Article
Comment
Ethics
Fashion
Race
5 min read

Anna Wintour is not a moral compass

The Vogue editor’s championing of diversity is all very well, but it’s based on what sells
Anna  Wintour stands holding a small mic.
Anna Wintour.
UKinUSA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York launched a new exhibition. “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” highlights the history of Black people resisting white supremacy through their sartorial choices. A few weeks after it opened, the 2025 Met Gala, which serves to raise funds for the Costume Institute, was chaired by Black voices across the creative industries, including A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Coleman Domingo and Lebron James. The exhibition has already received rave reviews from Black writers and academics, likely in part due to its co-curation by Monica Miller, who literally wrote the book on the subject Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Concurrently, a few hours south of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in Washington DC, Donald Trump was calling Diversity and Inclusion initiatives “dangerous, demeaning and immoral.” A series of policies rolled out across the US federal government has led to the shutdown of not only diversity programmes, but a quiet disappearance of wording and other initiatives that might be interpreted as promoting similar themes. 

But the Costume Institute, which does not receive any federal funding, is uniquely free to follow Anna Wintour’s steer. And Wintour, Conde Nast’s Chief Content Officer and Editor in Chief of Vogue, is fighting back. “I feel we need to be courageous”, she told the Washington Post last month. Now, she added, is “a challenging time”.

Until now, Wintour has been an unlikely activist. Vogue has long been criticised for a range of ethical issues that include,  including lack of diversity, promotion of unhealthy body standards, and the sexualisation of young women. But are the magazine and Wintour now our bastion for future hopes of racial justice and equality?

In 2020, many of my friends and family ordered books and listened frantically to podcasts about race in America because of the events surrounding George Floyd’s death. In May 2020, a video circulated of officer Derek Chauvin suffocating George Floyd as he called out for his mother, leading to a flurry of protests and debates about the racial bias present in institutions. 

In those days, learning about the systematic injustice faced by Black Americans and calling for change felt popular. Everyone was doing it. Books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi filled our Amazon carts and library holds. 

These days, many of those books have quietly disappeared from the shelves. For sure, there are those who continue to fight for racial equality. But the winds have changed, with some companies - like Conde Nast - landing on one side, while Google, Meta and Amazon disappear from the horizon. 

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities.

It might seem obvious that brands are not the best source for our moral formation. But the fact is that many of them see themselves as culture-forming and mission-driven. If you don’t have something else to help form your idea of what the world should look like, why not Vogue, with its picture-perfect editorials, or Google, with its future-facing innovations? 

For me, my beliefs in diversity and racial justice come from something stronger: my Christian faith and the many Black men and women globally who share this faith with me. It was my reading of Black Liberation theologian James Cone that first showed me the depths of beauty I could gain by understanding my faith through someone else’s perspective. Cone was famous for his book which drew parallels between Jesus’s death on the cross by Roman crucifixion, and the deaths of many Black men by lynching in the American South. Cone stopped me in my tracks, making me rethink a key symbol of my faith. He said this: 

“The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,” an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

It won’t make it into a Vogue editorial anytime soon– but maybe that’s the point. 

A faith-based belief in justice comes with challenges. It can feel tiring to face a troubled history of racism in a religious institution. Existing in diverse, faith-based communities brings everything from awkward cultural differences to true and genuine disagreements. The global Anglican communion faces tension between white, liberal progressives in the UK who want to celebrate gay marriage in the Church of England, and an assemblage of Christians of colour in the Global South who maintain strong convictions about traditional views of marriage and gender. Our faith in Christ is the anchor that holds us together. But these are real disagreements; they’re not trivial, and there’s no easy way forward. 

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities. And this is why we can’t rely on people like Anna Wintour to form our vision for the future. As nice and important as it is to promote diversity in models, photographers, and designers, ultimately Vogue will be shaped by what its editors and publishers think will sell on the newsstand.  

This is my plea for us all. Let’s not let the shifting tides of any company– Meta or Vogue– decide our ethical convictions towards justice. Let’s rely on something stronger.

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Article
Assisted dying
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Politics
5 min read

Holding an opposing view is not 'imposing' belief on the assisted dying debate

Opposing interventions from believers on dishonesty grounds is a sinister development in public debate

Nick is an author and Senior Fellow at Theos,a think tank.

A graphic shows a gallery of people with religious symbols on their clothing.

“There are some who oppose this crucial reform,” Esther Rantzen wrote recently of MPs who dared to opposed Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life private member’s bill. “Many of them have undeclared personal religious beliefs…  [do] they have the right to impose them on patients like me, who do not share them?” 

