Cancel culture is a flippant term for an often-ugly reality. Originating within the black Twitter subculture, the idea of ‘cancelling’ someone came to prominence a few years ago, capturing collective efforts to marginalise celebrities deemed to have violated the norms and values of ‘respectable’ society. Notwithstanding its conceptual fluidity, cancel culture’s imprint may be identified whenever attacks are launched on someone’s reputation and economic livelihood over opinions or actions ‘alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying’.
Rightly or wrongly, many of the elite targets of cancel culture have been rehabilitated, their banishment proving to be temporary. But the practice of trying to socially extirpate a person as a result of perceived transgressions has metastasized, encroaching upon the world of everyday folk – people who rarely have the means to engineer a return into the good graces of others, and who lack the social cachet upon which celebrities may confidently rely. In the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death in May this year, the frenzied urge to boycott, shame, or vanquish the ‘disgraceful’ (whether flesh-and-blood individuals or statues wrought in stone) has at times taken on a Salem-like quality.
Consider the progressive owner of a Colorado yoga studio. He saw his business collapse because he was considered insufficiently attuned to the plight of minorities, despite labouring to create a highly inclusive and ethnically sensitive workplace. Or what about Sue Schafer? Her admittedly ill-advised decision to dress up as a black person for a party eventually saw her ousted from her job years later, after a Washington Post exposé ‘outed’ her. Such is the potency of cancel culture that a large newspaper could devote 3,000 words to dissecting the past actions of a person with no public standing whatsoever, thereby ruining her career.
These are just two examples in what is becoming a depressingly extensive catalogue. Quite often, they are a consequence of spurious accusations made long after the event in question, or what reasonable observers would deem a simple difference of opinion. Regular people, who depend on networks of social trust to carve out a life for themselves, have suffered mercilessly at the hands of those who believe that social exile and professional destruction are forms of just recompense.
While it’s important not to overstate the magnitude of this issue (writer Bonnie Kristian has insightfully argued that cancel culture is mainly tied to the professional class), it remains a genuine problem, particularly for its victims. As Ross Douthat notes, the goal is not to try and punish every alleged transgressor, but to ‘shame enough people’ so as to coerce everyone else into conforming. And although some of the targets of modern-day mob action can be justly criticised for genuine moral error, pettifogging absolutism – fuelled by the same social media platforms that magnify the original offence – has given license to the scurrilous and the vindictive.
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How might the church respond to the scourge of cancel culture? What resources does it possess to resist — and indeed, challenge — one of the more alarming manifestations of our social media-saturated age?
To answer these questions, consider the words of the Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Colossae:
When you were dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us (Col 2:14).
And later in the same letter:
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you (Col 3:13).
The idea that the church is composed of forgiven sinners – those who live free in the knowledge that their liability against God has been expunged – is part of the bedrock of Christian faith and practice. If there exists a way of life believers should appropriate — one that offers an antidote to the toxicity of cancel culture — then this passage admirably distils it. It provides a sharp counterpoint to the stern, unrelenting attempts to exorcise a person from mainstream society.
To be sure, genuine forgiveness by which the church should be animated hardly reflects popular conceptions, which are often little more than shabby facsimiles. Those thoroughly psychologized versions, which prevail in today’s therapeutic age, seek to erase past hurts (and the wrongs that caused them) through the power of individual fiat. On such views, ideas of repentance and contrition – indeed, of the moral injuries that breach relationships in the first place – are conspicuously absent.
The writers of the New Testament will have none of this. Take Paul: he talks of God’s gracious and decision to welcome into his fold those who were genuinely guilty of sinning against him. He cancelled this ‘legal indebtedness’, decisively dealing with the otherwise condemnable actions of his image-bearers through Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice (Col 2:14b). With the Son’s accomplishment, of course, has come the end of every accusation levelled against the faithful, penitent believer (Col 2:12). She has been released from her past, the moral rift between her and God having been repaired.
