Dignity Before Difference
Rediscovering Imago Dei after DEI
By Vladimir Snurenco
American institutions are retreating from DEI. In recent months, more than twenty Wall Street Journal pieces chronicled the retreat from DEI across government agencies, universities, corporations, banks, retailers, law firms, federal contractors, and research institutions. But DEI isn’t disappearing into thin air. Offices are shrinking. Some DEI trainings are being softened or pushed out of view, and some programs are being renamed. Yet the deeper question remains: After DEI, what moral language will guide our common life?
Many voices advocate replacing DEI with merit. Merit matters, of course, because a society that stops caring about merit becomes corrupt and ineffective. But merit alone cannot explain why a person without an impressive resume still has dignity and worth. Merit can rank job applicants, but it cannot tell us why the weak, the unborn, the disabled, the poor, the elderly, the prisoner, the addict, and the stranger must never be treated as disposable.
My answer to the question “What comes after DEI?” is that we need to rediscover the imago Dei: the belief that every human person is made in the image of God. This is the deepest source of the Western understanding of human dignity. It gives us a moral baseline that is more enduring and more humane than the category-driven language which has dominated so much of our public life for so long.
When Good Words Become Bad Habits
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not ugly words. Taken at their best, they point to real concerns. A workplace should not be hostile to women, a university should not treat students from different backgrounds as outsiders, and a manager should know that certain words can offend or belittle people.
If DEI simply meant teaching people to treat one another with dignity and respect, much of the controversy would disappear. Removing unnecessary barriers so that qualified people could be seen clearly is, after all, ordinary fairness. A classic example of such fairness is blind auditions in orchestras. When evaluators could hear the music without seeing the musician, some old assumptions about who could play well were exposed as false. Far from being a rejection of merit, it was a way to protect merit from bias. That is DEI at its best, or at least what many decent people intended DEI to be.
But many Americans have encountered something very different. Too often, DEI has not trained people to see the person more clearly; it has trained them to see a category first and foremost. People learn to view themselves and others through the lenses of privilege, oppression, and historical grievance, until the individual becomes little more than a representative of a race, sex, ethnicity, or class.
Recognizing differences is not the problem. The problem is that DEI often makes differences ultimate. Once that happens, human beings are sorted, and new forms of unfairness can be justified as remedies for old ones.
The Mistake of Category-First Thinking
The deepest problem with DEI is anthropological rather than administrative. When our primary focus shifts from the individual to the group, the public square turns into a perpetual negotiation among tribes. Diversity becomes a scorecard of how well each group is represented, equity becomes the pursuit of equal outcomes across groups, and inclusion becomes proportional representation by group. This inevitably results in suspicion, scorekeeping, and resentment.
This is why so many people experience DEI not as something welcome but as pressure imposed from the outside. Instead of learning how to reason about what is good and evil, they learn the boundaries of acceptable speech, which opinions are dangerous, and which identities carry moral authority. Before long, compliance becomes safer than truth. That is no way to form good students, employees, or citizens.
The right answer to discrimination should not be reverse discrimination. Imago Dei offers a different answer: It refuses to reduce people to categories and instead asks, Who are you? At the deepest level, the answer is always the same: I am a person made in the image of God. That does not erase the history of injustice tied to race, sex, class, religion, or disability. It simply refuses to let any of those things define the whole person. Before someone is white or black, rich or poor, immigrant or native-born, he or she is a human being made in the image of God. Get that moral order right, and everything else looks different.
Equality Is Not Sameness
Much of our confusion may come from how we understand the word equality and how the DEI movement talks about equity. In practice it tends to mean sameness: equal abilities, equal outcomes, and equal results. However, we as human beings all possess different levels of ability and talent, discipline and virtue. What we need to promote is equal worth and equal dignity, which should not be reduced to mere sameness.
The imago Dei does not mean that everyone has the same gifts or that outcomes must be equal. It means that each person has inherent worth that does not depend on power, usefulness, productivity, identity, or social approval. A person with more wealth or a higher IQ is not thereby more in the image of God. A healthy adult does not have more dignity and worth than a dependent child. And a person who can speak for himself is not more human than a person who cannot speak at all.
Meritocracy can recognize ability and reward achievement, but it cannot explain the worth of every human being. That is why we need something deeper than both DEI and meritocracy: a moral vision that honors excellence without worshipping success and protects the weak without demonizing the strong. The imago Dei gives us that vision.
The Vulnerable Reveal What We Really Believe
Every moral framework is tested at the periphery. It is easy to speak of dignity when a person is successful, attractive, articulate, useful, and wanted. The harder test comes when the person is unborn, disabled, elderly, dependent, poor, addicted, unpopular, or unable to defend himself.
