Chick-fil-A, Grove City: The Same Witch Hunt
Right-wingers eat their own for no real reason? Sounds oddly familiar…
Once upon a time, there was a brand. A famously (or infamously, depending on who you asked) conservative brand that stood apart from its peers in the clarity of its mission and the quality of its product. While it was by no means perfect and had its fair share of cringey history and behavior, it was a brand that Christians and conservatives were comfortable with, not simply because of what it offered but because of why it offered it. It was safe, reputed, and capable of being taken seriously—in a word, it was respectable.
And then, one day, it wasn’t good enough. One not-culture-warrish marketing decision was all it took for the most dogged side of the political Right to jump on the brand and deem it the one word that ‘true conservatives’ simply aren’t allowed to be: woke. Rather than looking at the brand holistically and making judgments on the overall character of the institution, it was time to play the game of find-the-wrongspeak-and-fire-at-will. The brand survived, yet its credibility was forever destroyed by the most ravenous kind of culture war thinking: the kind that demands institutions fall in ideological lockstep or be labeled as deficient, despite no serious argument existing for such deficiencies. Thus ends the tale.
What brand am I talking about? Within the confines of the 24-hour news cycle, I’m thinking about the recent boycott of fast food giant Chick-fil-A, a longtime stalwart on the shortlist of Evangelical-safe brands. What was the grand crime for which Chick-fil-A was to be shunned by the Super Serious Council of Boycotters? Supporting DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)—an oft-maligned (and often legitimately so) term to describe the measures aimed at greater racial understanding and equity in the workplace. To be sure, many DEI measures passed at other companies have ranged from cheesy to racist-adjacent, but that’s not what Chick-fil-A was on about.
The very first sentence on Chick-fil-A’s DEI page contains this phrase regarding the chicken restaurant’s mission: “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us. To have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A.”
Yeah, that’s the wokeness I was told to be afraid of.
Did they have to use a flashpoint term like DEI? Perhaps not—but if that’s the sole reason for the boycott, then the advocates of that boycott have to argue that they’re seriously boycotting one of the most openly conservative/Christian-friendly brands in America because they did the right thing but used the bad word, which is a level of pettiness that, even to a conservative who supports boycotting brands when necessary, seems like hair-splitting.
Yet, go back to the aforementioned parable about brands. For anyone connected with Grove City College, the idea of completely normal and respectable brands catching fire in the modern snuff-out-all-the-wokeness age should hit close to home. The parable is about Christian colleges every bit as much as it is about fried chicken producers.
Chick-fil-A wasn’t safe from political boycotts gone witch-hunt-y, and neither was Grove City when the woke hawks descended to label it a case of leftward institutional decline. Were the people who came after Grove City motivated by animus? Certainly not all of them, and neither are the Chick-fil-A boycotters. But what is happening to Chick-fil-A is the same thing that happened to Grove City and it’s hardly a shining tale.
In fact, it’s the same, tired, ridiculous story. Targeting notorious conservative brands in the same way that one targets truly ‘woke’ corporations sends a clear message, and it’s not a good one—no one is safe, no one is good enough, and the truly conservative should be so incensed with righteous fervor that they refuse to perform the simple task of realizing that Target and Chick-fil-A aren’t promulgating the same cultural values. We’re talking basic intellectual discernment here.
You want to boycott Chick-fil-A because you don’t like three letters put together in a certain order? You’re more than welcome to. But don’t pretend that what you’re doing is a brave stand against the woke hoard. And if this is the boycott strategy you want, then you might also stop telling me how my mild criticism of conservatives is such a silly strategy. If you’re willing to boycott, and I cannot stress this enough, Chick-fil-A, one of us has picked a truly extreme, truly counterproductive cultural strategy. And it’s not me.