163 Cancel Culture

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Cancel Culture”, originally shared on November 4, 2021. It was the 163^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

    Cancel Culture is a product of identity politics that ostracizes those whose beliefs or behaviors are not necessarily criminal but earn my outrage based on their belief or behavior (now or in the past) found offensive by those in my identity group. Those who are their friends, their employers, and anyone who does business with them are likewise ostracized to apply social pressure to also “cancel” them. Some people need to be punished. But is that God’s go-to response? Today, we’re going to find out.

   This past Monday was All Saints Day and next Sunday is All Saints Sunday. This reminds me of the story of two brothers who ran a small town. They cheated, stole, and bullied their way into control, and everybody hated them.

   One day, one of the brothers died. The surviving brother, though nobody in town could remember him ever being at all religious, went to the pastor of a church in this town and made a proposition.

   “My brother and I own this town and everyone in it. And now I own it by myself,” he said. “I want my brother’s funeral to be in this church and I want you to lead it. And I’ll give a big donation to your church but, in exchange, I want you to say at the funeral, ‘He was a saint.’ What do you say?”

   To everyone’s surprise the pastor said, “OK”.

   On the day of the funeral, the brother directed everyone in town to attend.

   When it came time for the pastor to speak, the pastor went to the casket and said, “Everyone knew this man. He and his brother ran this town. He was a bully, a thief, a coward, and a cheat. He thought that he could buy anyone and anything. But, compared to his brother, ‘He was a saint!”

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century church reformer, described the Christian life as that of being both a saint and a sinner at the same time. We continue in Sin in a fallen world, so we are sinners, but Jesus died on the cross to make us righteous before God, so we are saints. I think that that concept can help our culture through this time in which we are more divided than at any period in our history since the Civil War. In fact, “divided” may not be enough to describe our current state. “Splintered” may be a better word.

   Social media has made it easier than it’s ever been to find your tribe, your outrage cell, no matter what you believe to be true. Whatever your beliefs or just flat-out prejudices, they will be confirmed and supported by others. Your tribe will give you an identity. It will direct you to books and magazines, TV and radio shows, websites and other media that will tell you what you should know and believe. It will tell you that everyone who is not of your tribe is your enemy, that there is no spectrum of acceptable beliefs, and that your enemies are out to get you. Your only hope is to stay with your tribe.

   If you do not, if your behavior does not conform to the worldview of the tribe, or if some unacceptable information about you comes to light, you will become the enemy.

   You will become “canceled”. You could also be canceled because past views were not those of your tribe in the present. It could be a picture of you or a recording of your voice, or something you put on Facebook long ago, but you’re out. Canceled.

   “Cancel Culture” is a term that has been used to describe how cancelation works in today’s culture. It’s usually connected with a public figure or celebrity, a corporation or a team. But it can refer to anyone of any party or ideology.

   It’s especially true of those in the public eye, or connected to a public organization, or profession because they are most vulnerable to the kind of pressure and coercion that can be brought to them or to the organizations of which they are a part.

   It can also happen in families, teams, friendship circles, and even churches.

   I went by the statue of Jedediah Strong Smith at the San Dimas City Hall the other day.

   Jedediah Smith was an early explorer of this area, though his only connection to San Dimas is that he camped here one night on his way to the San Gabriel Mission.

   He is described on the Jedediah Smith Society’s web site as a trapper, trader, explorer and leader from 1822-1831. With the help of the area Absaroka tribe Native Americans, he identified the South Pass, enabling over 400,000 pioneers to travel overland to California and the Oregon Territory. He was the first American to enter California from the east. He was the first known person to travel the West Coast by land from San Diego to the Columbia River. He was the first non-Native American to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Ebbets Pass, what is today Highway 4.

   An article on the City of San Dimas’s website about the history of San Dimas says that, one night in 1826, he and a band of explorers who were the first Americans in the nearby area, came to a ciénega (marshy area) later called Mud Springs, and now called San Dimas, and camped near what is today Arrow Highway.

   The article about this statue on the San Dimas Festivals of Art web site says that when Jedediah Strong Smith viewed the valley from the top of the San Gabriel Mountains on November 26, 1826, he wrote in his journal, “A welcome sight”, which is the name given to the sculpture at city hall.