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While God’s lavish, unmerited grace towards sinners blossomed with the incarnation of the Son, the Creator’s determination to cancel sin has deep roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah spoke eloquently of Yahweh’s covenantal promise to redeem his people after a period of exile. Despite Israel’s unfaithfulness, despite its manifold failures to embody the wisdom and justice of her Sovereign, he nevertheless deigned to restore her. Isaiah 40-55, in particular, is replete with references to Yahweh’s redemptive power; let one passage stand for many:
But now, this is what the Lord says – he who created you, Jacob; he who formed you, Israel; ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine’ (Isaiah 43:1).
Later in the chapter, Yahweh declares that although Israel failed to spend itself in service to him, he has blotted out the nation’s transgressions, engaging in a covenantal act of ‘forgetting’ as he sets the stage for his people’s salvation (vv.24-25; cf. Ps 103:12). Even in their rebellion and idolatry, God reassures them that they are his treasured possession: chastised for a time, yes, but not abandoned permanently; suffering temporary alienation, but only as a prelude to eventual restoration.
This is of a piece with other parts of the Old Testament’s prophetic corpus. Jeremiah, for example, relayed the same message of hope to a nation burdened by moral corruption: Yahweh was going to transform his wayward people, choosing no longer to answer their grave misdeeds with the stern voice of justice, but with the merciful decision to pardon them. So complete, so epochal, was this act of mercy going to be that Jeremiah could, like Isaiah, describe it in terms of God remembering Israel’s sin no more (Jer 31:34).
That determination, of course, was embodied climactically in Jesus Christ himself – ‘God with us’ (Matt 1:23). He not only unveiled the loving, gracious heart of the Father; as the second Adam, he also gave his followers a living portrayal of perfect humanity. Jesus’ life was characterised by a fundamental turn towards broken, sinful people, particularly those who, in their own day, were victims of a similar kind of cancel culture. For Pope John Paul II, this was the very ‘incarnation of [divine] mercy’, embodying in excelsis God’s richly forgiving heart. Consider, as just one instance among a multitude, Christ’s decision to welcome the hated Zacchaeus into his company. Such was the depth of his mercy that he went so far as to practice open commensality with someone who, despite his personal wealth, had been shunned by the moral gatekeepers of his society (Luke 19:1-9). The diminutive tax collector had been marginalised by his contemporaries for engaging in acts far worse than many of the peccadilloes sparking outrage today. But in his confrontation with divine forgiveness, he enjoyed both social and moral rehabilitation (v.8). For Jesus, the possibility of mercy, of redemption, was a persistent reality that he consistently disclosed in his own person. His call to Zacchaeus wasn’t an isolated act; rather, it reflected a life that, in its essence, mirrored the Creator’s enduring forbearance.
God’s character, unveiled so beautifully in his Son, acts as the foundation and pattern for Christians as they seek to live rightly in the world: ‘be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:48). His compassionate decision to forgive the sinful in Christ, even in the midst of their sin (cf. Rom 5:8), is therefore paradigmatic for believers.
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The church needs to assiduously cultivate this kind of culture for its own internal health. If God’s people fail to cherish and transmit a robust understanding of forgiveness, they will lose the very heart of the Gospel, leaving themselves vulnerable to methods of dealing with conflict and difference that have been stripped of all winsomeness and humility. With cancel culture’s ‘moral vigilantism’ insinuating itself into various arenas of social life – academic, commercial, governmental – cleaving to a model of deep-set charity within the church (both divine and human) becomes ever more vital.
