Nerding Out on Cancel Culture
For some reason I've been nerding out recently on the topic of free speech and cancel culture, as well as related topics like identity politics, diversity, and "woke-ism". It's a new frontier for me, because I've always been firmly a theology guy and not too into politics. Among other reasons, I think one reason I've been drawn to it is because I'm strangely drawn to debate and controversial subjects, and all sorts of controversial subjects intersect under the cancel culture umbrella!
So in the weeks ahead I'm going to share some of my thoughts and some of the resources I've been looking into about it. But I want to preface everything I'm about to share by saying I'm very new to it all! I'm far from an expert and just learning as I go, and whatever I share in these upcoming posts is "in process" and not my once-and-for-all opinion.
Pressured to be Progressive
So to jump into it, let me share a brief personal experience I had that's related to this constellation of topics. A number of years ago at the previous church I worked at we were applying for a grant from the government to take on a student intern to work for us for the summer, which was a very standard and routine thing that our church and many others did every year. However that year, as we were filling out the grant application, right at the end of the application there was a mandatory tick-box. I forget the exact phrasing of the box but in essence it required everyone who submitted a grant application to affirm all sexual orientations and gender expressions. It stopped us in our tracks because the church held the traditional Christian position on sexuality and gender.
Now, I don't raise this example because it's the most dramatic or sensational thing you've ever heard. In the grand scheme of things, not getting a summer student grant would not have been the end of the world. And I'm certainly not raising this as an example of Christians getting "persecuted". Christians in Canada have an abundance of rights and freedoms to be thankful for. But the incident was notable because my guess is that many churches would understood it as a small glimpse into what the future could be like for Christianity. It is well-known that the Western world is growing increasingly secular and post-Christian, and some Christians and people in ministry have an uneasy feeling that the further society goes down the secular road, the more the government and other authorities will look at the church unfavourably at best or with hostility at worst. So this incident with the grant application was a small but notable example of the government making a particular service (grant money) available only to those who conform to a progressive view of gender and sexuality. The point is not just that society and the government are getting increasingly progressive, the point is that they were in some sense exerting pressure on organizations to also be progressive.
(Sidenote: I'm well aware that there are churches that affirm all sexualities and genders. My goal here is not to comment on that debate. I'm simply describing the situation that the church I worked for was non-affirming and most evangelical churches would equally be non-affirming.)
Charles Murray: An Extreme Example of Cancel Culture
On this note of progressives exerting pressure on other people to also be progressive, I've been doing a lot of looking into the state of free speech on college and university campuses. Books like The Coddling of the American Mind (which I read one or two years ago) and more recently The Cancelling of the American Mind (which I'm currently reading) draw attention to the increasing pressure there is on US college campuses to align with a particular set of progressive values. For professors this could be getting fired or denied tenure, for students this could look like getting disciplined, and for speakers this could look like getting disinvited to speak on campus or getting shouted down from the stage during their speech.
Let me give a specific example. In 2017 an author named Charles Murray was invited by a student to deliver a speech at Middlebury College. Although he was invited to speak about his 2012 book "Coming Apart" about the white working class, he had a controversial reputation because of a book he had written back in 1994 that connected certain races with lower intelligence. When Murray rose to speak he was shouted down by around 400 students who had come to protest his presence at the college. The shouting went on for 20 minutes until it became clear that he would be unable to give his speech in that environment. At that point, he was moved to a separate, private room to give his speech via a video call. The students tried to interrupt even this by shouting in the hallway and pulling fire alarms, but he managed to finish the speech. A faculty member attempted to escort Murray out a back door to get safely back to his car, but they were met with a group of masked protestors who began pushing and shoving them. One of the protestors grabbed the faculty's hair and pulled, twisting her neck and requiring her to go to the hospital to get a neck brace. When Murray managed to get in his car the protestors pounded on the car, rocked it back and forth, and jumped on the hood. (See this article for full story.)
It would be easy to suppose that the main problem with that incident was the violence of the students and protestors. While that was one major problem, the problem beneath that problem was the mindset that drove that behaviour. Rather than listen to Charles Murray and at least give him a chance to present his perspective, rather than enter into a respectful debate with him, rather than even quietly and peacefully protest outside the room he was speaking—rather than any of those valid ways of engaging with Murray they felt it was best to stop him from speaking entirely. Instead of looking at him as a human being with mistaken views, they saw him as a villain who needed to be needed to be (in some sense) eliminated.
Ganging Up on the Progressives?
Full disclosure: I'm more interested in the cancel culture coming from the progressives/liberals/left than I am from the conservatives, so that will be my focus in these blog posts. But that is not to imply conservatives have not been guilty of trying to cancel people and ideas they don't like. Indeed, for me it feels like old news that conservative Christians in particular have engaged in cancelling. After all, Christians have been in power in the Western world for most of the past 2,000 years and have forcibly shut down opposing views and silenced dissenters in all manner of ugly ways. The temptation to cancel seems to be a part of fallen human nature generally and is not unique to either liberals or conservatives. So the reason I'll be focussing on examples on the progressive side is partially because of the newness of it.
Another reason I'm interested in progressive cancel culture is the irony of it. Progressives would highly value concepts like tolerance, inclusion, and diversity. One of their primary aims is to stand up for minorities who are getting mistreated or ignored by those in power. Yet, in environments (like college campuses) where progressives are the majority and have the power, there seem to be a lot of cases of them exhibiting intolerance, exclusion, and requiring strict uniformity. (More to say on this point in future posts.)
Lastly, I'm interested in progressive cancel culture because it sounds like it has the potential to be difficult for me and people I care about. As someone who is somewhere roughly in the center politically, the idea of a culture that is increasingly both progressive and authoritarian makes me feel uneasy. Similarly, growing up Evangelical means I know and care about a lot of people who would be on the conservative side of the spectrum. And while I may not agree with them on every issue for the most part in my experience they are good people and do not deserve to be villainized or painted as hateful bigots. I'm not trying to sound "doomsday" or exagerate the difficulty: like I mentioned above, so far Christians have had it really good and even if the culture gets a bit more anti-Christian things will likely still be relatively comfortable for us in the big picture. And maybe Western countries won't turn into progressive authoritarian societies at all like some people fear they will! But nonetheless these developments that I'll be discussing in these posts are worth Christians (and anybody who cares about a truly free and diverse democracy) keeping an eye on.