Over the past few weeks, two Christian universities have been roiled by controversies at the boundaries of Christian speech. In one episode, Wheaton College’s social media team congratulated alumnus Russ Vought for his appointment to the Trump administration. After some alumni objected, the university deleted the post while clarifying its political neutrality. The backlash from the school’s conservative constituency was swift: An open letter raising concerns about Wheaton’s “institutional drift” went semi-viral, garnering around 2,000 signatories.
North of the border, Regent College faced similar dynamics after canceling a lecture on colonialism by British theological ethicist (and my doctoral supervisor) Nigel Biggar. Like Wheaton, Regent’s decision appeared to respond to complaints that the talk might make the school appear sympathetic to British colonialism.
Though Biggar’s work interrogating colonialism has generated controversy, Regent’s decision was surprising: Biggar is among Regent College’s most influential alumni. Less surprisingly, backlash against the backlash ensued, and the board of Regent issued a statement apologizing for its handling of the affair and its decision to cancel the talk.
Public contests over the faithfulness of Christian institutions are nothing new: World Vision, InterVarsity, Cru, and other organizations have been swept up in various controversies over the past decade. However, our shifting cultural landscape has changed the texture of these latest dramas. Opposition to Regent and Wheaton has been inflected by concerns about their capitulation to “cancel culture” even while critics have triumphed in its demise.
Cancel culture is perhaps best understood as license to engage in social punishment, often as a means of enforcing hotly contested norms of speech or conduct, for indiscretions or wrongdoings that were likely to escape formal institutional mechanisms. As a form of reputation management, “cancellation” was effective when it involved a sufficiently large number of people. As a result, “cancellations” were often accused of employing a mob mentality that thrived in the decontextualized environment of social media.
Stigmatization deliberately penalizes people’s status for their transgressions, ruining their reputations. As Musa al-Gharbi has argued in his recent book We Have Never Been Woke, the expressive character of canceling has been especially attractive to highly educated elites for whom symbolic capital is the primary currency. But what began in the realm of symbolic punishment rarely stayed there. Employers were often subjected to similar pressure campaigns to distance themselves from their employees or even terminate them.
Insofar as the threat of cancellation extended through social media and corporate infrastructures to reshape speech patterns, it was a distinct phenomenon. But the mechanisms of reputation management it employed are universal.
In Dr. Wortle’s School, moralist and novelist Anthony Trollope distills Victorian anxieties about affiliating with morally tainted people, anxieties that cancel culture revived. When (true) rumors spread that a teacher is not legally married to the woman he lives with, concerned bystanders undertake a campaign persuading parents to remove their children and so escape the scandal. Despite the teacher’s extraordinary reasons for his irregular situation, the threat of moral contagion prompts the highest-status parents to withdraw their support, imperiling the school’s existence.
These cultural dynamics have played out on both sides of our political aisle the past 30 years. Some version of cancel culture is inevitable; the only question is which norms are enforced and whether the norms of Christian unity and faithfulness will prevail. Public shaming has never disappeared. Our society is simply undergoing whiplash from changing which transgressions we think deserve recrimination.
Christ and Cancel Culture
In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul admonishes the congregation to take care that the freedom to eat food sacrificed to idols does not become a stumbling block to those who are weak (v. 9). The logic beneath Paul’s exhortation is complex but worth revisiting in light of contemporary disputes about the boundaries of Christian discourse.
The possibility of the “weak” being scandalized by the “strong” arose because Christians had different levels of knowledge about the gospel’s relationship to pagan sacrifices. The strong knew the gods to whom the Corinthians sacrificed were not real. Yet this knowledge did not mean they could be indifferent to other Christians. “Those who think they know something,” Paul writes, “do not yet know as they ought to know” (v. 2). Knowledge puffs up, he says, but love edifies (v. 1).
Instead, those who are strong, or theologically knowledgeable, must conform their conduct to the expectations of the weak, who might otherwise emulate the strong and eat meat sacrificed to idols while falsely believing that the gods to whom such food is sacrificed are real.
In acting as a “stumbling block” against which the weak fall (v. 9), the strong do not simply make a mistake: They strike the consciences of the weak (v. 12), inflicting the same blows on the brothers and sisters “for whom Christ died” (v. 11) that Christ suffered in his passion (Matt. 25:40; Matt. 27:30; Luke 22:63).
Paul’s complicated moral reasoning underscores the lengths Christians must take to maintain unity with each other. Setting aside our own liberty for the sake of others’ consciences is a distinctive mark of our Christian witness, a sign that we are empowered by the Spirit to conform to Christ’s sacrificial love. Paul enjoins the strong to accommodate the distorted misperceptions of the weak. They are wrong, but the fragility of their consciences requires medicines and cures that are more patient, more deliberate, and more private than belligerent assertions of our freedom.
Paul’s pastoral admonition has been worked out across the course of the Christian tradition through the framework of “scandal,” which names the threat that appearances pose to people’s confidence in the truth of the gospel. As Jesus says in Luke 17, it would be better for wrongdoers “to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones” (v. 2) to be scandalized, to stumble and fall from faith.
This most obviously happens through misconduct that becomes public—as we see from how media coverage of church leaders’ wrongdoings undermines people’s confidence in the gospel. But it also happens when the norms of Christian conduct are simply unclear, when one constituency knows that Christian freedom permits conduct other Christians find offensive.
The logic beneath scandal also underwrites the social character of discipline. Because Christians are bound together, one person’s reputation shapes how the entire community is perceived—which means communities must hold wrongdoers accountable by publicly chastening publicly known sins.
