DAY TWO: Forgiveness in a Cancel Culture

Today, we can both get the news quickly and react quickly. In many ways this is a welcome new reality. 

But the torrent of information coming at us combined with the ease of instant communication can be damaging. And our instinct to be right, to be first, to be heard is one of the reasons we often make mistakes. Alan Jacobs says that our “instinct for consensus is magnified and intensified in our era because we deal daily with a wild torrent of what claims to be information but is often nonsense[1].”

We also don’t realize how much of this “nonsense” is a form of entertainment, an intoxicating theater of the absurd.

Senator Ben Sasse agrees that much of what passes for news and opinion is actually a form of entertainment, “Many of our television hosts are modern-day carnival barkers. We can get dopamine, adrenaline, and oxytocin all at once. It’s an adult video game[2].” Online, we operate in what David Brooks calls a “coliseum culture” where we sit around watching someone get rhetorically eaten alive.

What’s ironic about this emerging shame culture is the way it draws out the longings of the human heart for justice and the way it tries, but fails, to mirror the story the Bible tells about righteousness and justice, forgiveness and grace.

Andrew Sullivan, an agnostic journalist, nonetheless notices that this phenomenon is “filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.” Sullivan sees the parallel: “Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin[3].” 

It turns out that perhaps this secular age isn’t so secular after all. We have progressed, but not beyond our longings for justice. We have not abandoned our notions of sin, judgment and wrath. There is a Hell. It’s called cancel culture and erasure and we want to send the bad people on the Internet there.

And yet what good news we have to offer in the real gospel. Christians possess a better story that accurately sees a world that is deeply broken, fully of deep evil that must be avenged. 

Jesus was “made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).”  Jesus was shamed so that our own sins might be forgiven. And God invites to his table those who were his enemies. It is sin and death and injustice, then, that are cancelled, and we are invited into God’s favor.

A cancel culture that seeks to isolate perceived bad guys from mainstream society through public shaming may one day come for you or your tribe. Jesus calls us to something better. Rather than erasing people with whom we disagree, he calls us to see everyone, even the person who offends our sensibilities the most, as an image-bearer of God. 

READ:

Proverbs 18:13

2 Corinthians 5:18-21

PRAY:

Dear Jesus, Help me to answer your call to see everyone as your image-bearers—even those with whom I disagree. Equip me to spread the good news of the gospel online. In your name I pray, Amen.

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[1] Jacobs, How to Think, 27.

[2] Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018), 82.

[3] Andrew Sullivan, “Andrew Sullivan: America’s New Religions,” Intelligencer, December 7, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html.