What is Cancel Culture and Why the Church Must Eschew It?

‘Cancel culture’ is a term that fills the minds of today’s social media savants with dread—especially if a person is at the receiving end of it—irrespective of their political, social, religious, or cultural standpoints! Cancel culture, in popular parlance, refers to the collective outrage against the actions, thoughts or words of a person, community, or even corporate brands which others decry to be offensive, to the point where they are thrust out of social or professional circles, effectively being “cancelled”. While most of this happens on social media—after all, this is the age of social media—there are widespread instances of cancel culture affecting individuals, companies, or communities personally and professionally to the point where many have been asked to leave their jobs and boycotted from their social circles, companies have pulled brand endorsements from celebrities, and products and brands have been boycotted to oblivion for association with things that may not be acceptable to a certain group of people. For example, the 2015 Oscars were cancelled for being “too white” (and probably rightly so)! Today, we have reached a point where cancel culture can be regarding anything, anywhere, anytime, provided there are enough people to ‘amp’ up the volume of the discourse, which is all the easier in this age dominated by screens and social media.

However, where does the Church stand in relation to this cultural trend? Many have attempted to equate the practice of excommunication in the Church, something that has been prevalent since the New Testament times, to cancel culture. And this is notwithstanding the fact that often it is the Church—one that tries to uphold what many consider to be orthodox and dated doctrine—that is at the receiving end of this cancel culture for their beliefs and practices. While a commonplace definition of excommunication may sound and feel like today’s cancel culture, the truth is far from that. As is often the case, it helps to delve into the details.

Excommunication, in the ecclesial context, refers to an institutional step through which a person or a group is put “out” of communion with others, often due to moral or doctrinal reasons. While the modus operandi of excommunication may differ from denomination to denomination, the general sense of it remains the same—the moral or theological differences between a person/group and the larger community are too big to be scaled in a way that keeps them together.

Historically speaking, excommunication was nothing like today’s cancel culture, which can be about something as trivial as not being allowed to wear certain kinds of clothes in a restaurant to something as hugely significant as the Me-Too movement. Excommunication was the last step of a very long process to resolve the differences or to restore people, depending on the kind of issue at hand, and it was often a very painful step at that. This is very different from today’s cancel culture, which often tends to be a one-way traffic, with everyone jumping on to whichever bandwagon is trending at a given moment.

And it is that one point which stands out especially as a stark point of difference—dialogue. When we go back to one of the first major heresies, and one of the major flashpoints in Church history—the Arian controversy—what preceded the council of Nicaea, where Arius was anathematized (a formal form of excommunication) for his heretical teachings, was a series of dialogues, both written and verbal, between the opposing parties (some of which did tend to be problematic in nature for their tone and language—we are all humans, after all). The emperor then called the council of eminent churchmen together at Nicaea for further deliberation and a final call on this matter, along with some others, to preserve the unity within the Church. And that is the other highlight in the history of the Church, at least until recent times. Whatever was done, and whatever was decided, the primacy of the unity of the Church was undisputed and that was the end goal of the whole process. Constantine too declared to that effect in the First Ecumenical Council— “Division in the church is worse than war,” he said. And that too is a point of difference in comparison to the cancel culture where the whole emphasis is on cutting off rather than healing. For the Church, division or cutting off is, or at least ought to be, a very painful step. (The account of events forming the context of the First Council of Nicaea has been taken from eminent historical theologians such as Alister McGrath, Gerald O’Collins, SJ and Khaled Anatolios).

And these are exactly some reasons (out of many) why the Church must eschew cancel culture. Because it has essentially become a mob culture, a culture where there is no time or space to hear a differing voice, amidst all the din and digital noise. This is not to discount the fact that there are genuine issues being discussed and addressed in today’s public spaces, many of which end up in “cancellations”. But when a conversation on social media metamorphoses into a mob baying for blood at all costs (figuratively, of course), with more people having no clue about the issue at hand than those who have, it is time to ask if it is a viable trend at all!

Sadly, the Church today is not untouched by these vagaries of our times. What we often find in the modern Church in the name of discourse, on both sides of the aisle, are unilateral diatribes, uttered to the ayes of supportive audiences. One only has to cursorily search any doctrinal topic on YouTube to find a plethora of videos, many of which are heavily edited to suit a particular agenda. We are eager to talk, and at times even scream, rather than listen to the other, and then offer or accept correction, wherever required. The Biblical model, however, requires us to sit and talk to one another, openly and honestly, irrespective of the level of our disagreement. That is what we see in various incidents across the book of Acts, and that is how the First-Century Church dealt with problems and issues that threatened to divide them. To do otherwise is to buckle under the pressure of popular culture, maybe not in terms of our doctrine, but in terms of another significant aspect that defines us—our character!