Megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton said Jesus would have backed DEI.

Adam Hamilton, the pastor of one of the country's largest Methodist churches, says Jesus would back DEI. That's a convenient thing to say from a pulpit in suburban Kansas City, where the congregation is comfortable and the politics lean whichever way the wind blows. But it doesn't survive contact with the actual Gospel.

Jesus spent time with tax collectors, Samaritans, Romans, and religious outcasts. He didn't do it because they belonged to certain identity groups. He did it because they were individuals in front of Him. That is not diversity, equity, and inclusion as practiced today. Modern DEI sorts people into “oppressors” and “oppressed” by skin color and sex. It demands that institutions treat people first and foremost as members of categories. That's not a Christian anthropology. It's a human resources manual with a theology degree.

Hamilton should reread the Good Samaritan. The point of that story was never about checking the right boxes. A man lies bleeding in the ditch, and the one who helps is the one who shows mercy. The story doesn't ask what group anyone belongs to. It asks who loves their neighbor. That's a standard the church has always struggled to meet, but it's a far more demanding one than any DEI training.

We're in Kansas this week, and voters here have a pretty clear-eyed view of this kind of moralizing. They see a pastor with a massive platform telling them what Jesus thinks about a corporate hiring initiative. It's all backwards. Jesus never ran a diversity committee. He overturned tables. The more these leaders try to dress up left-wing ideology in first-century robes, the more ordinary people tune them out. That may be the one point of agreement we have with Adam Hamilton: nobody seems to be listening anyway.