The reason I wrote my new book God and Cancel Culture is not because Donald Trump was canceled from Twitter or Mike Lindell had his MyPillow canceled in a couple dozen retail outlets. I think that’s a disturbing trend. I wrote it because I believe the ultimate goal for the far-Left socialist cancel culture crowd is to cancel Christianity in our culture.
There’s always been cancellation in culture. Even in recent days, so-called evangelicals who don’t believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit have tried to cancel those who do. Remember when many mainline denominations had a charismatic renewal? With almost no exceptions over the years, that has been canceled.
But the socialist agenda is trying to move America toward communism, which is always atheistic. And beyond politics, those with basically godless agendas, from LBGT to pro-abortion, resent the restraints that Christianity and the Bible put on their desire to do whatever they please. It’s serious because they want to take away our religious freedoms. And if we don’t stand up against it, no one else will.
There are examples of pastors being arrested during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. A legislator in California even floated a bill (which was later dropped) that would have made the Bible “hate speech” because of what it says about homosexuality being sin.
So, what are Christians (or other conservatives who are being canceled) to do? I believe there is a rising tide to standing up to cancel culture. And one of the most articulate leaders of this burgeoning movement is Heather Higgins.
I know Higgins and am doing my part to work with her. I’ve been told my efforts are “political” because a lot of the cancel culture is one side (the Left) trying to cancel conservatives, which includes many Christians.
I believe it’s a spiritual attack, and we who have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit must stand up to it and do battle in the Spirit. But there are also practical things we can do, and that’s why I so admire Higgins, whom I know to be a committed Christian.
Recently, I spoke with Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women’s Voice and founder of the Anti-Bigotry Alliance, for an episode of my God and Cancel Culture podcast. She offers another story of how cancel culture is hurting everyday people.
“There’s a guy named Emmanuel Cafferty, who worked for San Diego Gas & Electric,” Higgins says. “Somebody took a picture of his arm as he was driving his truck. Emmanuel was cracking his knuckles. He [the photographer] claimed it was a white power symbol, and he [Cafferty] lost his job. The man who took the photograph has since retracted his claim that it was a white power symbol against a Hispanic worker. But he [Cafferty] still has not gotten his job.”
As we talked, Higgins presented three major problems with cancel culture and three ways to defeat those problems.
1. Cancel culture is tough to articulate. “There’s this strange silence on the part of the conservative elected leaders,” Higgins says. “And part of the reason for that is that they don’t quite know what to say. It’s sort of a large issue that’s hard to put into a sound bite. So what I decided to do was to first make the issue something that is easy to articulate, and that was by creating the Free Speech Pledge.
“The Free Speech Pledge is something that individuals and companies can sign to explain they’re not going to engage in discrimination against different viewpoints or in the bigotry of cancel culture,” she adds.
You can sign the pledge here: freespeechpledge.com/.
2. The same rules don’t apply to everyone. “Just calling somebody a hypocrite doesn’t tend to really change the circumstance,” Higgins says. “If a corporation has a certain standard, and they don’t adhere to it, and there’s a repeated pattern of them not following their own rules, that’s going to create media pressures. That’s going to create pressure on their brand. That is going to create legal causes of action for people who were unfairly treated by this unequal application of their rules.
“So the first website we are about to launch under the umbrella of the Anti-Bigotry Alliance is called Same Rules for All,” she explains. “We may not agree with the rules posted by this social media company, business, educational institution or even this church. But this is their standard. And it is up to the rest of us to help them apply their rules fairly. And it will allow people to post examples that fall under their policies and be treated the same way as the things that they canceled or the people who lost their jobs.
“It will allow other people to see these posts and upvote if they think that this is a violation,” Higgins adds. “So you start to have a tabulation of all the people who have complained. And you start to have a library of all the instances that violate these terms. That’s going to create a lot of pressure on these companies to behave better and behave more fairly.”
3. Many people are unfairly canceled. “As a society, we have shifted from any sense of objective harm based on an intention to the subjective views of the person who perceived the harm even if it wasn’t there,” Higgins says. “That is an untenable standard for any system of justice.
“If it’s just in the mind of the beholder, what recourse does anybody have?” she adds. “It quickly slips from hate speech being something that’s hateful to being something that I hate. And that’s not a viable standard.”
“I know you’ve interviewed so many people who’ve been canceled. … you know how many of them are not big names,” Higgins says. “They’re not household names. If they’re canceled, nobody would know about it. If they lose their livelihoods, nobody knows.
“Every successful effort to cancel somebody and to engage in that bigotry is its own reward when it works,” she adds. “So it becomes a very nasty cycle where those who engage in this behavior feel that there are no adverse consequences. We need to create adverse consequences for being so harmful and poisonous.
“How you create that accountability and consequence is by improving awareness because right now it’s a very obscure black box with a lot of individual harm, much of which never sees sunlight,” she says. “Unfairlycanceled.com is something that we wanted to create because so many of these stories of cancellation … are not big names. Putting sunlight on what’s really going on and how unfair it is and how big it is … will help us a lot.”
Cancel culture is as real for Emmanuel Cafferty and the pastor in Alabama as it is for Donald Trump. Thankfully, if we join together in prayer and strategize with the wisdom of God, we can defeat it. Higgins is doing her part. I invite you to pray and think about yours as you listen to this episode of God and Cancel Culture here, and subscribe to God and Cancel Culture on Apple Podcasts and your favorite podcast platform. And don’t forget to sign Higgins’ Free Speech Pledge here. {eoa}
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