Christian legal group that helped topple Roe shifts fight to DEI

It was late 2022 when hundreds of lawyers across America joined in a virtual Lord’s Prayer for Jeremy Tedesco and his mission to promote Christian values in corporate America.

A senior counsel at the country’s most powerful conservative legal group that helped orchestrate the end of Roe v. Wade, Tedesco was getting ready to spread the gospel: corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies are anti-Christian and must be eradicated.

“Gracious, Holy Father, we humbly come before you today to address the accountability of America’s corporations,” the host and lawyer, Bob Pruitt, said in prayer.

“Amen.”

With barely a pause, the two then delved into their grievances over what they called “woke” corporations — from Walt Disney Co. to Netflix Inc. to then-Twitter Inc. (now X Corp.). The webinar, which was obtained by investigative watchdog and news site Documented and seen by Bloomberg News, was disseminated to a network of over 4,800 attorneys across the country who belong to Alliance Defending Freedom.

The aim: push those lawyers to convince corporate clients to end DEI programs, including efforts to hire and promote people from minority backgrounds and support LGBTQ workers, as part of a broader project that they say will help to make the U.S. friendlier to Christians.

Two years on, that movement is gaining unprecedented momentum. Donald Trump’s incoming administration has pledged to eradicate federal spending on DEI offices within agencies and ban government contractors from offering bias training. Companies from Amazon.com. Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. to Walmart Inc. have already watered down or scrapped certain programs aimed at recruiting and advancing racially diverse talent, as well as prioritizing contracts with minority-owned businesses, amid the political DEI backlash.

Meta said it made the changes because the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.” Walmart said it chose to curb DEI efforts in order to “open doors to opportunities for all of our associates, customers and suppliers.” Amazon said it is hoping to “foster a more truly inclusive culture.” It’s unclear if ADF was involved with these companies.

ADF has played a key role in the movement, helping to draft dozens of shareholder resolutions aimed at axing DEI trainings and policies meant to improve representation of racially underrepresented groups at firms. The group is also scoring companies based on their friendliness to Christians through a project called the Viewpoint Diversity Score.

“The incoming presidential administration will no doubt do its part to hasten the demise of DEI,” Tedesco said in an email on Jan. 10. “Doubling down on DEI is doubling down on failure. We expect to see more brands move to distance themselves.”

The U.S. legal system is crowded with campaigners, liberal and conservative. But ADF stands out both for its in-house successes — helping to write and defend the pro-life Mississippi law that ultimately led the Supreme Court to overturn the federal right to an abortion — and a unique strategy of recruiting thousands of lawyers across the country to boost its influence.

ADF doesn’t publicly disclose the names of its allied attorneys, though says on its website that they include practitioners from “Big Law.” Tedesco said the group regularly encourages “shareholders, asset managers, public officials, and others, including attorneys in our network” to promote their corporate accountability work.

Ideological Army

“ADF’s allied attorneys are the armies in the field, carrying ideologically motivated precedent into these spaces that, on their own, wouldn’t necessarily be as visible,” says Alison Gash, a professor and expert on ADF at the University of Oregon. “Through the help of these armies, they suddenly have real power.”

The lawyers have to agree to a statement affirming their “belief in and commitment to the historic Trinitarian Christian faith as revealed in the canon of the Old and New Testaments and commonly expressed in the Nicene-Constantinople and Apostles’ Creeds,” according to ADF. Attorneys are encouraged to become ADF allies because the organization will help them be “a change agent.” They’re offered benefits like grants and funding as well as training and support from ADF and its 100-strong in-house counsel and staff.

“ADF always aspired to have lawyers in large firms with corporate clients as part of their network,” said Joshua Wilson, a professor at University of Denver who specializes in researching conservative politics. “Lawyers wield power in organizations everywhere. So, if you have this network and you have lawyers positioned in these institutions, that gives you potential inroads and access.”

Slipperly Slope

It’s difficult to know what advice those attorneys are providing to clients, let alone unpick how ideological motivations are influencing it. But to some American Christian conservatives, DEI policies are seen as a slippery slope toward promoting LGBTQ rights and abortion. ADF’s legal argument against them is that they infringe on free speech and religious rights; they claim corporate policies banning hate speech or discrimination prevent Christians from saying things or acting in ways that align with their values.

Supporters of DEI have pushed back on that characterization, saying it is a misrepresentation of programs and trainings meant to reduce discrimination. The goal is to promote inclusive environments and respectful standards for all people, not stifle free speech, they say.

“DEI is about opportunities and access for marginalized communities in places they’ve been excluded,” said Leah Watson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Equating DEI with something that is anti-religion is inaccurate and it’s meant to mislead. The programs that have traditionally been characterized as DEI are efforts to ensure there is equal opportunity in workplaces and in schools, which is required by the law for everyone.”

Though the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in higher education in 2023, no cases related to corporate DEI has reached the high court. But some lawyers are advising companies to preemptively reconsider some of those programs — particularly scholarships and programs only available to underrepresented groups or women, hiring practices that require people of color to be considered for roles, and bonuses for managers for boosting workplace diversity — in anticipation of any further civil lawsuits and potential government action similar to Trump’s previous executive order preventing federal contractors from implementing some diversity trainings.

Conservative Response

ADF sees itself as a conservative response to the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, a legal powerhouse that provides support for lawyers seeking to get involved in civil rights and First Amendment cases. ADF produces a ranking of companies based on their friendliness to Christian values, in many ways the inverse of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which benchmarks companies on their support of LGBTQ rights based on companies’ policies protecting LGBTQ workers from discrimination, their benefits for same-sex couples and transgender people, and their affirmation of support for LGBTQ rights in employee training materials, among other factors.

Meanwhile, the ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score ranks firms based on factors such as religious and ideological diversity, and whether they avoid what they dub as “divisive concepts” in workforce teaching materials, such as unconscious bias training and discussions around privilege, allyship and xenophobia.

The ADF index has the backing of Christian investment firms that hold $250 billion in assets, according to Inspire Investing, which is closely allied with ADF. Those firms have pledged to punish companies that have low scores and reward those that score well, ADF said.

In a fact sheet sent to allied attorneys in early 2023, ADF encouraged them to direct their corporate clients to use the Viewpoint Diversity Score. ADF urged the lawyers in the network to cite the Viewpoint Diversity Score “in your memos and written guidance to corporate clients,” according to a copy of the sheet obtained by Documented and seen by Bloomberg. It also asked attorneys to “provide expertise on securities and corporate law to a growing network of allied investors filing shareholder resolutions to hold corporations accountable.” ADF helped to draft at least 28 shareholder resolutions introduced by Christian investors during annual shareholder meetings last year.

“There was a period of time where it felt like we were losing every battle: the pendulum felt like it was swinging farther and farther to the left,” Tedesco said in the webinar. “But as we know, these pendulums often swing back. I feel that we’re at that moment.”