This is a peculiarly common argument for those who support the right to Assisted Dying, which is surprising as it would be hard to come up with a less coherent case against religion in public life. The idea that elected MPs engaged in parliamentary debate are “imposing” their will on other people is odd. The idea that MPs have undeclared personal religious beliefs is strange too. I think it’s fair to say that most people know that Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim or Tim Farron is a Christian, and for those that don’t know that but do have access to Google, it takes less than five seconds to find out the religious beliefs of an MP. 

Perhaps most tellingly, however, why is it that we should be alert to – read wary of – MPs religious beliefs? Do the non-religious not have beliefs of which we should be cognizant? If my MP is motivated by a philosophy of relentless, Peter Singer-like utilitarianism or vague, incoherent secular humanism I’d like to know. 

In truth, Rantzen’s intervention in this debate, like that of a number of others – Lord Falconer, Simon Jenkins, Humanists UK, etc. – is part of a recent and rather dispiriting attempt to de facto exclude religious contribution to public debates by accusing them of being dishonest. 

To be clear, secular voices have long tried to exclude religious ones, but the tactics change. Back in the New Atheist heyday of the early twenty first century, all you needed to do was splutter something about sky fairies or Bronze Age beliefs or mind viruses to close down any sort of religious intervention. If, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, faith was one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate, no sensible parliament could possibly want to heed what faith had to say. 

Even back then, however, there were subtler arguments against faith, which usually came in the form of semi-digested Rawslian political liberalism, and demanded the religious participation in public debate had to obey the strictures of “public reasoning”, using logic and language that “all reasonable people” will understand. 

There are quite a few holes in this particular away of thinking (who are “reasonable people” anyway?) but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad one to follow. It is quite right and proper, if only as a matter of pragmatism, to speak in terms that your opponents will get, just as it is right and proper, as a matter of courtesy, to be open about what ultimately motivates you. 

And so that is what religious figures – MPs, leaders, institutions – do. Having read through pretty much all their contributions to the assisted dying debate, in parliament and beyond, I can testify that not many people, on either side of the debate, quote scripture or invoke papal teaching as a way of persuading, let alone commanding, others. (As it happens, parliamentarians haven’t really done that since the 1650s, but that’s another story).  

Rather, they argue in terms of policy and principles. They talk about the risk of legislative slippage, of changing attitudes to the vulnerable, of the need for better palliative care, of existing pressures on the NHS, etc. This is quite right and proper. As James Cleverly remarked in the Common debate in November, “We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill”. And so that is what they did. 

Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak? 

In effect, religious public figures, whether or not their beliefs are “declared”, do what they have (rightly) been asked to do by those who have appointed themselves as gatekeepers for our public debate. And so this has forced the usual suspects to pivot in their argument. No longer able to dismiss religious contributions for what they say (“don’t quote the Bible at me!”) they are now compelled to dismiss them for what they don’t say. Hence, the trope that has become popular among such campaigners – “you are not being honest about your real motivations”. 

A new report from the think tank Theos, entitled, How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: religion and the assisted dying debate, unpacks the various objections that have been levelled at the religious contribution to the debate, and then systematically dismantles them.

Some of these objections are old school in the extreme.  

Religious belief is too intellectually inadequate or disfiguring for debates of this nature. 

Religion is insufficiently willing to adapt and compromise for politics.  

Faith is ill-fitted or even inadmissible in a secular polity or culture.  

But the report majors on the newer objection, so clearly displayed by Esther Rantzen, what we might call “dishonesty” objection, that religious contributors are fundamentally dishonest about their motivations and objectives. 

In truth, this is no stronger than the more tried and tested objections, and it displays a serious, possibly intentional, misunderstanding of what a religious argument actually is. To quote the political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, such secular campaigners “present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant simplicity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin [and] with this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life.” 

Contemporary arguments against religion in public life are slightly more sophisticated than Waldron’s caricature here, but not much. The idea that religio should be “declared” as a competing interest, so as to stop religious participants in debate from being “dishonest” is every bit as sinister, against both the letter and the spirit of plural, liberal democracy. Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?  

As the assisted dying debate returns to parliament for the final push, there will be much animated debate. That is quite right and proper. A democracy needs vigorous and honest argument. But part of that honesty involves opening the doors of debate to everyone, and not subtly trying to exclude those with whom you disagree on the spurious grounds that they are being dishonest.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief