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Notes -
I have a hard time seeing it as a veneer of materialism. The “immaterial forces” are something like justice or fairness. I think those have a pretty solid foundation in materialism.
Compare to American civic religion, which is grounded in various enlightenment values. But the government is allowed to cite life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, because they’re fundamentally material.
(Though…the whole “endowed by their Creator” thing raises some questions.)
So when DEI asserts that something is good because it is “fair,” it’s grounded in a material value rather than a spiritual one. You don’t have to subscribe to any particular metaphysics or doctrine to recognize fairness as a value. It’s too useful for bargaining and cooperation, so it shows up again and again in secular contexts.
Maybe this is just plausible deniability. @desolation had an example extremist who was explicitly grounding DEI rhetoric in religious principles. I don’t have a problem with banning that from government speech. For the average advocate, though, I don’t see what immaterial grounds are being used.
I was actually referring to "oppression" (or "systemic -ism" or "patriarchy" or "white supremacy" or other similar terms). It's certainly the same word as one that's used to refer to a real concept with a solid foundation in materialism, but as used by the religion in question, it refers to an essentially magical concept due to how it is claimed to have impacts on interactions between individuals, while lacking the sort of scientific backing to support such claims. Again, I think this is ingenious for its ability to convince otherwise secular/materialist people of this supernatural force, but it is a veneer, and scratching the surface reveals that it's magical thinking that fundamentally rests on faith, not dissimilar to a belief in an omnipotent God that works in mysterious ways.
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