It is trendy, especially among Christians on the political right in the US, to criticize cancel culture. It is no secret that cancel culture lacks grace and forgiveness. Even those who seem to embrace “cancel culture” distance themselves from the language of canceling. Those who relish the corporate ritual of call outs and clap backs, the shares and reshares and page refreshes prefer to act as if they were engaging in a necessary and virtuous battle of words and ideas, not reputations. Why speak of ostracizing, shaming, shunning, cancelling or even boycotting when seeking justice, restitution, and accountability sounds so much better?
The loudest protests against cancel culture that I have seen fault it for its severity. Phrases like “extreme moral accountability” and “staggering self-righteousness” abound, as do fears that this will lead to the end of life and culture as we know it. I believe this is actually a mistake. Cancel culture gives secularists an important glimpse of sin’s pervasiveness, subtlety, seriousness and deadliness, and points to the reality of a more stringent coming judgment.
Each and every one of us has said, done, and thought things that we (should) deeply regret. Cancel culture goes looking for character flaws; it is never disappointed. In so doing, it points us to a deep sense of need for the Gospel.
In offering this single redeeming feature of cancel culture, I am not talking about a sort of cancel culture that is reframed, restrained, limited or cast in the best possible light. Nor am I grasping for a sort of “just-canceling theory” of speech ethics that spells out right conditions and conduct for verbal wars, as long as they are directed at the correct people. There are situations where the public or the Church genuinely ought to be scandalized, and buried truths ought to be brought to light as a matter of correcting a false witness or exposing a terrible crime (the Boston priest scandal and Ravi Zacharias come immediately to mind, among many others), but to pursue the relationship between that sort of truth-telling and cancel culture would require an essay of its own.
Rather, I have in mind the way the staunchest conservatives in the United States currently speak of cancel culture (even if they also engage in their own idiosyncratic versions of the same), a way which renders it easiest to criticize. Cancel culture certainly includes the violent speech and death threats of the ugliest attempts at canceling, but it is more than that. Lurking beneath the surface is a kind of biting cynicism that snaps at the slightest public misstep, awkward comment, or honest miscalculation—a mob mentality that takes someone’s vulnerable and deep embarrassment and turns that into a viral meme or object of scorn. The line between cancel culture and bullying or harassment is far from clear.
Cancel culture, at least of this vulgar type, is—it must be said—an outright denial that love could ever cover over a simple misunderstanding (let alone a multitude of genuine sins), a failure to distinguish in any meaningful way between sin and sinner, and a complete reversal of Paul’s encouragement to the Philippian church to seek out “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (Phil. 4:8). It is a suspension of any constructive criticism as one might find in Proverbs.
Behind these denials, however, is a deeper distortion. The problem with cancel culture is not necessarily what is under scrutiny, nor even its severe punishments. It is who is placed in the judge’s seat.
The Wages of Sin
From time to time someone points out that cancel culture and intersectional virtue signaling mirror a sort of puritanical spirit from long ago – the neo-Puritanism of the social justice warrior superseding what has come before. This is usually vaguely linked to the sort of base impulses that led to superstitious witch hunts at Salem or the medieval ordeals. But whatever might be made of the ideological or causal links in this chain, this simple association seriously underestimates the depth of thought evident in the original Puritans, who had a far richer and varied understanding of sin and a clearer view of the costly terms of its removal. These newer, trendier, secular performative ideals can only faintly echo the ancient, biblical reality.
In 1669, Ralph Venning published a book in the aftermath of the Great Plague of London entitled Sin, Plague of Plagues—an all-too-prescient title in the midst and wake of COVID-19. The title was not a cheap or overused metaphor as is so often employed by modern pulpits to provide a Sunday morning theme. “Plague of plagues” was meant to convey a true lesser-to-greater argument, the kind Jesus often liked to use in his object lessons. “Plague of plagues” held the Great Plague of London side by side with the Greater Plague of Humanity, and found the Great Plague of London wanting.
