel and Sacraments do not depend on human righteousness.
The DEIA audit dismisses the idea that human righteousness cannot be coerced. Its entire framework assumes that the Church’s modern moral failures (racism, exclusion, insensitivity, hostility, microaggressions, etc.) can be addressed mainly through institutional reform. The underlying premise is very clear: if the structure can just be fixed, the Church can become unprejudiced, the people righteous, and the society equitable.
It is the outlandish and terrifying spawn of a Donatist priest and the Human Resources lady.
Every purity regime, whether moralistic, nationalist, pietistic, or progressive, inevitably leads to either hypocrisy or schism. The audit hints at this risk when it warns that DEIA could “split the church into atomized groups” if mismanaged, yet it acts as if better management will fix something that management itself will never be able to. The simple reason is that the old Adam never dies when a bylaw is amended or a quota is achieved. We, sinners, adjust to the overlapping regime incentive structure to earn rewards, signal virtue, and avoid disavowal.
AC VIII reminds us that the Church’s holiness is not a result of obedience, but a gift from Christ. When discipline is necessary, it is only for the sake of pure doctrine and admonishing sin. There is no room whatsoever in the Holy Christian Church to evaluate or adjust enthusiasm for a collective social justice rehabilitation program. Where sinners still exist (everywhere), they remain under forgiveness, not the threat of constant audit.
Office of the Assessor General
The deepest problem with the ELCA’s DEIA audit is not any single proposal, but rather the new super-pastor it presupposes: an Assessor General.
Christ entrusted the Church with the authority to forgive and retain sins through Christ’s Word and Sacraments. It should never seek proportional representation because it is solely in the business of distributing mercy and grace with wild abandon to those whom God has prepared to receive it. The Church can never create unity because it only shares what has already been provided by, for, and through Christ alone.
The audit implicitly establishes the Office of Unholy Assessments (OUA), whose purpose is to surveil and impose corrective social justice measures. Its currency is legitimacy determined by credibility in the eyes of the most powerful and persuasive constituencies, most of them outside the Church and hostile to Christ.
A pastor of the OUA becomes a commissar of the current virtues. Congregations are reduced to implementation sites and experimental factories. The Church’s faithfulness is, then, judged not by the marks we know and trust, but by binders of demonstrable compliance with ever-evolving standards of diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation.
Conclusion
The DEIA audit claims that its proposals are only policy, not doctrine. Augsburg Confession VII and VIII say otherwise. Any policy that usurps and/or asserts ecclesial authority as laid out in the audit always turns into doctrine in praxis. When access to leadership, funding, standing, social credibility, and moral influence depends on aligning with a program of cultural, racial, sex, and gender spectrum representation, that program becomes the functional confession. It always displaces the true Confession, as the ELCA has demonstrated in its relentless Satanic apostatization.
This does not render the Church indifferent to true injustice; it just means we fall back on Scripture to resolve them, not replace what makes the Church in the first place. The Gospel proclaimed and the Sacraments administered will, in fact, foster love across sex, status, class, racial, ethnic, cultural, and social lines, but never on a schedule, and not in ratios, and not in ways that satisfy the gods of this age.
Fox, Swibel, Levin & Carroll LLP. Report on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Audit of the Governing Documents of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Prepared for the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Chicago: Fox, Swibel, Levin & Carroll LLP, October 24, 2023. Released November 2023. Source as of January 16, 2026: https://lutherancongregationalsupportnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ELCA-Report-on-DEI-Audit.pdf
Adam C. Koontz, Family Bible Commentary, Vol V: Pauline Epistles, General Epistles & Revelation (Colorado: Ad Crucem Books, 2024), 37.
"It is the outlandish and terrifying spawn of a Donatist priest and the Human Resources lady." This is a brilliantly written turn of phrase and, simultaneously, absolutely terrifying.
One wonders if confessional Lutherans are one of the "diversity groups" they so highly value and protect.