WLSU: Cancelled

From what we can gather, someone within the community was working to undermine Paul’s leadership and sowing seeds of discontent, and likely some problematic teaching. After a public confrontation with said offender, Paul leaves to look after some of the other churches he has planted, and the Corinthians decide to stick with him, and they banished the other guy.

Yes, banished. That was a real thing. In the early church, as is evidenced both here, and in other early writings, as well as some of Jesus’ own teachings, there seems to be an acknowledgment that some people just don’t play well with others, and they need to be separated from the community for the community’s sake.

Today I think people call this cancelling someone – the conscious decision to ostracize someone out of the belief that their actions or words are unacceptable.

Speaking personally, I have heard more arguments about the danger of so-called “cancel culture” than I have actually seen cancelling occur. But certainly, it does happen sometimes, and the question that seems to be brought up repeatedly goes something like this: “Should someone be banished for something they do, or should we be free to say and do what we want without consequence?”

Should J.K. Rowling’s vociferous anti-trans comments impact my engagement with the Harry Potter universe she created? Should the dozens of rape accusations against my childhood hero Bill Cosby negate the lessons I learned from his sitcom growing up? Should Elon Musk’s largescale promotion of antisemitic propaganda stop me from using the X social media platform or driving a Tesla? And if the answer to all these questions is yes, do I disengage completely? Encourage others to do the same? Am I done with these people? Or are they canceled?

This canceling business is not uncontroversial. It’s also not new, even if the lingo is.

I remember back in 2003 when the Country music trio then-named The Dixie Chicks responded to the US invasion of Iraq by telling a London audience, they were ashamed that our President was from their home state of Texas. The backlash was intense and immediate – with radio stations refusing to play their music and their music sales dropping dramatically. They even received death threats.

So did the Beatles, of course, back in 1966, when during an interview John Lennon remarked that his band was currently more popular than Jesus. Aside from the death threats, some Christian groups organized public bonfires of Beatles records and paraphernalia. The Beatles considered ending their US tour early for their own safety.

And then there was St. Paul, and even Jesus. Jesus, in describing conflict resolution at one point instructs his followers that if someone inside the community sins egregiously and is unwilling to apologize and atone, they should be treated like “a Gentile or a tax collector”. Which is to say they should be treated as outsiders.

Maybe Jesus was an early proponent of cancel culture.

The Church is currently observing the holy season of Lent – a time of penitence and fasting leading up to Easter. We often see this simply as a time of self-deprivation or sacrifice. But Lent has an interesting history that is described during our Ash Wednesday with these words: “For the first Christians Lent was also a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.”

So, the early church believed in banishment, of formal separation for those who had actively and egregiously harmed their community with their words and deeds. But something else is going on here: The possibility of reconciliation.

For Paul’s part, when he mentions his ostracized adversary in 2 Corinthians, it is not with malice or hatred, but with an eye for reconciliation. Paul says, “you should forgive and console him so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” He urges the community to “reaffirm their love” for the one who has been punished. In Paul’s mind, this banishment is not a cancellation of the person, not the end of their story. Rather, it’s a chapter in their shared story – a story that ends in reconciliation, unity, and belonging.

Later in his letter, Paul refers to the very work of the Church as the ministry of reconciliation, modeled after Jesus’ own reconciling act of love and self-sacrifice.

And what of Jesus, who said that the unrepentant offender should be treated as a Gentile or tax collector? Well, we don’t need to look further than Jesus’ own ministry – because Jesus specifically went out of his way to minister to Gentiles and tax collectors, some of whom became his first followers and loudest proclaimers of his power. The outcasts and people on the margins were Jesus’ passion. Who is outside of Jesus’ reconciling vision of God’s love?

Since the first century, Christians have put forward the belief that, upon Jesus’ death, he went to Hell. In the Inferno for three days, it’s said Jesus laid waste to the place, freeing all who were captive there. I’m thinking now of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. When Judas found out his scheme would lead to Jesus’ crucifixion, he immediately killed himself. What Hell he must have experienced. It is not difficult for me to imagine the reunion between the two old friends who had been separated by egregious sin, the pain, sorrow, and remorse, the forgiveness and healing. Reconciliation.

There are no outcasts for Jesus, not permanently.

So then what? People’s actions, their words, their deeds don’t matter? They can say and do painful, injurious things and we just say, oh well?

I don’t think so. I don’t believe grace undermines accountability. Jesus, Paul, the first Christians all recognized that our words and deeds matter, that we have the capacity to cause harm to our siblings, that a person’s behavior can tear at the very fabric of community that holds us all in love and hope. And they believed we sometimes have a responsibility to call people out, to hold them accountable, to keep them at a distance if they persist in harming us.

In our current cultural landscape, critiques of cancel culture often carry with them a desire to avoid accountability. But why would Rowling’s hateful words not influence the way I hear the other stories she tells? How can I watch Cosby perform respectability knowing what he was doing behind the scenes all those years? And for that matter, if the Dixie Chicks or Beatles offend you, why shouldn’t you boycott them? Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences.

And with this collective desire to hold people accountable, and, yes, to punish them, comes a whole other layer of complexity: Who decides where the line is? Which offenses are forgivable, and which are not? And what’s worse: how do we keep ourselves from just deciding that anyone with whom we disagree is not worth our time? Cancelling people is equally at home on both the left and right wing of our country’s ideological spectrum. Sometimes it can look a lot like justice. Other times it veers uncomfortably close to persecution.

There are no easy answers. And there are some people that, if I’m honest, I am just done with so long as they’re not interested in repentance and apology. I think about this a lot. When someone is called to task and people jump to their defense saying, “what about forgiveness?” I hear myself responding, “Well what about an apology? An admission of guilt? A desire for self-examination and the possibility that amends need to be made?” Repentance is incredibly liberating, and we avoid it at all costs.

We also tend to avoid acknowledging the fundamental reality that we are all meant for each other – that our lives are inextricably connected. And that this connectedness is good. This is what both the offenders and the punishers miss so often in their posturing: That we belong to each other, and that we are meant to build communities of reconciliation. We are not put on this earth to win at all costs. We are put here to love at all costs.

The truth is we are all part of a community. All of us - even the celebrities and world leaders among us. We all belong to each other. God put us all on the same earth at the same time. And we are capable of great harm. We can be dangerous and toxic and cruel and petty. And when we are, we are not free from consequences. But also, when we are all those things, we are not outside of the love for which we were made. We are always belonging. We are always beloved. And nothing can change that. Reconciliation is our destiny. It’s our job to act like it.