The High Cost of Religious DEI
A Double Standard in the American Workplace
The America of early 2026 is a very different place from what it was previously. Entirely intentionally and through the efforts of a highly organized and controlled effort to shape society through regulation, civil rights and workplace accommodations were drastically and irreversibly changed in a pair of identical regulatory actions that banned all non-religious forms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices, while enabling and enforcing a new form of DEI that federal and international legal scholars are beginning to refer to as Religious DEI (Brenner & Riser, 2026; McCulloch, 2026; White House, 2025a). Today’s workplace is dramatically altered for almost all parties in a highly bipolar fashion, with one set of workers gaining numerous rights and protections. In contrast, a second set of workers is rendered socially and politically invisible and effectively treated as utterly irrelevant to the workplace and its operations.
Brenner & Riser (2026). Fox Business 2026, White House 2025a, and McCulloch 2026 all undermine the view that removing DEI from the workplace as a secular activity will restore a workplace meritocracy (i.e., one in which hiring is based on ““”merit” without regard to race and sex). According to Brenner & Riser, if the state pays the salaries of bureaucrats who promote one religion or sect over others, then there can be no meritocracy. This is because a meritocracy assumes that the state does not endorse or promote the self-definition of any religion or ideological sect over others. The state merely enforces the legal rules of the workplace. Corporate silence in response to state edicts is not seen as neutral or indifferent. Rather than being neutral, employees perceive silence as actively harmful, and its effects are profound, with real psychological and economic costs in the workplace (Yoshino & Smith, 2013).
Executive Orders and Appellate Court Rulings Mandates on Telework, the Demise of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and the Use of Advanced Project Management Techniques in the Practice of Organizational Psychology Jason Brennan and Patrick D. Brennan Source: The State-Mandated Erosion of the Cognitive Abilities of Minority Groups Is Unraveling the US Economy and Society (PDF) science August 11, 2026 The title serves as a springboard for a discussion of executive orders, appellate court decisions, mandates requiring employees to telework, the abolition of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and advanced techniques in project management, all of which demonstrate the erosion of minority groups caused by state-mandated measures (Brenner & Riser, 2026; McCulloch, 2026; News4JAX, 2026). The article further discusses legislation that led to the discrimination and how the discrimination imposes “resilience strategies” on minority workers and concludes that the “61 percent tax on the mental labor of minorities” is having a profound impact on the economy and social structures of the United States, including the business and public sectors (Yoshino & Smith, 2013).