   The Roadside America.com website says that he was the inspiration for the bear-fighting mountain man Jebediah Springfield of “The Simpsons”. His appearance in the statue is a bit misleading, the article says, because a bear had torn a chunk of his face off by the time he arrived here and he had had to let his hair grow long to cover the scars on that side.

   An article on the Pasadena Star News website includes this quote attributed to Occidental College professor Robert Glass Cleland about Jedediah Smith, “He was a brave leader, a Christian gentleman...an explorer as well as a fur trader…the true ‘Pathfinder’ of California history. The annals of the west bear record of many heroic men, but no pioneer ever set foot on western soil of greater heroism and nobler life than Jedediah Strong Smith.”

   The Wikipedia article on him is extensive, documented, and more nuanced. It describes him as having a dry sense of humor, as coming from a family who were practicing Christians, and that his letters indicate his own Christian beliefs, though accounts of his being a “Bible toter” and missionary have no basis either from him or from his companions. The book in his hand in his statue is his journal, not a Bible. But it’s noted that those accounts also have no stories about him drinking to excess or sleeping with Native American women along the way.

   The article also includes the mention that, “he owned at least two slaves, which conflicted with his northern Methodist upbringing, and his behavior was not always honorable when dealing with those he considered his antagonists.” (reference: Barbour, Barton H. (2011). Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-4196-1, page 250.)

   He owned slaves? Elsewhere in the article it specifies that, in 1830/31, several years after his overnight in what is now San Dimas, “Smith also bought a house on First Avenue in St. Louis to be shared with his brothers. Smith bought two African slaves to take of the property in St. Louis.” (reference: Morgan, Dale L. (1964) [1953]. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the American West. Bison Book. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Books. ISBN 0-8032-5138-6, page 323.)

   Both references are documented in the article, and I’m including them in my blog.

   So, what are we to make of that?

   Should a person be judged by the worst thing he/she ever did, and the rest of their lives be cancelled?

   Can we ignore the heinous behavior of persons who have also done heroic things?

   Should Jedediah Smith be cancelled?

   Can we learn from the past if we don’t know it? Can we succeed if we are guided by fear of what people will think?

   There is certainly some behavior that separates a person from civil societies. Systems are in place to determine responsible parties, and, in some cases, decide punishment.

   Ultimately, God will judge all things.

   But, in between, there are our daily interactions with one another and those in our culture. Should we forgive? Does that release a person from responsibility? When should we forget?

   We might be acting hypocritically, pointing to others’ flaws before our own, like people to whom Jesus said in Matthew 7:5,

⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

   Or like the men about to execute a woman found in adultery to whom Jesus said in John 8:7,

⁷ When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

   I used to think that being on the extremes of the political and social spectrum is like what was said about being a fundamentalist. You can only live in one of two ways: either living a lie in which you know you aren’t the person your friends and colleagues think you are and dying a little inside every day, or living one life with your church friends and another life with those who hold views that are more like your own and desperately hoping that the two groups never meet.

   Now I think that many people live in many more than just two identity groups, and it’s exhausting.

   People should not have to live like that.

   How do we deal with sinners, or criminals?

   There was a time in the United States when we sent people to a penitentiary. That is, a place to become penitent. Or, to repent.

   Jesus began his public ministry with these words, in Matthew 4:17,

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”

   Peter declared in Jerusalem, after Jesus’ death and resurrection, in Acts 3:19

Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out,

   But, today the answer is rehab. People go there to be rehabilitated. They are cleansed. But is it enough?

   Ironically, today’s rehab has a lot to do with the Church that 16^th century reformer Martin Luther sought to change.

   Doing good things can’t make up for the bad things we have done. We need to repent. It is a turning around toward God, a complete inner transformation of the whole person, not an outer act. It is being born again, it makes of us a new Creation, God’s Creation as we were intended to be.

   That is God’s answer. Rehab may make us feel better about ourselves, but it cannot save us.

   Jesus saves.

   As John writes in 1 John 1:8-9,

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

   Or, as Paul writes to the Romans, chapter 3, verses 22b-25a,

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.

   Or as he writes in Colossians 2:13-14,

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of our flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.

   God has not cancelled us. God has redeemed us by the blood of Jesus on the cross.

   God’s cancel culture is to cancel our sin, the thing that separates us from a living relationship through the one true living God.

   We, as God’s people, have been set free to love and serve God and, in response, one another.