Calvinism was an energetic and revolutionary creed which found its epicentre in Geneva. Here, as elsewhere, Calvinists showed themselves devoted to education, enthusiastic charity givers and generous to refugees.

They also proved to be violently intolerant, with Jean Calvin’s Geneva imposing extreme punishments for perceived sinners, including the death penalty for pregnancy out of wedlock. They also had a tendency to smash up statues and burn down abbeys, or anything else that was associated with the old religion. Perhaps most puzzling of all to religious conservatives, Calvinists saw the world being divided between the damned and the saved — and the doubt this caused in believers often led to extreme psychological stress, to the point of breakdown.

It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and so just over 400 years ago, a group of English men and women with Calvinistic leanings, feeling that their homeland wasn’t Godly enough, set sail to start a new country. This they did, pretty successfully, and today the new religion spreading from America displays that country’s strong Calvinist roots, and with the zealot’s indifference to local customs.

Today the faith is spread not by preachers, or even teachers, but through the institutions that wield the most power in the 21st century; corporations, and their Human Resources departments. For the practitioners of what is generally known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” are teaching nothing less than a modern form of political Calvinism, one that paints a pessimistic picture of humanity destined to be damned. And their strength is growing.

Our economy may be in deep trouble following the pandemic, but one area which is already enjoying a roaring 20s is the diversity industry, which has significantly increased its presence in many companies since the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. All around, in hushed tones, people in a variety of careers, from academia to medicine to finance, grumble about the increasing encroachments on their workplace by newly empowered D.E.I teams. And the grumbling is always private; no one wants to go on record.

For some it’s a mere time-wasting exercise, with occasional Zoom conferences adding to the day’s workload. For others it goes much further, with HR-led diversity teams now even deciding who can be hired for what role. But almost everywhere there has been a significant ramping-up since last June.

The usual pattern is that a well-meaning manager, bombarded with images of BLM and racial justice from every corner of social media, will suggest that the organisation needs to alleviate concern about racism. The company or department, aware that racism is seen as the number one social evil and that anti-racist courses might also act as insurance against any discrimination lawsuit, will hire a professional anti-racist activist from outside.

It is rarely initiated by human resources, but HR embrace it because it gives them a role as priests of the new faith. There is also a whole outside industry that benefits too.

A middle manager at a medical professional body told me how, following the summer protests in the US, “it was [considered] a matter of urgency that we ran a series of mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions for our staff”. There hadn’t been any problem at the company, which was pretty diverse and had good morale.

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The sessions were run by professional diversity consultants, and were “quite different from previous E&D training I had attended at past jobs. Whilst those ones tended to focus more on how to avoid breaking the law, these sessions felt a lot more like an induction into their ideology.” They said that equality meant “treating people differently and acknowledging their race” and afterwards participants were told to research “ally behaviour” and “to educate ourselves about the British Empire”.

As with many of these courses, some very questionable claims were made: “We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite. They were told the gender pay gap was in large part caused by people using the word “girl” instead of “woman”, a claim that fails to take into account the overwhelming influence of child-rearing on the gender pay gap.

There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.

Many diversity and equality sessions instruct employees to read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, a runaway bestseller that has become the Little Red Book of the diversity industry. White Fragility is mainly tasked with teaching white liberals that the polite ways they talk about race to avoid offence are actually proof of their deep-seated sin. Whites, says DiAngelo, are able to “infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not”, and being unconscious of this racism is merely proof of how insidious it is.

In this world, greater white average wealth in any area is a priori evidence of this racism, even though over a dozen or so ethnic minority groups in the United States are wealthier than the white average. This central inequality, according to the book, “represents power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society”.

It is an incredibly bleak worldview, and as Matt Talibi said, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.

And this is what is being taught at workplaces across Britain, a new American religion proclaiming that, whatever we do, we are damned. It goes largely unopposed partly because the British are so unused to politics intruding in these areas of life, but also because workers are scared for their jobs; the rise of woke capital has given large corporations more power over their precarious employees.