If the dangers seem overblown, then consider the propensity of God’s people to abandon a forgiving spirit, trading it for false, spurious forms of righteous purity. My own tradition, evangelicalism, has produced plenty of churches whose penchant for legalism and exclusion – often based on cultural mores masquerading as the fundamentals of orthodoxy – would rival anything conjured up by present-day cancel culture. Much the same could be said about certain vestiges of contemporary American religion, where political tribalism has supplanted genuine neighbour-loving faith. Christians who wish to ‘own the “libs”’, or who shun MAGA-hatted relatives, betray an attitude that is insensible to the deep mercies of God. This isn’t to say that one abandons key convictions for the sake of some ersatz social harmony. But my point is that each generation of God’s people must learn afresh to both prize and practice the gift of divine grace, lest it succumb to harsher, less generous modes of organizing and regulating communal life.
In contrast to the severe and alienating force energizing cancel culture, Christians are called to adopt a posture of indefatigable grace: first towards their brethren (Matt 18:1-22), and then towards the world-at-large. ‘Forgive as the Lord forgave you’, wrote Paul, thereby drawing a direct link between the Gospel message and the Christian’s way of life (Col 3:13; Eph 4:32-5:1; cf. Matt 6:12). The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once observed that the Gospel message is not only good news for sinners; it also functions as an ethical warning against treating anyone as ‘unforgiveable’, permanently beyond the reach of human compassion and restoration. The connection is clear enough, something Martin Luther noted when he wrote: ‘There is nothing but…uninterrupted forgiveness of sin, both in that God forgives us, and in that we forgive, bear with, and help each other’. The sacred testimony of Scripture encourages a fundamentally transformed orientation towards others, militating against the practices that purveyors of cancel culture regularly vaunt.
This is no mere sentiment; as Anthony Esolen wrote, turning towards the other – even those who may be despicable or despised – reckons seriously with the fact that we ourselves desperately need forgiveness. The principle of enemy-love functions in much the same way, obliging Christians to eschew the destructive wheel of mutual recrimination as they mimic the cruciform paradigm set by God in Christ (Matt 5:43-48). ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, according to the Apostle (Rom 3:23). He recognized with searing clarity the sobering truth that each of us has participated, sometimes gleefully, in moral corruption. The self, as L. Gregory Jones noted, is neither a substance of unadulterated good, nor one of unrelieved evil. It is, rather, a perennial ‘battlefield’ between virtue and vice, in which everyone is a willing conscript. If the spotless Creator, the very standard of the Good, can pardon us amidst that ongoing tussle, how much more should Christians be able to forgive the sins of one’s fellows?
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Far from being a bare, judicial practice, in which believers are enjoined merely to acquit the penitent from afar, Christian forgiveness contains an active, extravagant, open quality. In describing God’s act of cancelling our debt against him, Paul sometimes used the verb charizomai, a word that means ‘to be generous’ (Col 2:13; cf. Rom 8:32). It captures the manifold reality of God’s having actively given himself to us in Christ (as opposed to simply acquitting us as an impersonal judge). L. Gregory Jones had it right when he observed that full-orbed forgiveness is not simply absolution from sin; it doesn’t simply cancel out another’s wrongdoing. Rather, it creates the necessary conditions for the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness, between two parties. This begins, again, with other believers, before extending outwards to the wider world. Jones’ reflections capture both God’s benevolence towards us and the type of actions we are to practice as his people. Paul’s words, meanwhile, distil our holy obligation to reach beyond denuded conceptions of forgiveness in order to grasp a much richer understanding of what it is to live faithfully and graciously with each other. What this means is that Christians aren’t simply admonished to pardon those who have wronged them (itself a contrast with cancel culture’s narcissism over small differences); they’re behooved to go the extra mile by labouring, where possible, towards the renewal of relationships.
