The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement: What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement:
What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See          

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 10, 2026

Today's anti-DEI movement does not merely invoke the language of neutrality; it weaponizes it. Its appeals to “colorblind equality,” “individual responsibility,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “freedom from coercion” provide moral cover for a coordinated effort to dismantle the institutional commitments that make multiracial and multiethnic democracy possible.

A Manhattan Institute (2023) policy brief by Christopher Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, and Matt Beienburg makes this clear. The document calls for state legislatures to abolish DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training, prohibit diversity statements, and eliminate identity-conscious policies in public universities. It even supplies model legislative language for states to adopt. In other words, it does not merely criticize DEI. It operationalizes a political project.

What would Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer help us see in this document and in the broader movement from which it emerges? At the risk of oversimplifying the work of these formidable researchers and thinkers—or failing to fully acknowledge the many conceptual overlaps among them—I offer the following reading. Each illuminates a different dimension of the same political project: Stewart helps us understand the religious-nationalist drive for power; MacLean reveals the anti-democratic political economy beneath it; and Mayer follows the money and institutional networks that make such ideas actionable.

Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, would
likely urge us not to mistake this for a simple “culture war.” Christian nationalism, in her analysis, is not merely about religious belief. Nor is it reducible to debates over prayer, abortion, sexuality, or school curricula. It is a political movement seeking power over the institutions of democracy. Its aim is not pluralism, but control. From this perspective, attacks on DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and public education are not side issues. They are part of a larger attempt to define whose knowledge counts, whose histories matter, and whose presence in public institutions is legitimate.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, would likely locate this effort within a longer history of anti-democratic political economy. Her work shows how radical-right, neoliberal thinkers and donors have sought to constrain majority rule, weaken public institutions, privatize public goods, and insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability. Seen through MacLean’s lens, anti-DEI legislation is not only a cultural backlash. It is also a governance strategy. It

narrows what public universities can do, what faculty can say, what students can learn, and what communities can demand of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, would likely follow the money. She would ask: Who funds the think tanks, advocacy organizations, litigation networks, media campaigns, and policy shops that produce these “model bills”? Who benefits when public institutions are weakened? Who gains when democracy is recast as “coercion,” equity as “orthodoxy,” and civil rights as “preference”? 

Mayer’s work helps us see that ideas rarely move on their own. They are carried, amplified, and institutionalized through networks of wealth, influence, litigation, media, and policy advocacy. In higher education, this influence can become especially consequential when donor support comes with expectations—whether explicit or implicit—that shape curricula, research priorities, faculty appointments, or public-facing programs. When private wealth gains this kind of leverage over academic life, it does more than fund ideas; it helps determine which ideas become legitimate, visible, and powerful. The result is a serious threat to academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of universities as public-serving institutions.

Together, these three writers help us understand that the attack on DEI is not simply about administrative offices or training sessions. It is about the future of democracy itself.

John Oliver’s recent and timely Last Week Tonight segment on New College of Florida gives us a concrete glimpse of what this project looks like when theory becomes governance. New College was not merely criticized as “woke”; it was politically captured and remade through state power. 

Board appointments, administrative upheaval, the elimination of gender studies, numerous faculty departures, escalating costs, and an aggressive campaign to rebrand the institution all became part of a larger effort to transform a distinctive honors public liberal arts college into a showcase for ideological control. Put plainly, New College was not simply reformed; it was targeted. Its transformation should be understood as an intentional and orchestrated attack—one that other states, especially those already moving in this direction, should heed as a warning.

Oliver’s satire makes the story accessible, but the implications are grave: New College reveals how appeals to freedom, neutrality, and anti-indoctrination can become instruments for narrowing intellectual life and subordinating public education to political spectacle.

Link to John Oliver's show on New College

What happened at New College of Florida should therefore be read not as an isolated Florida story, but as a warning about a broader national strategy—one that has already taken legislative form in Texas through SB 17 and related efforts to discipline public higher education.

This is especially clear in higher education. Public universities are among the few institutions where young people can still encounter histories, literatures, theories, and communities that challenge inherited hierarchies. They are places where students learn that inequality is not natural, that democracy is unfinished, and that knowledge can serve justice. This is precisely why they have become targets.

The anti-DEI movement tells us that it seeks neutrality. But there is nothing neutral or apolitical about banning the vocabulary of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, power, privilege, or structural inequality from public life. 

There is nothing neutral or apolitical about using state power to restrict how universities support historically excluded students. There is nothing neutral about turning “colorblindness” into a weapon against the very communities whose labor, taxes, cultures, and struggles built the state.

