One of the fruits of Satan’s handiwork is a growing lack of civility between individuals and between entire groups of people.
His job has gotten easier since our post-Christian, modern society has pushed God and his church out of the center of society to its outer fringes, along with Christ’s two commands to love God and neighbor. Simply put, God has been replaced with the latest version of Gnosticism or a sort of secular humanism with the credo that our salvation lies within us solely through our will and intellect’s power. This newest version of Gnosticism, like the other versions since the time of Christ, states that the current, disordered structure of the world in which we operate is the source of evil and the cause of our feelings of alienation and anger. Eradicating this evil, they say, doesn’t require any change within us but the world around us.
The secrets to the formation of the heart have been banished to the fringes of society. Only a well-formed heart can produce the genuine love that can conquer evil. Seeking those “secrets” out there on the fringes of society, humanity can learn the basic principles by which to live, which are contained in the Bible, the commandments to love both God and neighbor, the Ten Commandments, Beatitudes and Catholic Social Teaching. The new Gnostics view all this as restrictive “rules, regulations and laws” impinging on our freedom to do whatever we want when we want rather than the basics needed to help us understand and know what agape love is and to practice it.
God and his teaching have been replaced with diversity departments in every sector and level of society, from kindergartens to corporate offices and the government. These diversity departments use DEI curriculum as the basis for behaving and interacting with civility, aiming finally to eliminate the evil between our neighbors often expressed outwardly in the form of racism, bias and hate. Except it won’t.
Well-formed Catholics know where this is going because while the mind seeks out the clarity of the purpose or goals of these initiatives – I think everyone can agree the world would undoubtedly be a peaceful place without racism, bias, intolerance and hate for our neighbors – the ignored element, the heart, seeks passion for the purpose. Without passion, any initiative will fail or become an expensive, rote, meaningless exercise.
The heart has also been pushed to the fringes of modern society. The heart has no place, bearing or meaning in modern society, and that’s when things go sideways because the human person has a heart and the desire for God, which is written on it.
Among other things, DEI teaches the mechanics of civility and fairness. It attempts to temper our evil actions by creating a veneer of niceness over the heart, which is “deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt,” according to Jeremiah 17:9. Evil does reside in the human heart. The environment or “the construct” we live in results from the heart.
A solution to our brokenness that does not incorporate the heart will never heal the wounds of the soul we are born with or the wounds created due to our natural selfishness, irascible appetites, concupiscence and the general weakness of our will. This is the same will that is supposed to guide us to our self-initiated nirvana.
Your neighbors, whether they are your actual next-door neighbors, your employees, customers or vendors, are all living with and trying to heal their own wounds, too. These wounds are compounded by our natural inclination to think selfishly. According to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “The greater a being is, the more it wants to determine its own life. It wants to be less and less dependent and, thus, more and more itself a kind of god, needing no one else at all.”
As much as we try to ignore the heart, it is the part of us that makes us uniquely human, no matter the generation. This means DEI-type initiatives that put a veneer of niceness over the human heart are here to stay because the next generation will be as broken as the current generation. Alongside those new generations, newer variants of DEI will form with the helpful resolve of social scientists who will think that this time, this new version will be successful.
As leaders, the best way we can combat this madness is to continue to learn the truth in Jesus, never abandon that truth or lose hope, and continue to work diligently day by day while standing on the rock of Christ and not on the sand on which our society is built. We have to wake up each day and pray to our God, Creator of Heaven and Earth; we must remind ourselves that he has assigned us a plan, a vocation, that is unique to us and not to be deceived into thinking that anything other than the continual inner work of perfecting our own hearts with the help of God will help make our world a better place.
