How should we respond to ‘cancel culture’?

Recently my family watched the excellent Escape from film Pretoria, set in apartheid South Africa. It made me think, if I had been a white South African in the 1970s would I have supported or opposed apartheid?

I similarly wonder, if I had been a German living in the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, would I have supported the rise of Hitler to power? Or, if I were George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards, would I have owned slaves? In my head, I like to think I would have done what was morally right. However, the weakness of my fallen flesh makes me all too aware that I probably would have been just as culturally blind as many who lived at the time.

Cancelling former heroes

We live in a era in which history is being re-evaluated, with heroes ‘cancelled’ because they were not on the ‘right side of history’. It is entirely right that we truthfully evaluate the past, and do not deny or excuse the inexcusable. We must not maintain a simplistic ‘heroes and villains’ approach, but learn the lessons of history in the hope that we do not repeat them.

However, it is also essential that we do this with grace and mercy towards those who went before us. It is easy to judge others with the benefit of hindsight. Recognising this ought to cause us to have humility about ourselves. We like to think that we are on the ‘right side of history’ today, but the future may judge us far more harshly. Perhaps we have failed to stand against abortion with the vigour that the future will retrospectively demand, or we have been casual about global warming.

Churchill

I recently read Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill is one of our greatest heroes, and yet he is being cancelled for his imperialism and allowing a terrible famine in Bengal. Churchill’s approach to history is a nuanced ‘warts and all’. He celebrates the contribution individuals made to the progress of human civilisation, whilst sharply critiquing their failures and immorality. He tries to situate them in their context. Just about everyone appears in shades of grey.

As Christians we do not judge what is right and wrong on the basis of public opinion about ‘the right side of history’. It is determined by the unchanging word of God. To be on the right side of history is to seek after the coming Kingdom.

However, faithful believers in past generations have often failed to hear what God was saying because they were deafened by the louder voices of their culture. It is a danger we all face and therefore essential that we listen to voices from the past, and from cultures other than our own, to try to gain a more objective perspective on what the word of God is saying to us. A wider historical and cultural frame is like a hearing aid that helps God get through to us.

Much of the Bible is a historical narrative that compels us to learn the lessons of sin and unbelief. Jesus is the only true hero who can claim a righteous status. By these standards we all deserve to be ‘cancelled’ in the final judgement, and can only be on the right side of history if we repent and believe the good news.

So our reaction to the cancel culture ought not to be knee-jerk rejection, nor unthinking adoption. We need a rigorous critique of the past tempered with humility. We need not sanitise the past, still less idolise it or find our identity in one-dimensional celebration of it. We need to assess it through the holiness and grace of God. In this way we will be more likely to contend for both justice and mercy, and avoid the danger of seeing the beams in the eyes of those who lived before us without recognising those that obscure our own eyes today.