Nor is there anything Christian, in the deepest moral sense, about denying the dignity of the vulnerable, erasing histories of suffering and resistance, or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful. The Christianity rooted in justice that many of us recognize speaks to humility, justice, love, mercy, and care for the stranger. Christian nationalism, by contrast, cloaks hierarchy in sacred authority. It baptizes domination. It transforms—and disfigures—a faith tradition into an instrument of political control.

This is why Stewart’s analysis matters. She helps us see how religious language can be marshaled to justify anti-democratic power. This is why MacLean’s analysis matters. She helps us see how democracy is weakened not always by dramatic coups, but by slow institutional redesign. And this is why Mayer’s analysis matters. She helps us see how concentrated wealth builds the infrastructure that makes these transformations possible.

The struggle over DEI, then, is not a narrow dispute over campus bureaucracy. It is a struggle over whether public institutions will continue to serve a multiracial democracy or whether they will be remade to protect hierarchy under the banner of freedom.

For those of us in Texas, this is not abstract. Under SB 17, we have seen how anti-DEI laws chill speech, restructure universities, eliminate offices, threaten programs, and place entire fields of study under suspicion. We have seen how Mexican American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other knowledge traditions become vulnerable when political leaders decide that democracy itself has become too diverse, too demanding, and too honest.

The answer is not despair. It is clarity.

We should name the movement accurately. We should refuse the false innocence of its language. We should defend academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, civil rights, and public education as essential democratic goods. 

And we should insist that pluralism is not a threat to democracy. Pluralism is democracy.

The future being offered by Christian nationalism and its allied political networks is a narrowed one: fewer rights, fewer histories, fewer voices, fewer protections, fewer public goods. The future we must defend is broader, deeper, and more humane: a democracy capacious enough to tell the truth, educate all children, honor all communities, and build institutions worthy of the public trust.

That is the real choice before us.

Reference

Last Week Tonight. (2026, June 8). New College of Florida: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities [Press release]. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Police in Texas Try to Arrest Librarian for Civil Rights Book: Update on the Granbury ISD Saga over Backward Banned Books Agenda

Friends,

You can't make this stuff up. Yes, this is exceedingly alarming. Thankfully, the Granbury district attorney threw out this case as he found the investigation to be without merit.

The best source for this saga is this NBCNews story authored on July 25, 2024, by Mike Hixenbaugh, Tyler Kingkade, Scott Friedman, and Eva Parks titled, "Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas." Spanning a two-year time period, this appears to be the most extensive investigation against librarians, nationally, who were ultimately not charged of any crimes. Here is where we can appreciate the importance of legal cases like these as they establish precedents that can be taken up later by attorneys in future cases, should they be necessary—and we certainly hope this kind of prosecutorial animus against librarians does not continue.

Many states, including Missouri, Arkansas, and Indiana, are currently considering legislation "to make it easier to prosecute librarians." (Hixenbaugh, Kingkade, Friedman, & Parks, 2024, July 25).

When we speak of authoritarian regimes and fascism, this is one big way that it manifests, by controlling what we read, and thusly controlling what we teach and think. Most generally, fascist authoritarian regimes are the antithesis of democracy.

This is the kind of America Trump and his friends want. I really encourage folks to read Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise  to get a complete sense of what their dystopian nightmare for America means. Not for the Billionaire class, of course, but for everybody else.

The best way to say "no to fascism" is to register to vote and then vote. Get your friends and family out to vote, too.

Glad this ordeal is over for these librarians who did not deserve this.

-Angela Valenzuela

#Project2025 #vote2024 #SayNoToFascism #Fascism

Shocking: Texas Librarian Faces Arrest for Checking Out Toni Morrison Book

Eric Ryan July 28, 2024 | KEAN 105.1

Read More: Police in Texas Try to Arrest Librarian for Civil Rights Book | https://keanradio.com/ixp/174/p/police-try-arrest-librarian-civil-rights-book/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

It really has to suck some days to be a cop.

Imagine showing up for your shift one day, ready to arrest murderers and pedophiles, and your superior officer informs you that your assignment for the day is to go investigate and arrest a librarian for loaning out a book about civil rights.

Fight for Civil Rights and Understanding

It all started when the librarian, checked out a book by the esteemed civil rights icon and author, Toni Morrison. Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning author, is celebrated for her profound contributions to literature and her powerful exploration of African American history and identity. Her books have long been a cornerstone in the fight for civil rights and understanding.

Lack of Evidence

The police officer attempted to interview the librarians, but they refused to talk without an attorney present. After two years and an 824-page investigative file, the district attorney decided not to press charges. citing lack of evidence. What an awesome use of our tax dollars, right?