This is not to diminish the horrors of plagues in any way—certainly not the kind that destroyed the Egyptians in the time of the Exodus, nor our current pandemic experience. I personally know people who have lost loved ones—fathers, wives, brothers, children—to the ravaging and slow death grip of COVID-19, after all the resources and machinery of intensive care units have been finally exhausted. I have had to visit them in the hospital. It is unspeakably tragic to watch otherwise vibrant and healthy people lay with tubes shooting of the body in every direction because they cannot breathe. It is devastating to watch a shell-shocked family gather for a memorial.
No doubt Venning had similar experiences ministering to his congregants during the Great Plague in the 1660s. Yet, despite the visceral nature of what his eyes witnessed, he sought to describe in even more painful and vivid detail just how dangerous sin is: it is worse than even the worst thing one can conjure up, even a plague. It is worse than any cancer or pandemic: these things may be cured by human ingenuity. It is worse than any affliction: circumstances may change. It is worse than death and Hell: “it is sin that makes Hell to be Hell.” It is even worse than Satan: “God and the Devil are not so contrary as God and sin; for the Devil has something left which was of God, that is, his being. Sin, however, never was nor can be of God; he is neither the author of it nor the tempter to it.”[1]
We may or may not want to quibble with the finer details of Venning’s hamartology or understanding of hell. Even so, I wonder if the temperament of the average church attendee in the United States could stomach this kind of teaching once the full implications are realized. Venning suggested that sin itself – especially the mundane, every-day decisions one makes to bend the truth or steal a low-cost item or gossip about a coworker or neglect a task that needs doing – is qualitatively worse than the things we are accustomed (even as Christians) to putting in the category of “very worst.” From the perspective of eternity, the stuff that threatens to haunt our scariest nightmares is less dangerous than the stuff that threatens to bore us. Venning reminded his readers time and again that he is focusing on the source of evil itself; the thing of which no sense can be made because it was not created by God. It is non-rational, amorphous, that which stands in complete and utter opposition to the Creator, who made everything good.
Cancel culture reflects something of the state of our world, it is a partial recovery of the offensiveness of sin Venning highlighted in his work. It pushes back forcefully against sentimental notions of easy-believism or antinomianism. It is blissfully unaware of a cheap grace that says sin isn’t really that bad there really is no standard for right behavior. It does not for a moment allow the person under scrutiny to offer a lame excuse or non-apology. It is refreshingly honest about how human beings behave, avoiding the sentimental platitude that people are generally good, genuine, and well-meaning once we get to know them.
Cancel culture ultimately fails to distinguish sin from sinner or to provide any recourse or hope to the condemned, but at least cancel culture reminds us to hate sin. Biblical teaching is clear: eating a piece of forbidden fruit, gazing a little too long at someone in improper sexual desire, calling someone a fool, striking a rock in anger, making an empty promise, stealing from the devoted treasury, saying something provocative at the slightest exposure of insecurity or loss of pride, touching a holy artifact of the covenant, are all utterly deadly activities. Real people have lost their lives over the routine, excusable sins we barely remember to confess.
If this is true, then surely it is also true that anyone in the limelight better carefully and soberly watch even the details of what they say and do, just as we all are under a spiritual surveillance. As the Lord himself reminded his followers: “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Mt. 12:36-37). Before the face of the one who knows us better than we know ourselves, it will be too late to offer lame excuses and non-apologies. Whether crowds gather to watch our every move or we are relatively unknown in this life, the wages of our own long-forgotten sin ought to weigh heavy on our souls in view of the life to come.
Where the wages of sin bring death, the free gift of God is on offer, too. Venning continues in this line of thinking from Romans 6 too, of course. “What a welcome, then, should Christ and his gospel have! They come with saving health to cure us of the worst diseases and plagues, that of sin.”[2] Cancel culture can indeed teach us something easily forgotten about sin, and can set the conditions for a fruitful conversation about costly grace and lasting forgiveness that can reverse even public humiliation.
We can find hope and rest in the fact that sinners in the hands of an angry, righteous God have recourse that sinners in the hands of an angry, unrighteous mob never will.
Caleb Miller is a US Army chaplain and has written for Themelios and From the Green Notebook.
[1] Ralph Venning, Sin, Plague of Plagues reprinted as The Sinfulness of Sin (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 2001), 187-188.
[2] Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin, 216-217.