One of the things I find so alien about the new religion is the absence of humour. So much of what is called identity politics is funny in its absurdity, because fanatics are intrinsically ridiculous — but only when they can’t get at you. But most people feel that they can, they can get them sacked or publicly humiliated, and so all the humour is told in DM groups or Slack channels. True believers certainly can’t laugh at themselves, and are determined to take the public realm’s sacred space for themselves.

There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion. The traditional English cultural taboo about not discussing religion or politics in the pub reflected a deep-seated aversion to fanaticism; the idea that workplaces might be settings for political instruction would once have struck people here as positively demented.

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A friend who works for a Russell Group university in the north of England described how, since June last year, there have been “constant invitations to regular Race Equality sessions and Diversity and Inclusion sessions”. Even in department-level meetings on completely unrelated topics there are now talks “educating us about the slave trade” with videos and slides. She describes these as “just complete non-sequiturs since the majority of the meeting is about new research grants, new students in the department, recruitment for next year”. It’s not that it’s a great intrusion, it’s just that it’s…. weird.

They are also made to undergo unconscious bias training before being allowed on interview panels for new staff and students, and are told things which are either questionable or outright false. At one of the meetings a diversity and inclusion officer told faculty that “if you only have one woman on your job shortlist there’s statistically no likelihood you’ll recruit her”, and this went unchallenged, even though this is not only untrue, it’s obviously untrue. Strangest of all, they were also told to “start every lecture with a picture of a black scientist and say that they have a voice and that it’s being heard”. She finds it embarrassingly patronising.

Universities are particularly vulnerable to this sort of activism, because by nature they are political. Many privately despair, including academics who aren’t especially right-wing; whatever your politics, conformism can become intolerable in a workplace. Talking about politics all the time is tedious. And activists can be disagreeable people.

Another academic, working at a politics department, recalled that things ramped up after the death of George Floyd when a committee was set up to look at diversity and decolonisation. It ended with activists from outside the department hiring students to “review” their reading list and blaming the inclusion of John Locke and David Hume for the BAME attainment gap. The conclusion was the demand that they separate “colonial and non-colonial” political history courses, which meant in effect separate courses for white and non-white political philosophers.

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The strangest thing about all this expanded HR is that there is almost no evidence that diversity officers improve outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Indeed there is even evidence of the “pharisee effect”, that people made to recite a platitude about diversity and gender equality were less likely to hire a black or female candidate; it just made them feel like they’ve done their bit, a criticism that has been made against upper-class activism since Tom Wolfe’s day.

None of this stops it expanding. Even the royal family are on board, or as it was reported last week, “Queen to appoint diversity tsar”, one of those headlines that would truly baffle someone waking from a long coma. This will not improve the life of a single BAME person except for the actual tsar, or tsarina, who gets the job; everyone knows it, it’s just the royal family conforming to the state religion, just as their ancestor George I did.

The companies hiring diversity consultants probably aren’t improving people’s lives, and they aren’t encouraging tolerance, let alone “diversity”; quite the opposite. They’re doing what people in positions of power have done since the first states were formed, ensuring that their gods and saints are the ones being revered by the subjects they rule. As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.

On the one hand, our societies are desperately keen to assert that all people are the same: not just equal under the law or equal in dignity, but equally capable and with the same abilities. One demonstration of this is that there are no currently acceptable explanations for unequal outcomes that do not currently fix solely on prejudice or lack of opportunity. The era insists that we are all equally capable, and if we are not in the same place at the end of it, then that is only because the playing field has not been sufficiently levelled.

As the same time, we also like to believe that certain groups of people bring special attributes to the table, the phenomenon I have tried to identify as “Equal and also better”. So, for instance, there is the example of Christine Lagarde, who regularly asserts — without of course having any skin in the game herself — that women bring attributes to the table that men do not.

Last month she was at it again, claiming that world leaders who happen to be female are doing a better job at dealing with coronavirus than their male counterparts. Putting aside for a moment whether that is provable or not, or indeed correct, the deep assertion is what is important: there is something about women which makes them more capable in coping with pandemics. Equal, but better.

And that may be even be true — but you cannot run this programme at the same time as the programme that says we are all the same and that the justification for women being at the top table is that they have precisely the same competencies as men. Or you cannot do so without some serious grinding of gears.

