A puritanical phenomenon where even the most brilliant in our society can be exiled from public life and platforms has grown over the years—it’s known as Cancel Culture.
There’s something familiar about the movement. It feels and looks religious. It’s like a modern form of puritanism, with a veneer of virtue, and a generous serving of self-righteousness, where ‘the mob’ can punish a public figure, by social and professional exclusion, for an indiscretion or ‘wrong’ opinion.
We don’t have to look too far to see this cull of new moral orthodoxy. We’ve seen public intellectuals, novelists, historians, actors, comedians, and even politicians, whose views and words fell outside the new moral speech codes, banished from the public square, maybe never to return.
This cancel culture takes different forms. In some cases, you get the new ‘moral’ enforcers who scour the web and republish some ill-judged comment made years ago (or recently), so that you get excluded from jobs, promotion, or public platforms (e.g. Gina Carano from Mandalorian). Then there’s the type of cancel culture that silences factual statements that go against politically correct ideology (e.g. J K Rowling).
There’s an empty piety to this kind of self-righteous vitriol. We are all foolish with our words sometimes, and no doubt we should be more careful. But sacrificing someone’s career and lifetime of hard work on the altars of the alt-left because someone holds views that contradict the politically correct orthodoxy sounds like a bad culture to me. Surely this raises offense to the level of virtue when it is no virtue at all.
Yet another version of cancel culture wants to sanitise the past by removing statues of historical (and yes, flawed as we are) figures. Like you, there are some figures immortalised in statue form that I’m not attached to or a fan of, but when I hear that Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, a man whose leadership saved us from one of the most fascist, racist regimes ever to emerge in Europe, may be relegated to a museum, this makes me a little jittery about where this new puritanism is leading us. And we’ve been here before. The ICFWP recently visited Oxford University, joining a tour with a very knowledgeable guide. At one point, we stood outside Oriel College, where the controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes towered above us. Because of Rhodes colonial past, many want his statue taken down. There was a palpable irony when the tour guide pointed to the opposite side of the street, where the University Church of St Mary the Virgin stood. Above its entrance, facing Rhodes the other side, was a statue of the Virgin Mary. The tour guide candidly informed us that only five years after the statue was erected (1637), Parliamentary soldiers passing through Oxford shot the head off the offending Catholic icon.
University Church of St Mary the Virgin, with a statue of the Virgin Mary above the porch.
This very public display of telling us what’s now right and wrong, what’s ok to say and what’s not, who’s in and who’s out, indicates that, although we’re a more secular culture, we are no less religious. In our post-Christian culture, the sacred domain of organised religion has collapsed into the secular domain of the political and social. We are no less puritanical than our Christian forbears, but now we are without biblical principles to guide our judgements. Thus, there are two major reasons why cancel culture is bad for us.
Firstly, because cancel culture inevitably leads to greater tribalism and a more divided, less peaceful society. If we can only express our thoughts and ideas around people who believe the same thing, then we force each tribe further into their own echo chambers. And in doing so, we stop learning from one another. These divisions often push us into groups based on our discrete units of identity (e.g., gender, race, sexuality), deflecting our attention away from our unifying and transcendent identity as image-bearers of God; an identity that made possible the idea and right of freedom of speech. Is it any wonder then, that in replacing our individual sovereignty with group sovereignty, freedom of speech is under threat?
But there is a second reason why the ‘gospel’ of cancel culture is bad for our culture.
At the heart of cancel culture is the distinct lack of forgiveness. Of grace!
This new gospel has all the puritanism of Christian morality but without grace. And judgment without personal redemption is bad news for us all. We may think we gain a purer society through this new moral crusade, but we don’t. We gain a harsher, more coarse culture. Because at the heart of cancel culture is the distinct lack of forgiveness. Of grace! And a society that lacks grace will be a less free place to live. That’s why cancel culture is distinctly different from Christian culture. It has all the characteristics of historical religious evangelical zeal, but without redemption. This is not God’s way.
Jesus declared to us that God doesn’t cancel someone for indiscretions or moral failings. But who, instead, forgets our sins when we own up to them and move on—a judgement wedded to grace and one that leads to personal peace. Imagine that. So many grow up with the notion that God is watching—even waiting—for us to fall and fail, and then cancel us. To turn up at some inconvenient moment and remind us of that blush-worthy mistake we made all those years ago. As if some cosmic judge, totting up the ethical accounts and banking every transgression. God does not subscribe to this world’s version of cancel culture.
Instead, we know that God has “not dealt with us according to our sins, Nor punished us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10, NKJV), and He reminds us that, it’s a “glory to overlook an offense” (Proverb 19:11, CJB). Thank God this is who He is. Because if He wasn’t, and He remember every transgression, de-platforming us, and erasing any good work we had done, then we’d never been recipients of one of the most beautiful Christian songs, Amazing Grace—a hymn written by the repentant slave trader, John Newton.
Let’s be thankful that God is about second, third, and fourth chances. In fact, Jesus taught a very different cancel culture: cancel the transgression, not the person. A culture of forgiving each other as many as seven times 77. A God of grace. Of redemption. Of forgiveness. Of forgetting.
Photo Attribution:
Cover photo by Tony Webster | Christopher Columbus Statue Torn Down at Minnesota State C… | Flickr. The fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 10, 2020.
Inset photo by Billy Wilson | University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, England | Flickr. University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, England
JeB - February 12, 2022
Actions have consequences whether or not they are forgiven. In today’s society one may have freedom of speech, but one should also be aware of what the result might be.