Modern Day Pharisees: Conservative Evangelical Christian Nationalists - Anonymous employee Dunham+Company Employee Review

Company leadership claims to want to advance the Kingdom of God through their work, but their execution of that work is from a conservative evangelical Christian nationalist perspective. Their theology is not Christ-like; it is oppressive. Their clients have worked to deny women's rights, including the right to choose, to use flawed scriptural interpretations to vilify the LGBTQ community, and to advance the dangerous rhetoric of the Republican party, including running marketing campaigns to mobilize the conservative evangelical base to vote for now-former president Donald Trump. The company's guiding principles, The Dunham Way, are a cult-like, Ten Commandments-inspired list of bullet points. Even though employees are expected to memorize them through regular pop quizzes, they are often ignored by leadership. As other reviews have noted, their commitment to "people over profit" is hollow. You should expect to be underpaid and overworked. Other reviews also noted the favoritism witnessed at the agency. If you are not among the chosen favorite employees, you are likely to be ignored, or worse, antagonized. When you leave, voluntarily or involuntarily, the remaining employees will be told you "weren't a good fit" and refuse to acknowledge their own fault in their high turnover rate due to their mismanagement. You will be told that they are praying for you, that they hope God grants you discernment in the next step of your career, and you will only be mentioned in passing as the butt of a joke. Their HR department is led by their chief administrative officer. He is a relic of a bygone era, and has no understanding of how to hire, shepherd and communicate with Gen Z and Millennial employees. In sexual harassment training, you will not be taught how to identify acts of harassment, nor how to support victims of it. With him as teacher, you will instead be taught how not to be accused of it. You will be told that "things like that don't happen here, and we don't want anyone to get into trouble." With his involvement in hiring, the agency also practiced discriminatory and illegal hiring practices. Applicants are asked in a screening email, "would you mind taking a few moments to tell me what it is about the company, the role, and our particular type of work and/or clientele that appeals to you?" Candidates that did not mention being Christian as a motivation for their application were not considered for further phone screens and interviews. Hiring managers also regularly screened candidates' social media profiles to determine whether they were the right kind of Christian: conservative, pious, reserved. Candidates with public photos wearing revealing clothing, attending parties or concerts, or sharing liberal sentiment were not invited to interview with the company. The company's founder and chairman is attached to antiquated styles of management. You are expected to be in the office at 8am, Monday through Friday. You will take a lunch no longer than an hour. You will not leave the office until 5pm at the earliest. Leadership will keep tabs on who is on-time and who is late, who stays until 6pm and who leaves early. Employees that put in 45+ hours per week are seen as doing the bare minimum. Those that want to put in their 40 hours, make their salary, and maintain a healthy work-life balance are perceived as lazy. Throughout the pandemic, he demanded that employees work in-person. Numerous employees caught COVID from their coworkers in the workplace, including from the company's president. At one point, five out of about fifty employees in the Plano office, 10% of the workforce, had tested positive for COVID at the same time, and several of them had come into the office while they were contagious. The company's leadership issued no notice or warning, despite being told about the diagnoses, and this was while the entire staff joined in weekly prayers for a member of the c-suite who had been in the ICU for three months because of COVID-related complications. If you, too, identify as a conservative Christian, then you're likely to fit right in. You'll love raising money for ministries that condemn the LGBTQ community as sinners, that provide biblical evidence for why women can't preach, that try to ban abortion and emotionally manipulate women into giving birth to unwanted children, and that strive for Republican leadership throughout the country. You can do that all while being overworked and underpaid. But if any of that gives you pause, there are many other opportunities to do work that Jesus Christ would actually endorse. Go find those.