Christian forgiveness isn’t merely a narrow stricture, to be trotted out mechanically at particular moments of wrongdoing. There’s a lavish, overflowing spirit to it, designed to wend its way into the very marrow of the believer’s way of life. It’s a spirit that actively seeks ways of living at peace with others, even the obnoxious, the offensive, and the coarse. A spirit that wills the good of others, even in the context of deep social differences or ideological antagonisms. And a spirit that does not condemn, but holds out (where necessary) the possibility of reconciliation. Those who humbly and gratefully recognize the magnitude of divine grace in their own lives are more likely to embrace such a supple, generous approach in their dealings with others, even in the face of grievances, uncomfortable misunderstandings, or sharp disagreements. Their souls suffused with divine charity, such folk are to a great extent inoculated against the current temptation to indulge in angry, pitiless reaction. Instead, their equanimity extinguishes all bitterness, and exhausts the power that animates feuds and quarrels.
One shouldn’t be surprised by this, for the basic moral vision of the New Testament ought to condition believers against offence-taking and grudge-nursing. And instead of morally performative displays, which seek to magnify the transgression and advertise the outraged person’s superiority, Christian forgiveness is ultimately a de-centring process: encouraging someone to offer clemency unheeded to the penitent and sorrowful. This represents a much harder road, given our native pride and thirst for vindication. Moreover, there will be times where forgiveness (much less reconciliation) will be precluded by the magnitude of catastrophic, unrepentant sin. But it offers the world – or at least those sections of it blighted by cancel culture – an alternative means of dealing with our differences and hurts. More of that anon.
To be sure, the antidote to our current excesses isn’t always an act of strict forgiveness, precisely because so many ‘offences’ don’t rise to the level of legitimate transgression in the first place. But the timbre of the absolved life remains just as relevant in a world where the grifters of cancel culture exploit the rough edges of social discourse. Certainly, God’s gracious acquittal is the wellspring for an array of cognate virtues: not just forgiveness itself, but a wider ethic of compassion, marked by patience, gratitude, and charity. A genuine acknowledgement of one’s forgiven state generates a profound humility, which contrasts sharply with cancel culture’s rigid hierarchies and moral arrogance.
One sees this, too, reflected in the church’s sacred texts. Calling on the church in Rome to live at peace with others and forego revenge at every turn, Paul urged his audience to practice hospitality and acceptance in disputable matters. Using once more the prior reality of God’s acceptance as a backdrop for his instructions (Rom 14:1-15:3), the Apostle summoned Roman Christians to a way of life that transcended sharp divisions over acceptable religious practices. According to him, there were no hierarchies dividing the weak from the strong, for their basic identity in the God who’d welcomed them relativised every other marker. While forgiveness per se may not have been called for, the reality of one’s graciously acquitted state may stand behind this vision, inculcating an entirely new way of viewing one’s fellow believers and relationships with them. In all these things, Paul saw that divine exoneration was the foundation-stone for an entire ethos, underwriting other virtues that are essential to a genuinely Christ-like existence. So fundamental is this character that the nineteenth-century Anglican minister, J.C. Ryle, could say that ‘a spiteful, quarrelsome Christian is’, despite his professed belief in forgiveness, ‘a scandal to his profession’.
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Such qualities reveal something that is ultimately far more nourishing, elegant, and wholesome than what our present moment has served us. Embracing and nurturing the holy virtues generated by forgiveness is therefore important for the church’s external witness, and can only have a beneficial, enriching effect on the surrounding culture.
We should recall that the Gospel has often succeeded in taming the brutish tendencies of human beings, even when its theological claims have not been embraced. As legal scholar Bruce Frohnen has written, Christ’s invitation to forgiveness – and indeed, the New Testament’s broader summons to an ethic of grace – has had a civilising effect on those portions of the human race that have been substantially influenced by Christianity. If the rise of cancel culture is but one manifestation of that receding legacy, should not a renewed, prophetic witness at least be mounted to try and ‘leaven’ society once again?
That influence doesn’t simply occur on an individual level; it requires the creation of an alternative culture, which inevitably entails an important role for God’s church. Writing some years ago about the socio-political implications of forgiveness, South African theologian J.M. Vorster observed that the church has been created to be an ‘exemplary community’: symbolizing a new reality with every act that chooses charity over its opposite. His description isn’t far removed from the Pauline vision of a Christian politeuma, or civic body (Phil 3:20), which the Apostle used to denote the idea of covenant communities as outposts of the kingdom – a kind of challenge to an agonistic culture, grounded in the complete self-giving of the Messiah (Phil 2:5-9).
