John Inazu (Washington College; Google Scholar), DEI Wants Spiritual Variety Too:

Earlier this month, Kelsey Dallas reported on the unsure way forward for many interfaith packages on school and college campuses. The present problem comes from conservative legislatures focusing on Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion (“DEI”) packages that they see as overly decided by progressive ideology. However these assaults will in lots of instances pull funding for non secular pluralism, too, as a result of “at many colleges, the directors planning race or sexuality-based occasions are the identical individuals organising packages on religion.” In the meantime, different campuses have struggled to provoke interfaith programming within the first place. …

Greater schooling at present is rightly targeted on exposing college students to individuals with various beliefs and backgrounds. However no matter one’s views of the objectives or strategies of DEI programming, too many of those initiatives ignore faith. Curricular and extracurricular content material on non secular range is commonly missing in our faculties and universities.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I usually discover Washington College to be an establishment tolerant of spiritual distinction. However tolerance is just not the identical as understanding. I’ve greater than as soon as come throughout colleagues and college students who lack a primary understanding of faith or consciousness of the previous and current affect of faith on this nation.

Take this placing instance that occurred a number of years in the past. Throughout a tutorial workshop that I attended, one of many individuals made a remark about her uncle, a fundamentalist Christian. One other participant mentioned one thing like, “I simply don’t know any Christians whom I respect intellectually.” This prompted a 3rd participant to supply that he had as soon as met a Christian professor at Yale who appeared fairly good. And any individual else talked about Aquinas. At this level within the dialog, I chimed in to counsel that maybe among the many billions of professing Christians on the planet we would discover a number of extra worthy of the mental respect of these in greater schooling.

Universities have an vital alternative to appropriate misperceptions about faith. However they’ll have to start out by welcoming college, directors, and scholar life employees who’ve an understanding of and appreciation for faith usually in addition to specific non secular traditions. In the present day’s college DEI packages would contemplate it malpractice to herald any individual to steer programs or coaching on race, gender, or sexuality who lacks a nuanced understanding of these subjects. We should always have the identical excessive requirements in terms of non secular range.

Editor’s Observe:  If you want to obtain a weekly e-mail every Sunday with hyperlinks to the religion posts on TaxProf Weblog, e-mail me right here.

Different religion posts by John Inazu:

• Kicking Off The Authorized Vocation Fellowship For Early-Profession Christian Attorneys (Feb. 26, 2023)
• What The Left And The Proper Get Incorrect About The ‘He Will get Us’ Tremendous Bowl Jesus Adverts (Feb. 19, 2023)
• How Can Christian School Be Interfaith Leaders? (Dec. 18, 2022)
• The Respect For Marriage Act, Christianity, And Pluralism (Dec. 4, 2022)
• Tim Keller On Forgiveness (Nov. 20, 2022)
• The Incomprehensible Witness Of Forgiveness (Nov. 13, 2022)
• Pandemic Forgiveness (Nov. 6, 2022)
• The Life We’re Trying For (Sept. 25, 2022)
• On The 21-Yr Anniversary Of 9/11, What Unites Us? (Sept. 11, 2022)
• Interfaith Would not Imply Compromise (Aug. 28, 2022)

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/04/dei-religious-diversity.html