Churches need to step up and recognize where we’re at, and start preparing people. Church members who are going to lose their jobs. We have to start building safety nets. People we’re in community with, we need to step up and help people know that their church members have their backs. 

I had a conference call on Sunday night with two guys back in the US. Both are young conservative Christian friends who worked for the same major American media company (one still does, but the other quit a few months back). They are white males. They reached out to me via a mutual friend after my book Live Not By Lies had an impact on them. They agreed to talk to me for the record if I consented to keeping their details private. What follows is my record of our conversation, revised to honor their concerns. I sent the draft version of this post to them both to make sure I had written down our conversation accurately, and that I had protected them both. The one who still works for this company (I’ll call it ACME) has a family to support, and can’t afford to lose his job.

I will call these men Rick and Charlie. Their real names aren’t even close to this. I hate that I have to write like this, but these are the stakes. People are scared to death for their careers – and they have reason to be.

ACME has become increasingly woke, and this has caused big demoralization within the corporation among those who dissent from its progressive line. After one particular high-profile incident a year or so ago involving a public figure who worked for the company being fired for an extremely minor social media post, Rick said that “all of the conservatives I know at ACME were like, I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

Rick had a significant amount of responsibility inside ACME, working on a marketing team.

He loved his job, and loved the company. After the George Floyd killing, ACME went into internal panic mode. They had lots of Zoom discussions about race. “The white people could talk, but none of us did,” says Rick. “The assumption was that we didn’t have anything to say, so none of us did.”

Rick says that in these endless strings of meetings, ACME executives would give black people an opportunity to voice their frustrations and anger, and to talk about their “lived experiences” with racism, or what they perceived to be racism.

“Some of these things really were racism,” says Rick. “Others weren’t specific to race, but were everybody’s lived experience. Everybody gets treated badly in the same way at some point. But you couldn’t say that out loud. I sat through countless hours of that kind of meeting.”

Then the team in Rick’s division started talking about hiring.

“That was an interesting conundrum. There were a lot of questions for us for producers. What is the legality of us calling agencies and saying, ‘We’re looking to hire directors, but only black directors’? ACME partnered with outside firms that would promise us we can get you women, we can get you black directors, we can get you around any sticky problems like that. I didn’t explore the legality of it, but it felt pretty weird.”

Rick said that in his division, the quality and effectiveness of the work they were doing took a back seat to identity politics. “It became our total motivation: hiring x number of female directors, and x number of black directors.”

There was one case in which the team had the budget to make a hire, and considered taking on a freelancer who had done superb work for them in the past, under budget. The problem: he was a white male.

“Someone present in the hiring meeting said, ‘White people had it good for 400 years – it’s about time they felt the sting,’” says Rick. “None of the people leading the meeting said a word about that.”

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