This is one way that God’s people can, as it were, function as salt and light in an environment that is increasingly polarized and fractious. Present in the world, and yet distinct from it, the church in all its myriad forms can offer a counter-narrative to the Manichean assumptions of cancel culture, defusing or interrupting those roiling cycles of mutual recrimination. To be sure, such a call may sound naively optimistic, especially in a vigorously post-Christian context. Perhaps it is. But what is the shining city on a hill meant to represent, if not the radiating edifice of truth that can be seen for miles around (regardless of one’s beliefs)? And why did Jesus describe his disciples as ‘salt’, if not to suggest that their pilgrimage through the world would have a preserving effect – arresting moral decay by inhabiting and advancing an alternative way of being?
No one pretends, of course, that Christians are entirely immune to the stirrings of dissension or back-biting. Let 1 Corinthians stand as an enduring testament to that lamentable fact. God’s people have repeatedly proven themselves to be just as vulnerable as non-believers to the exclusionary spirit lying behind cancel culture. Nor will a society permeated by Christian principles embody them faultlessly. It is simply the natural consequence of living in a fallen world, which warps even the noblest of human impulses.
But even when they are translated into a secular idiom, these verities can still resonate, for they harmonise with what is true of people as divine image-bearers. Imagine what may have happened to Patrick Harrington if his earnest efforts had been met, not with puritanical zeal, but with people whose ‘social imaginaries’ were informed, however distantly, by the kinds of values to which Luther drew attention. Imagine, too, if Susan Schafer had been offered the grace to repent of her moral error, instead of stern, unyielding calls for her to be cast out like a pariah. And what of this man, who lost his job over an article he wrote 33 years prior? What if his contemporaries had, despite their own personal views, chosen the path of ‘forgetting’ or ‘bearing with’ – characteristics that owe much to Christian notions of forgiveness and forbearance (cf. 1 Cor 13) – over professional and economic exile?
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In many ways, cancel culture is actually anti-culture, proceeding by way of negation and social death. By fuelling outrage and glorifying ostracism, it threatens to erode precious social capital that communities have painstakingly accumulated over many years. Writer and priest Giles Fraser lamented that cancel culture turns everyone into a potential liar, for fear of the consequences of being exposed. Under such a merciless regime, untempered by forgiveness, one might conclude that it’s better to engage in soul-crushing hypocrisy than embrace personally ruinous honesty. But while that ensures protection from the self-righteous throng, its cost – for both individuals and societies – is very steep.
By contrast, a culture that places the idea of forgiveness at its core – itself grounded in God’s decisive cancellation of sin – yields something that is far more enriching, as well as far more truthful. In order for a society to thrive, its members must be able to depend on at least a modicum of trust and openness. Journalist Elizabeth Oldfield recently made the important point that ‘a healthy citizenship’ requires the virtue of forgiveness; failure to practice this craft – to nurture it tenderly as a fundamental habit – leaves us without the capacity to heal ‘our social wounds’. Indeed, even in its secular form, a forgiving, merciful attitude allows people to honestly examine themselves and others, without fear of permanent censure or unrelieved condemnation. This is the stuff of vibrant, robust, generative communities. Whereas cancel culture is utterly corrosive to this enterprise, the restorative character of forgiveness – advertised, one hopes, in the church’s rival vision – upholds it. Does this fall short of what the Gospel requires? Undoubtedly: only under the full lordship of Christ does forgiveness in its complete sense become a reality. But for all that, a society that esteems it as a vital principle still reflects the beauty of that message, and reminds us of its power. That is no small achievement.
A Bagful of insights 