Down syndrome shows how quickly equal dignity can be denied in practice. Iceland offers a striking example. It is often cited as a country that has eliminated Down syndrome. You might assume that a scientific breakthrough produced a cure. But there was no cure. Rather, widespread prenatal screening followed by elective abortion reduced Down syndrome births to nearly zero. In contrast to Iceland, roughly six thousand babies with Down syndrome are born annually in the United States.
Down syndrome has not actually disappeared from Iceland. Children diagnosed prenatally with it have. As C. S. Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man, what is often described as “Man’s power over Nature” is often, in reality, “a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” The eradication of Down syndrome through prenatal screening and selective abortion may be celebrated as a triumph of science over nature, but it is better understood as a form of eugenics in which some human beings decide that others should not exist. Such reasoning stands in direct tension with the doctrine of imago Dei, which affirms the equal dignity of every human life. The unborn child bears the image of God, and so does the mother. So does the disabled child, the elderly man with dementia, the prisoner, the immigrant, the political enemy, and even the person whose views I may find foolish or offensive. Each of them stands at the periphery, and that is precisely where imago Dei is either honored or betrayed.
The Moral Revolution of Human Dignity
The idea that every human being possesses equal dignity did not arise naturally in every civilization. In much of the ancient world, human beings were plainly unequal in power, citizenship, legal standing, wealth, and status. Slavery was widely accepted, and unwanted infants were often discarded. The weak were often treated, at best, as burdens. As sociologist and historian Rodney Stark argued, slavery was nearly universal for most of human history. That matters because it reminds us that equal human dignity was not the obvious default position of mankind.
The moral revolution began with the Book of Genesis that taught us that every human being is made in the image of God. Christianity deepened the meaning of that claim through the Incarnation, the belief that God took on human nature and became man. St. Paul expressed the same idea when he wrote that in Jesus Christ “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female.” The point is not that differences vanish. The point is that none of these differences cancels the person’s worth before God.
This belief did not instantly make Christian societies just. Christians sometimes failed to live up to this high standard. We often tolerated, defended, or ignored evils that our own theology should have condemned. But the principle kept working. It placed pressure on cruelty and injustice, and exposed contradictions. Most importantly, it gave reformers a language to strengthen arguments against slavery, to expand concern for the poor and the sick, to elevate the dignity of women and children, and to place limits on how the strong could treat the weak. Although these developments were slow, uneven, and incomplete, the doctrine of imago Dei helped cultivate the delicate fruit of liberty in the West and kept calling us back when we betrayed our own ideals.
The Person and Rights Before the State
In 1776, the American Founders did not invent the imago Dei. But they rediscovered the concept that continues to animate the American experiment to this day. We see the imago Dei applied politically in the Declaration of Independence that famously says that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. It affirms that the person comes before the state and that the rights are endowed by the Creator; not created by government nor granted by majority vote.
Of course, the Founders sometimes failed to live consistently with that truth. Slavery was the great contradiction at the heart of America’s founding. But the contradiction was visible precisely because the principle was there. Abolitionists and civil rights leaders could appeal to the language found in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and demand that America become more faithful to its creed that all men are created equal.
What Does Imago Dei Mean in Practice?
Returning to imago Dei does not make every policy question simple. It cannot by itself design an admissions system, a hiring rule, or a law. But it gives us the right starting point: Treat every person with integrity and respect, remove unjust barriers without creating new forms of discrimination, and pursue diversity through fairness, invitation, and local wisdom rather than coercion or ideological conformity.
The Freedom & Virtue Institute’s Commonality Training offers a more unifying and practical alternative to modern-day DEI training. Instead of beginning with everything that divides us, it begins with what we share: a common humanity, equal dignity, and often a common purpose. Differences are not denied, but neither are they allowed to define the whole person. The training invites honest conversation, critical thinking, and mutual respect rather than shame-based compliance. Its aim is not to force unity, but to help people find enough common ground to understand one another and work together without reducing anyone to a category.
From Tribal Sorting Back to Shared Humanity
America’s 250th anniversary is a good moment to ask whether there is still a moral foundation beneath our politics. At crucial moments in American history, earlier generations rediscovered the doctrine of imago Dei. The founders drew on it in declaring that all people are created equal, and abolitionists and civil rights leaders invoked it to call the nation back to that promise. Imago Dei is the moral imagination our generation needs to rediscover once more.
Vladmir Snurenco is a Research Fellow at the Center for Social Flourishing at the Acton Institute and teaches Economics at Calvin University.