Now Hollywood — like all other areas of the entertainment industry — is at present contorted by this same underlying contradiction. With an eye on the prevailing winds, this week it was announced that only films which are “diverse” will now be considered for the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Specifically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that certain diversity criteria would need to be met in order to satisfy the judges.

For these purposes the Academy is focusing on “underrepresented groups” and lists these as “women, racial and ethnic groups, LBGTQ+ and people with disabilities”. To be considered, a film must fit at least one of the following criteria, among them:

— “At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors: must be from “an underrepresented racial or ethnic group”

— Underrepresented people must be in creative leadership positions, as departmental heads or as part of the crew.

— There must be paid apprenticeships, internships and training for underrepresented people.

— Audience development, from publicity and marketing to distribution, must also include people from these categories.

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Cinema is already one of the most diverse industries on earth, a place where human life in its fullest is already on display, from Gandhi and The Last Emperor to Dances with Wolves to Rain Man — all previous Oscar winners – not to mention the all-black Moonlight, which in 2016 was finally given the award after it had been wrongly handed to the rather bland, all-white La La Land. But by then already the demands for more representation were in full-flow, the #OscarsTooWhite campaign showing what the real problem was. Hollywood might be diverse, but it is not diverse in the right way. Diversity means minorities being equal, but better.

Yet the film and entertainment industry is unusual, and trying to use Hollywood to address underrepresentation is as doom-laden as trying to use it as a test-pad for global sexual etiquette. It thrives on untypical people with exceptional talents, tall poppies who don’t reflect the wider population. Although Hollywood is a town where progressive views are almost mandatory, it is also a land of almost brutal, Darwinian competition, and the last place to enact an egalitarian experiment. Rather than being fair, success is won or lost by most unjust of criteria — beauty, wealth, nepotism personal connections, and raw talent.

None of the Oscar winners of the past decades has been the product of fairness or equity, but of unusually talented and exceptional artists. Few previous Oscar winners would have passed this diversity criteria – which is perhaps the point – but then it’s hard to see how any of them would have been improved by diversity.

Would The Godfather have been a better movie had it featured more “LBGTQ+ people” or “people with disabilities”? Would The Departed or Shakespeare in Love be improved by its producers being compelled to offer training opportunities to people from underrepresented groups?

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The assumption behind criteria like those introduced this week is that the answer is that, yes, The Godfather would have been a better movie if it had had better representation. But that is a difficult, bold claim to make, so the only acceptable argument to make would be to state that The Godfather would have been exactly as good a movie if it had fulfilled the new criteria. Diversity equals the same, or better.

Nor will it end there, because it never does, not when a group of people are determined to hold two impossible things at once: that diversity in itself is good, but that diversity must also mean equality (except when minorities are overrepresented, of course). The #OscarsSoWhite campaign of recent years has not concerned junior apprentices and there is not a chance it will be satisfied by it; the real goal is onscreen representation, a criteria by which very few of the past winners could ever be made today.

Perhaps The Godfather, about a clannish Sicilian society unwelcome to outsiders, would have to feature some people of colour to pass the test, although obviously not as fellow criminals because visibility only counts if it is positive in its portrayals. Titanic is full of quite unfashionably white people drowning and would have to feature black working-class Irish passengers in Third Class (a BBC production might actually do this). Schindler’s List could obviously present a problem on the representation front, with the famous lack of diversity in the Third Reich, and casting black actors as victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust could be deemed insensitive.

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Still the diversity demands will expand, because the film industry is stuck in that same logical conundrum as Christine Lagarde and everyone else – that the representation of certain groups is desirable because members of that group have exactly the same abilities as everybody else. And also that they bring something which makes the end product distinctly better.

It is possible that the diversity criteria will mean that Hollywood movies from now on will be distinctly better, in which case everyone — not least any cinema-goers who still exist — can celebrate loudly. Or it is possible that it will make no difference.

But of course a third possibility exists, which is that the results are worse, that the films – their plotting and casting – are more obviously contrived, and that the audience does not take to the films which Hollywood wishes them to. And there lies a possible end-point to this commonly held contradiction in our age – that the great play for equity will have been made and the end results will be seen to be not just the same or better, but in fact visibly worse. What a story that will be.