In the last decade there has been a noticeable increase in the amount of people or organizations being cancelled. Whether it’s over race, religion, gender, politics, or climate change, everyone in America steps more lightly today in any public comments because we know we are one little comment away from ostracization.
Cancel culture has some positive virtues, but it also has some deadly flaws. Let’s first look at the positive.
A Sense of Justice
A culture of licentiousness and antinomianism has obvious problems. A complete disregard of what is right or wrong leads to wide-spread abuse, corruption, greed, and murder. Therefore, a sense of morality and justice is a gift from God. When we hear stories of unimaginable evil it should anger us to some degree. This is a result of being made in the image of God. We’ve been given a conscience (1 Cor. 13, Rom. 14) and God has written his law on our hearts (Rom. 2:15). Of course, lip service to justice doesn’t mean we truly care in our hearts about righteous living. Also, being passionate about justice doesn’t mean we are zealous for God’s definition of justice. Our consciences can go awry and must be calibrated to Scripture. Yet, the sense of justice that drives cancel culture in its best form is a good thing. It restrains evil and glorifies God.
A Desire for a Righteous Society
A desire for an upright community is also admirable. Time would fail us to list all the places in the Old Testament where God commands his people to purge the evil from their midst. God is holy and therefore requires his people to be holy (Lev. 20:26). When evil is tolerated it inevitably infects the rest of the community. This was the motivation behind punishments for sin in the Old Testament (Deut. 24:7) and Jesus’ command to beware of the false teaching of the Pharisees which he compared to a little leaven that threatened to leaven the whole loaf (Mark 8:15; Gal. 5:9).
Cancel culture emanates from that part of us that rightly wants to purge evil from our communities to save ourselves and those we love from its corrupting effect. It’s this redeemable quality of cancel culture that should cause many to see the value of healthy church discipline in Christian churches. I say healthy, because there are many examples of poor church discipline. Some churches have exercised church discipline in a very legalistic, unscriptural, and capricious manner, removing people from church membership for matters of conscience or without patiently seeking to restore them in the pattern of Matthew 18 through loving and gracious pastoral care. But when done well many see the value of a community purged of wicked behavior, especially unrepentant wicked behavior.
So, there are redeeming qualities of cancel culture. Yet, there are some very important ways it drastically misses the mark.
Disassociation Rather than Restoration
One of the ways cancel culture misses the mark is that it’s more motivated by disassociation than restoring or rehabilitating a wrongdoer. Individuals are often cancelled or blacklisted because they become a liability, an untouchable, a pariah of society, which no one is willing to touch out of concern for their own careers or social standing.
In contrast, when Scripture speaks of disassociating from someone it is for their good or a necessary step to escape deadly spiritual consequences. Christians are commanded to remove a person as a member of a church who continues in unrepentant sin (Matt. 18:17; 1 Cor. 5:2) but the motive isn’t the preservation of our own social status. Instead, the motive is the glory of God and to love (1 Tim. 1:5) and restore that person (Gal. 6:1; James 5:19-20) by using the last resort available to the church to urge them to forsake their sin before it’s too late. Secondly, when Christians are encouraged to avoid certain false teachers (Eph. 5:7), it isn’t for the sake of their career, but to save their own souls from being misled spiritually.
Being misled also reveals a second way cancel culture misses the mark.
Guided by the Wrong Moral Standard
Every moral standard besides the Bible will eventually lead us astray. Yet, much of cancel culture is built on the irrational and unstable foundation of some other moral standard, if indeed they can be called a standard at all given how easily they change.
In contrast, Christians’ highest authority is the Bible. It is seen as the very inspired Word of God and should be given ultimate allegiance. Everyone is going to presuppose some authority. For rationalists, it’s our own ability to reason; for empiricists it’s sense perception and experience; for postmodernists it’s our hearts; for Muslims it’s the Quran.
Yet, only the Bible make sense of the world around us. Descartes’ rationalism leads to pure subjectivism and Hume’s empiricism leads to skepticism, and both lead to irrationalism because if there isn’t an eternal God then there is no basis of truth and reason. Yet, God made our minds to correspond to reality and provide the basis for logical arguments, which is why we feel compelled by them. The cry to follow our hearts from postmodernists doesn’t explain why we feel love, passion, and shame in the first place. It also leads to slavery to our own constantly shifting desires. Finally, Islam, as C.S. Lewis writes is really just a heretical version of Christianity.[1] Yet, the inadequate teaching on the unchangeableness of Allah leads to irrationalism since an unchanging God is paramount to the upholding of truth.
To be sure, when arguing for first things it’s unavoidably circular, but when each worldview is evaluated on its own terms only Christianity explains the world adequately. All other worldviews collapse on themselves in irrationality. Further, there is simply no other book like the Bible. Its historical and literary credentials are unmatched, its wisdom unparalleled, and its cultural influence unprecedented.
Absence of Grace
The last area where cancel culture egregiously misses the mark is its complete lack of grace. Once someone missteps or reveals a controversial opinion, they are cancelled indefinitely with little recourse for restoration. This is a result of a secular culture that is extremely moral yet lacks any concept of the atonement. Alan Jacobs writes about our moralistic secular culture: “When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.”[2]
In a moralistic society with no atonement, it doesn’t matter what apology you give or how long ago something happened, your worst actions or words define you.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play called No Exit about three people who end up in a waiting room in hell together. At first they lie about why they are in hell, but eventually it’s revealed what they’ve done. Each of them grow to hate the others for what the other person did in life and for the way the others chide them for their own sin, but none of them have eyelids and they’re already dead so murder or suicide is impossible, leaving them hopelessly and inescapably face-to-face with their sin and the disdain of others. One of the characters, Garcin, is revealed to be a coward who deserted his countrymen in war. In what could be called the climax of the play, one of the characters, Inez, who exposed Garcin’s true colors, says to him, “You are your life and nothing else.”[3]
Every person on earth has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and one day they will appear before God, the perfect and holy judge who sees all things. On that day we will see our mistakes clearer than ever, but praise God we don’t have to be defined by them. For those who don’t accept Christ their sin will define them. Judas is called simply “The Betrayer” in Mark 14:44 for his infamous act of treachery. For those who aren’t in Christ their sin will become their identity; it will define and consume them. But those who trust in Christ are given a different name: child, beloved, redeemed, and heir with Christ. Contrary to Garcin in Sartre’s play, by God’s grace we can be something different than our life. We can be forgiven, justified, and transformed through the cross.
Insisting on justice without forgiveness leads to merciless treatment of violators. But then people suddenly wake up to the nightmare that we are all perpetrators and have burned down the only shelter from the storm of our guilt. Therefore, as Christians we must conform our sense of justice to Scripture and guard our hearts from motives that are at odds with God’s intentions. Perhaps most importantly, we must remind ourselves and others of grace. We must continually urge others to take shelter in the Rock of Ages to find forgiveness for themselves and to find power to forgive others.
[1] C.S. Lewis, De Futilitate in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994). 71. v
[2] Tim Keller, “The Fading of Forgiveness,” Comment Magazine, September 16, 2021, https://comment.org/the-fading-of-forgiveness/.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1949). 47.
Mike McGregor
Mike McGregor (MDiv, Reformed Theological Seminary) is Director of College Ministry at First Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. You can follow him on Twitter at @m5mcgregor.