Read More: Police in Texas Try to Arrest Librarian for Civil Rights Book | https://keanradio.com/ixp/174/p/police-try-arrest-librarian-civil-rights-book/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

 Friends,

You must be hearing the alarm bells by now on Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, that conservatives want Donald Trump to implement should he become president. These include reforming the FBI, aligning the DOJ’s litigation strategy with the president’s agenda, and significantly reducing the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which enforces federal voting laws such as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Voting Rights Act (VRA). 

Good-by free and fair elections and any smidgen of voting rights that remain. As Rachel Maddow recently said, paraphrasing, it's a political agenda to end all politics. 

This is a very anti-freedom, pro-corporate agenda that folks really need to learn about. I provide some resources in an earlier blog for the college classroom and any other place where it might be discussed (see Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise—PowerPoint for Discussion Groups and the College Classroom). 

There's a litany of other atrocious things. I'll get to these later. Don't want to ruin this morning's breakfast.

-Angela Valenzuela

Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025 By Matt Cohen | July 12, 2024

It’s no secret that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s detailed, sprawling right-wing plan to remake the federal government when the next conservative administration takes over — would fundamentally alter just about every aspect of American life. 

Various civil rights advocacy organizations and policy experts are rightfully ringing the alarm bells about Project 2025, which would — among many other radical proposed changes — ban abortion nationwide, eradicate civil rights protections for millions of people and completely eliminate the Department of Education.

Some of the proposals in the massive plan are so radical even former President Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from it, posting on his TruthSocial platform that he claims to “know nothing” about the details of the conservative mandate, nor has any “idea who is behind it.” 

Clocking in at over 900 pages, there are a lot of ideas in Project 2025. A good portion of it focuses on the actions the next Republican president should take in their first 180 days of office to facilitate the myriad proposals falling into place. Scattered throughout Project 2025 are a number of highly concerning ideas and policy proposals for specific departments and agencies that, should they come to fruition, could seriously alter the state of elections, voting rights and democracy in America. 

The alarming reforms to the Department of Justice

One of the most concerning chapters in Project 2025 focuses on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The chapter was written by Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the DOJ and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump and is best known as the chief architect of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. 

“The DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies,” Hamilton writes in Project 2025, before outlining a long list of “essential” reforms that the next conservative president should make a priority. 

Among them: reforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), asserting that the DOJ’s litigation strategy must be totally aligned with the next president’s agenda and completely stripping the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote, like the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In essence, what Hamilton proposes is a DOJ completely stripped of its independent authority, instead to be used as a tool of the president “as an enforcer of an anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-people agenda,” according to Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan legal and public policy research nonprofit Democracy Forward.

Under Project 2025, the FBI would be completely reformed — including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.” It’s a frightening mandate, especially at a time when the heightened threat of election-related violence and harassment of election workers is on the rise, thanks to the proliferation of disinformation.

“What the FBI does is investigate and expose corruption, look at political interference and think about holding the wealthy accountable when they break the law,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told Democracy Docket. “And so if this happened, people with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of the President.”

Project 2025’s other proposed changes to the DOJ will have “broad, sweeping implications for all kinds of things, including civil rights, but specifically for voting rights and the role the Department of Justice should play and has an obligation to play to defend Americans’ access to the ballot,” Perryman told Democracy Docket. 

She points out that, given what’s known about the legal strategies that dozens of the groups involved with Project 2025 have employed, there’s serious concern that the DOJ “would start fronting fringe and baseless legal theories” like the controversial independent state legislature (ISL) theory. “There is a real risk that you would have the nation’s litigating institution actually seeking to perpetuate and front those theories in courts across the country,” she said. 

Cumulatively, what the DOJ amounts to in Project 2025 is nothing more than a personal litigation and prosecution weapon for Trump, or whoever the next conservative president is. 

“We’ve heard a ton from Trump about his willingness to use the presidency to punish whoever he wants, including political opponents,” Gilbert said. “And so certainly a MAGA-controlled DOJ would be hugely problematic. Coupled with what just happened in the immunity decision, I can’t think of a bigger place where democracy will be undermined if Project 2025 is in place.”

An end to the agency leading the fight against disinformation

Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there’s an agency that plays a crucial role in protecting federal and state elections from a host of existential threats like foreign-backed disinformation and AI threats. Over the past few election cycles, states across the country have come to depend on — and praised — the resources and guidance the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) devotes to securing elections. Under proposed changes described in Project 2025, not only would CISA immediately cease its “counter-mis/disinformation efforts,” but the agency would be completely dismantled, with its core functions moved entirely from DHS to the Department of Transportation. 

“For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more,” writes Ken Cucinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, who authored the DHS chapter. 

Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights advocacy organization Campaign Legal Center, told Democracy Docket the proposal is “absolutely bonkers” and would have a devastating impact on election security. “It’s located at Homeland Security because the whole premise of the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s supposed to be the central resource for the protection of the nation. And that the important functions shouldn’t be living out in siloed agencies,” he said. “CISA is DHS’s bread and butter, pulling together different strands of these things.”

The idea to remove CISA from DHS is part of the broader trend in Project 2025 to essentially separate the functions of various agencies whose work intersects with one another — especially as they relate to elections. But it’s not a new idea. For years, the GOP has criticized CISA and sought to deprioritize its efforts in election security. 

Should Project 2025’s vision for CISA become reality, “it would be harmful to the efforts to protect elections, to withdraw any significant resources from that effort, because it’s a very difficult struggle,” Noti added. “And it requires significant resources. It’s a troubling idea, but it’s not a new one.”

Money will buy even more elections 

To fully understand the insidious agenda of Project 2025’s proposals for the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Public Citizen’s Gilbert said “it’s worth starting with the understanding that the FEC is currently broken” and that the agency is in dire need of “intense reform for it to function as it was intended.”

Reforming the FEC has long been a priority for Democrats and voting rights advocates — and a key tenet of the comprehensive For the People Act and Freedom to Vote Act that Republicans repeatedly blocked from passing Congress. But the reforms outlined in Project 2025 could make the agency worse than it is now. 

One such way is a proposal to raise campaign contribution limits. “Contribution limits should generally be much higher, as they hamstring candidates and parties while serving no practical anticorruption purpose,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a right-wing lawyer and former FEC commissioner who authored the Project 2025 chapter. Gilbert noted that von Spakovsky’s argument that there’s no anti-corruption rationale for keeping campaign contribution limits where they are is “absurd on its face,” especially given how much fiscal influence Super PACs wield. “If [candidates] could directly raise as much as they want, it would have immediate ramifications for who can influence and how the campaigns are run,” she said.

The FEC is one of the few federal agencies that has its own independent litigating authority, rather than relying on the DOJ to defend its work in court. But not under Project 2025, which advises the next conservative president to “direct the attorney general to defend the FEC in all litigation.” There’s a caveat to this, though, which is that the DOJ should only prosecute campaign finance violations if the FEC signs off on it — a proposal that’s of grave concern to Noti. 

“The whole structure of campaign finance prosecutions is the FEC has civil authority, the Department of Justice has criminal authority. And the bifurcation of those has, in a lot of ways, proven to be valuable,” Noti explained. “So the idea that they would get conflated and you give the three FEC commissioners veto power over criminal enforcement of the law is a troubling suggestion.”

Reviving the right-wing push to add a citizenship question to the census

One of the Trump administration’s biggest legal defeats was a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that blocked the implementation of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But Project 2025 renews the right-wing fervor that the next census requires that every person answer if they’re a U.S. citizen or not. 

Project 2025 simply states that “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census,” without mentioning the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling. It’s not clear how a citizenship question could end up on the next census but the mere mention of it in Project 2025 could have a devastating effect for voting rights and immigrant communities.

“It would really depress the population counts in those areas, which in turn has a pretty dramatic impact,” said Sophia Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. That impact wouldn’t just affect representation — Congress is apportioned based on the census and a lower response rate could result in redistricting in which some communities lose seats — but it depresses the relative size of areas with a high population of noncitizens, people of color and vulnerable communities. “Not just on representation, but on funding and resource allocation,” Lakin says. “We’re talking about how people live their daily lives.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Democracy Docket there’s a “two-fold purpose” of Project 2025’s citizenship question proposal of “demonizing immigrants and undermining the legitimacy of elections.” The effort, Beirich said, is “part and parcel of a bunch of lies about the security of our election that have been going on in the far-right forever.”

Lakin also expressed a deep concern of how a citizenship question on the census could flame anti-immigrant sentiments, which Trump and the GOP have made a priority of their platform. “That has reverberations beyond representation too, in terms of the whole anti-immigrant stances,” Lakin said. “The damage that it will do to our democracy, to our founding principles as a country that welcomes all, it’s really quite damaging in that regard, as well.”

The anti-voting policies of Project 2025 are really just the tip of the iceberg regarding why Democratic politicians, policy experts and government watchdogs are so concerned. The proposed cuts to civil rights protections, labor protections, and dozens of social services have the potential to impact tens of millions of people.

But what’s most disturbing about all the individual proposals in Project 2025 is how they work in tandem with each other: pieced together, Project 2025 is a roadmap for dismantling democracy in favor of an authoritarian government, fueled by a Christian Nationalist agenda.