Say the letters D-E-I out loud in most rooms right now and watch what happens to the temperature. To some, it is a slogan for a political program that has overreached. To others, it is the bare minimum of decency owed to people who have been shut out. Dr. Cheryl Sanders, a professor of Christian ethics at Howard University and a senior pastor in Washington, DC, has a question for Christians on either side of that fight: Before you decide what you think about the politics, have you checked what your own book says?
Her answer is that the heart of diversity, equity, and inclusion is not a modern import into the faith. It is woven through Scripture from the first chapter to the last. That does not settle every policy argument about DEI as a program. It does settle something that comes before the policy argument: whether Christians have any business treating the underlying values as enemies of the gospel.
Where Does Sanders Find Diversity Built Into the Bible?
Sanders starts at the beginning, in Genesis, where God makes humanity, male and female, in his own image (Genesis 1:27). No one color is blessed above the rest. Every person, in every variation, bears the image of God equally. From there she makes a wordplay that is meant to land hard, and it does.
“Imago Dei, guess what D-E-I stands for? The image of God includes diversity, equity, and inclusion. So when you have Christians demonizing those things, what happened to your biblical interpretation?” — Dr. Cheryl Sanders
She pushes further, into Revelation, where the worship around the throne includes every kindred, tongue, people and nation (Revelation 5:9; 7:9), not a single ethnic group standing alone. Her conclusion is blunt, and she means for it to sting a little: “If you do not like the people of another race, you are going to be miserable if you ever get to heaven, because it is every tribe, every ethnicity.”
Isn’t This Just Reading Politics Into the Text?
This is the natural pushback, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. Critics on the right worry that pastors are smuggling a secular political program into the pulpit by relabeling it with Bible verses. Critics on the left sometimes worry about the opposite, that Scripture gets cited selectively to bless whatever already feels comfortable. Sanders’s case has to survive both objections to be worth taking seriously, and the way she structures her argument suggests she has heard both before and answers them on purpose.
Her response is to separate the values from the slogan. She is not arguing that a specific corporate DEI training program is biblically mandated, or that every modern policy debate has a clean scriptural answer. She is arguing that the underlying values are not borrowed from a political movement: every person carries God’s image, justice and mercy are not optional extras, and heaven itself is ethnically plural. Those values were there first. The political movement borrowed, however imperfectly, from a moral vocabulary the church has always had and has too often forgotten to use.
She even reads Revelation as carrying its own political charge, since it was written under an emperor who believed himself to be a god. The refrain that God alone is on the throne directly challenged Rome’s claim on ultimate loyalty. The early church was not apolitical. It was making a specific, costly claim: no earthly ruler is in charge. Sanders argues that the claim still cuts against any group, on any side, that demands ultimate loyalty today.
What Is the Actual Standard, If Not a Political Label?
Asked how Christians should act when so many people claiming the name behave badly on these questions, Sanders does not retreat to a slogan. She goes straight to the prophet Micah:
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8).
That, she says, is the measure, because a person can profess Christianity loudly and still fail to live it out.
“Our standard of accountability is justice, mercy, and a genuine walk with God. Do not be confused by how Christians behave. Christians do all kinds of things.” — Dr. Cheryl Sanders
The line does double duty. It refuses to let bad behavior by self-described Christians discredit the standard itself, and it refuses to let the standard be replaced by a tribal loyalty test about who is on the correct side of a culture-war argument.
Is the Problem White People, or Something Else?
Sanders is careful here, and she wants the distinction heard clearly, because it is the line most likely to get blurred in either direction. The problem she names is not white people. It is a centuries-old habit of painting Jesus, God and everyone in the biblical story as white, until whiteness itself was quietly treated as godly, the default appearance of holiness.
She draws on the mystic Howard Thurman, who argued that enslaved people who became Christians redeemed a faith their enslavers had profaned. The faith itself was not the problem. What some had done with it was.
“It is not a condemnation of whiteness. It is a condemnation of white supremacy. We have to get that straight so we do not confuse worshiping Jesus with worshiping whiteness.” — Dr. Cheryl Sanders
That distinction is the hinge of her whole argument. Collapse it in either direction, by treating any critique of white supremacy as a critique of white people or by treating any image of Jesus as theologically neutral, and the conversation breaks down into exactly the culture-war shouting match Sanders is trying to lead the church out of.
Why Bring Up Painful History at Church at All?
Sanders connects all of this to present-day pressure in some circles to avoid or silence honest conversation about Black history. Her answer is direct: you cannot heal what you refuse to name. Telling the truth, in her framing, is not about blaming people alive today for what happened generations ago. It is about walking in the light, so that reconciliation stays at the actual center of the church’s work instead of becoming a slogan the church repeats without doing the work behind it.
“How can you fix it, how can you heal, if you are not willing to tell the truth about what happened? It is not about pointing fingers. It is about telling the truth so we can walk in the light.” — Dr. Cheryl Sanders
What This Does Not Claim
This is not an argument that every corporate or government DEI policy is biblically required, that Scripture has settled every contested question of law or workplace practice, or that Christians must agree on the politics to share the same faith. Sanders’s claim is narrower, and for that reason harder to dodge. The values underneath the acronym (the image of God in every person, justice and mercy as non-negotiable, a heaven that is ethnically plural) are not a modern political import. The church cannot disown them without disowning its own book.
Quick Answers
- Is DEI a biblical idea or a purely political one? Sanders argues that its heart (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is rooted in the image of God and the vision of Revelation, long before it became a political slogan.
- What is the Christian standard for behavior on this issue? Micah 6:8: do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God. Sanders calls this the baseline of accountability, regardless of which side of the debate someone is on.
- Is it wrong to picture Jesus as white? Sanders says the danger is making whiteness itself seem godly. She urges letting Jesus be the Middle Eastern man he actually was.
- Why talk about painful racial history at church? Because, Sanders argues, healing requires truth-telling first. Naming what happened is not the same as assigning blame; it is the path to reconciliation.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear the full episode of the Jude 3 Project podcast with Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, and Dr. Cheryl Sanders, including Sanders’s case that the church should lead on reconciliation rather than simply follow the culture’s fights.
Dr. Cheryl Sanders is professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity and senior pastor of Third Street Church of God in Washington, DC. She is the author of Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People*.*
Other Voices
Dr. Kimberly Credit, who studies how apologetics is contextualized for different audiences, names a related blind spot worth pairing with Sanders’s point about a racialized Jesus: “When I or a person think of Christian apologetics, what we see is the white male evangelical face.” That pattern runs parallel to the default-white Jesus Sanders critiques. Both quietly teach that one ethnicity is the normal face of the faith.
Kevin Muriithi Ndereba, who writes on faith and culture, offers a framing that supports Sanders’s starting point in Genesis. “We should understand culture as a gift from God,” Ndereba says, and he points to the Bible’s own record of Africa’s significant presence in the story of redemption, a reminder that the diversity Sanders finds in Revelation was never an afterthought in the biblical narrative.
