Cancel Culture

Now that my least favorite Sunday of the year is over, let’s talk about cancel culture.

I wanted to get in on the conversation not to voice my side but rather, to paint perspective. As a youth pastor, our young people have a lot of valid opinions on the subject. First, I want to speak to the Christian, because I think we miss it often. We’re oblivious to our ironic public statements we make across social media platforms. And by doing so, we miss the opportunity to be a bridge. We miss the opportunity to learn and empathize. We miss the opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus by loving well...especially those we disagree with. Here's what I mean by ironic public statements...

You have the Christian that states they'll never cave in to the culture and will stand on the Bible yet that same Christian does easter egg hunts for their kids. That's irony...and humorous.

You have the Christian that is afraid governments are restricting their religious freedoms during this pandemic while they use their religion to restrict the freedoms of women and gay communities.

You have the Christian upset about our Country's immigrant situation as they send in their DNA to ancestry to find out which Country their family came to this Country from.

You have the Christian who is upset the former president was banned from Twitter after he incited violence while they want to ban a pair of shoes because they think it re-empowers a disempowered devil.

You have the Christian who is upset about "prayer" being removed from school (as if prayer could ever be removed from anything) as they cheer while the golden Trump statue is being rolled through the lobby of their conference.

You have the Christian who is upset about the fiasco involving Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Suess yet that same Christian is not willing to listen and educate themselves about systemic racism.

Cancel culture always has multiple perspectives, and while I think it's silly some things are getting 'cancelled' I also think it's important to address the real concerns, issues, double standards, and our past. Especially if we're upset something is cancelled because it was accepted years ago but is obviously offensive, racist, or wrong.

Here's some perspective about cancel culture from a post I was sent by a friend...

Andrew P Street said recently, "Years ago I interviewed Brian Eno and he was amazing. But one thing he said about streaming music has always stayed with me: that his daughters listen to stuff from all sorts of eras without any idea of genre or timeline or context because it was all equally available to them. As he put it, everything was present. And I think that’s the big difference in the last decade or so of pop-culture: we now accumulate stuff rather than replace it. Instead of The Office being a sitcom people remember from a decade ago, it’s a show they’re watching now. There’s new pop culture, but it has to elbow for room amongst humanity‘s vast back catalog. And because everything is present, everything is necessarily judged against the standards of the present. So where once you’d only see, for example, an episode of the Muppets if you knew what it was and sought it out, now it’s just something popular on Disney+ that anyone can stumble over and go “Um, why is Johnny Cash flanked by Confederate flags? I didn’t know he was a white supremacist!” And, friends, that is why we’re getting disclaimers on shows or letting old children’s books go out of print: not because people are oversensitive or hysterical or stupid, but because society changes and pop-culture used to keep pace with that, but now that everything remains accessible we interact with our cultural past differently.”

I personally believe cancel culture is a combination of Andrew's perspective and capitalism. My friend Cody says, “Cardi B doesn't get cancelled because her record company finds it profitable to make a song called "WAP." However, Dr. Seuss's publishers did not find it profitable to have books with racist inclinations so they take it off the shelf.” At the end of the day, cancel culture is driven by money as money drives the decisions of nearly every organization.

So Christian, if you’re like my wife you’re about to be triggered by the next word: RELAX. Maybe if we added some perspective and sat in our discomfort long enough, we might not be so upset about our world changing. We might not even voice our ironic opinions that tend to build walls to the very people we’re called to love.