Public wrongs by leaders are to be corrected publicly (as Paul corrects Peter in Galatians) so that everyone who sees them might “fear” and be chastened against participating in the same kind of wrong (1 Tim. 5:20, ESV). A “little leaven leavens the whole lump,” Paul says, as he enjoins the church to both mourn and separate a wrongdoer (1 Cor. 5:6, ESV). Paul does not object to associating with unbelievers who engage in sexual immorality or greed, but he admonishes the Corinthians to not associate with those who bear the name of Christian while their lives contradict the gospel (v. 11), in order to ensure that the public reputation and message of Christianity is not confused or distorted.
The imperative to avoid scandal means that it is not enough for Christians to be good; they must appear to be good as well. In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul writes that he and Titus are bringing along a third party as they carry money from the churches in Macedonia, on the grounds that he aims at what is honorable “not only in the eyes of the Lord but also in the eyes of man” (v. 21).
Christian conduct demands going beyond the basic structures of right and wrong, sanctified or sinful. Christians are bound to live coram Deo, before the eyes of God, and coram hominibus, before the eyes of the Christian community and all those who (with more or less charity) watch to see whether they will stumble and fall.
We cannot map Scripture’s concerns about scandal and reputation directly onto controversies surrounding cancel culture. There are important differences between intimate communities like the church in Corinth and the technologically diffused, global public before which our conduct can be displayed today. Yet for institutions looking to faithfully navigate contemporary controversies, scandal offers resources that are more theologically potent than the seesaw oscillation between cancel culture and demands for free speech prevalent in so much of our online discourse.
For one, the substance of a controversy is more fundamental than the social dynamics that often take precedence. The cross of Jesus Christ is both foolishness to the Greeks and a “stumbling block” to the Jews (1 Cor. 1:23), yet it forms the center of the church’s life. Such a conviction puts real boundaries on what Christian institutions may reasonably accommodate with respect to their reputations. When push comes to shove, they must welcome the lower status that comes from adhering to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness.
If they have legitimate Christian concerns with maintaining appearances, institutions are also perennially tempted to try to save face while sacrificing their substance. Paul’s concern for the integrity of the church’s witness before the eyes of the world is not about preserving respectability but about preventing unnecessary offenses that make it harder for unbelievers to convert. Christian institutions embroiled in controversy will find their credibility in question—at which point they will be able either to (foolishly) boast in the sufferings they have undergone for Christ, as Paul does to buttress his authority in 2 Corinthians 11:16–33, or lose the confidence of their constituency outright.
But much of the scandalizing conduct of Christians happens in arenas where Christians have not yet reached the unanimity of judgment and mind that Paul calls us to (1 Cor. 1:10; Phil. 2:2). Such ambiguities mean that navigating scandal tests a community’s willingness to “keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace,” as Paul writes to the Ephesians (4:3).
The imperative to maintain peaceful and orderly relations in the midst of correcting or confronting others requires Christians and their institutions to value two goods that would suffocate the worst excesses of cancel culture: patience and privacy. Paul admonishes the Corinthians not to judge anything “before the appointed time” (1 Cor. 4:5), which Christians have long taken up as a caution against rash inferences about people’s character or conduct.
When institutions make public missteps, it can be hard to know whether to blame deliberate malfeasance or incompetence. In many cases, the communal judgment that we now associate with cancel culture happens so swiftly that it fails to leave time for institutions to offer responsible accounts of their conduct. The “pile on” of a social media mob is fueled by our impatient unwillingness to consider realities beyond immediate appearances.
At the same time, working through the complicated dynamics of disagreement between different constituencies requires trust, which privacy helps preserve. Jesus is explicit that private wrongs should be corrected privately before they are brought to whole communities (Matt. 18:15–20) so that offenders are not unnecessarily deprived of their good name. Working through public disputes through the same process operates, I think, on similar principles: Publicity raises the stakes for everyone and makes winning concessions and concord more difficult.
Private speech about controversy cannot be the end of the matter, though. Insofar as a controversy becomes public, it eventually requires public resolution. This can require institutions to clear the names of those involved to the extent that they are able. If cancel culture is deliberately predicated on soiling people’s names, Christian forms of disaffiliation must take into account the reputational damage that those people suffer and compensate them accordingly.
When institutions try to clandestinely cancel speakers, they invite onlookers to think the speakers are unacceptable. Public actions thus need public justification, and if universities reverse course, they need to offer similarly public accounts as to why.
University controversies also raise questions about unique institutional and pedagogical responsibilities. Churches have an obligation to proclaim the fullness of Christian doctrine—sometimes even by seeking to “silence” false teachers who are leading people astray (Titus 1:11). Christian universities have different (if related) ends: They are oriented toward the discovery of the truth, both within the scope of special revelation and beyond.
Christian universities are not indoctrination centers but testing grounds for ideas so that students can learn to distinguish between the true and the false in their arenas of study. Mature Christian students need to consider ideas at the edges of acceptability so they can better see the beauty and truth of God’s revelation and have deeper confidence in it for the sake of the church and the world.
Ambiguities about what Christian faithfulness demands mean such controversies are not likely to abate any time soon. Neither Christian institutions nor their constituencies can escape the burdens of judgment, even through uncertainty, fallibility, and disagreement.
As Augustine wrote in City of God, judges who confront their own uncertainty cannot abdicate their role—but they should submit to the necessity of judgment only with lamentations, crying out to God, “From my necessities deliver me.” If not many of us are called to be teachers (James 3:1), we should be equally cautious about participating in punishment of such teachers.
For, as I have had frequent occasion to say, the manner in which Christians argue among ourselves is as much a part of the witness to the world as where we arrive.
Matthew Lee Anderson is an assistant research professor of ethics and theology in Baylor University’s honor program and author of Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning in the Life of Faith.
