The word cancel comes from the Latin cancellare by way of the Old French and it means “lattice”. You can see the imagery of crossing something out with lines. In fact, the related word incarceration similarly means something like putting someone behind lattice or criss-crossed lines. 

There is a kind of frustration that a person understandably experiences when the voice being canceled is a voice that he or she happens to follow. While canceling seems to be a practice most commonly wielded in our day by liberals against conservatives, give it a minute and everyone will be doing it. In fact, in a recent article in The Bulwark, Brent Orrell makes the point that while everyone acknowledges the left’s trigger-happy relationship with cancel culture, the right’s analogous version is internal. Case in point, he says, is President Trump’s eagerness to ridicule, block, or fire anyone on his team who does not practice complete conformity to the Trump vision. At least in Orrell’s estimation, liberals cancel conservatives; conservatives cancel each other. 

It seems to be the case that, career-wise, being canceled is one of the best things that can happen to a person. The fanbase is strengthened. The spectators become followers. People who didn’t know the name are now familiar with it. Even the sharks beginning to circle functions as a merit badge. Invariably, it leads to more attention, the very thing the cancelation was supposed to quell. At an institutional level, however, the reverse is often true. When a company or institution is canceled, or deemed worthy of cancellation, support amongst followers can often flag, spectators tend to walk away from the fire, and the vacuum is often filled with the next larger competitor. Alan Sylvain wrote an interesting piece on how brand canceling often backfires.

As a pastor, I find myself in regular conversation with people who are trying to break bad patterns and establish healthy ones. This can be an enormous challenge. The Bible has a lot to say about this and lays out a simple path toward victory. The difficulty, however, is often in the details. Cold turkey quitting will work for some things, but when no immediate results are available, people often abandon the struggle. A marriage that has been built upon 15 years of broken patterns cannot be brought into a place of health in the span of three marriage counseling sessions. Quick results aren’t often reached and so the process is abandoned for “not having worked.” It is reminiscent of Chesterton’s statement about Christianity, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

What does this have to do with cancel culture? The temptation in a cancel culture is to cancel the cancellers. Then, if you can’t beat them, you just join them again. Sometimes institutions and brands need to lose their influence by losing their audience; however, the more successful the brand or institution, the harder it will be to quit them cold turkey. Perhaps the most effective way to stay gone is to leave quietly. It may be more helpful to think about how to preserve the things we don’t want to lose than how to cancel the things we want to get rid of. Some things will naturally disappear by moving them into our periphery. 

The following is from C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy:

Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

Lewis isn’t arguing that a person shouldn’t be informed; rather, he is suggesting that since we only have so much time in the course of a day, we should be careful to be informed by the meaningful rather than the trivial. This will require a trade-out between what is easy but trivial and what is more difficult but meaningful. 

How many Christians who honestly believe they can’t find time to pray or be in the Word of God have watched all nine seasons of The Office? Energy mustered to oppose systems, institutions, or even individuals is, more often than not, ineffective and would have been better employed in fostering healthy patterns in one’s own life. In truth, most activism is a spectacle sport and nothing more. 

If a man were to prioritize his prayer life, he would find that The Office would naturally find itself on the cutting room floor of his calendar and rhythms. . . not because The Office is ungodly, but because it is a master of the trivial whereas the Scriptures and prayer teach us to be mastered by the meaningful.

Cancel culture has its place. There are times for meaningful opposition. But our present context seems to be showing us that, in our day, cancel culture is more like unfriending gone wild. There is nothing meaningful or productive in any of it. Heather Heying, former professor at Evergreen and wife of Bret Weinstein commented, “Cancel culture is a bastardization of protest, and of revolution, both of which democratic systems need, but cancel culture seeks to destroy and banish all those who disagree with some new orthodoxy.”

Give your time to what is meaningful and good. Have your neighbors over for dinner. Don’t miss an opportunity to sing a song or two to the Lord’s honor whenever you are gathered with Christians. Do not waste your breath and energy trying to scape-goat Facebook or Bernie Sanders for the presence of evil in the world, if you don’t personally walk in holiness. Read your Bible. Make time for prayer. Let other things die, not the things of the Lord, the only means by which the world will be saved.

As a number of people and institutions have fallen under attack, perhaps the best thing Christians can do would be to ignore the cancellations altogether. John MacArthur has shown this in the past week as he respectfully addressed the issue of California’s state-wide ban on normalcy. Pastor MacArthur simply stated that he and his church would be ignoring the cancellation. They are not railing against the ban with posters and spray paint, but with ongoing calls to worship and benedictions. Here’s a not-so-well-known secret in the Church . . . worship wins. Read the end of the book. May quiet and peaceable living, may the persistent assembly of God’s people, and the worship of the Triune God abound. And may its meekness be a force to be reckoned with.