Uncanceled

Finding Meaning and Peace in a Culture of Accusations, Shame, and Condemnation

Phil Robertson

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781400230198
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Win the War for Your Own Integrity

After Phil Robertson quoted Scripture in an interview with a national magazine, his hit show, Duck Dynasty, put him on "indefinite hiatus." Phil immediately knew what had happened: he had become a target of cancel culture.

Since that time, Phil has spoken out against public shaming, strategic campaigns to get Bible-believing employees fired, and other tactics that are wreaking havoc in our society. In a deeply divided country, with so many bent on condemning and silencing others, Phil calls for us to carry out the unifying message of Jesus Christ.

In Uncanceled, Phil shares his own experiences with cancel culture as he

• encourages us to turn to Scripture as we navigate politics, personal conversations, and new cultural norms;
• helps us see the psychological and political motivations behind silencing conservative voices;
• reminds us that the goal is not to convince others to like us but to win the war for our own integrity by refusing to bow down to the god of political correctness; and
• shows us how to trade retaliation for the love and forgiveness that God offers.

Uncanceled is a blueprint for standing up for the truth of Jesus Christ in a culture that has forgotten how to have respectful conversations. As Phil reminds us, when we embrace the truth that Jesus Christ already paid an enormous debt to cancel our sins, we find a path to redemption, a way to forgiveness, and a means for godly connection.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS CANCEL CULTURE?

Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.

2 Corinthians 5:11

Cancel culture! What is that? To be honest with you, I had no clue what that meant the first time I heard it. But it didn’t take me long to figure out I had been a victim of it long before it became a thing. And a thing it has become.

Simply put, cancel culture’s goal is to embarrass, intimidate, or cause someone to lose something of value, such as a contract, a job, or corporate revenue, in order to force the target to change their behavior. This is the experience I described earlier when the media came after me to coerce me into retracting the Bible verse I quoted about homosexuality to the GQ reporter. When they tried to cancel me, it worked. Unfortunately for those who wanted me fired from Duck Dynasty, it only lasted about forty-eight hours or so. I never missed a beat. Others, sadly, are not so fortunate.

The attempt to silence people by canceling them is much more widespread and even more powerful today than it was then. An example of what I’m talking about is what happened to Drew Brees, the former quarterback of the New Orleans Saints. In early 2020, a reporter asked Brees’s opinion of the players who kneeled during the playing of the national anthem. His response, which many considered patriotic, was that he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag.” Brees immediately came under attack. The cyberuniverse erupted in a frenzy of indignation from the mainstream media, other players, and social media’s keyboard warriors. Brees caved a day later and offered the required apology.¹

Author J. K. Rowling also had an encounter with cancel culture in June 2020. Devex posted an opinion piece with the headline “Creating a More Equal Post-COVID-19 World for People Who Menstruate.” The writers were trying to bring attention to the dangers women in developing countries faced during the pandemic. I assume they were trying to be sensitive to transgender people, so they did not use the word “women” in their article, even though biological women are the only ones who menstruate. Rowling sarcastically replied to the opinion piece on Twitter: “‘People who menstruate?’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” Of course, she was pretending to search for the word woman.²

I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about whether Rowling made a legitimate point or not. The point I want to make is that, even though Rowling has a reputation for being liberal in her political and social views, she was not immune to cancellation. In her case, the backlash on Twitter was enormous, even vicious. While she did have a few supporters, others reacted with hysteria and outrage. One user responded, “Aren’t you a children’s writer? Your fixation with the genitalia of strangers is unsettling.”³ Another wrote, “Stop hating trans people you awful weirdo.”⁴ Many Twitter users unsympathetically informed Rowling, “I hate you.”

The thing I find most disturbing about the attack on Rowling is that no one attempted to discuss the facts of her opinion. The cancel culture attacked her with the understanding “We don’t discuss. We don’t attempt to persuade! We destroy! That’s what we do!” I have a news flash for these people: simply telling folks to shut up doesn’t really change any minds. Cancel culture may be effective at forcing people into submission, but it does nothing to persuade. In my humble opinion, people who respond with vulgarity (some of the responses to her tweet are too vulgar for me to repeat) and personal attacks indicate they aren’t all that comfortable in their position. From where I sit, it looks as if they are afraid their point of view won’t stand up to scrutiny.

Another celebrity who’s taken it on the chin in recent years for allegedly going against the grain of the political and moral views of popular culture is the actor Chris Pratt. In spite of the fact that Pratt has never spoken publicly about his political views, Twitter users went after him when he didn’t participate in a fundraiser for Joe Biden that was sponsored by his fellow Avengers actors. Some in Twitterland surmised, since he was absent from the event, he must be a Donald Trump supporter. Then he was attacked for attending what was described by his detractors as an “anti-LGBTQ” church, even though no one provided much evidence that it was true. When a Twitter poll was taken, where users were given the opportunity to eliminate one actor out of four named Chris, Pratt was the loser.⁵

Targeting celebrities for cancellation is one thing. Most of them can withstand any financial and professional hits their careers might take from the cancel culture. But what happens when this enraged crowd goes after regular folks? You know, people who work regular jobs for a living and often live paycheck to paycheck.

At the peak of the riots and unrest in the summer of 2020, a friend of a friend (I’ll call him Bernard) was communicating on Facebook with a colleague who worked for the same nationally known corporation as he did. Bernard’s colleague was sitting in her hotel room on the tenth floor and watching the violence unfold on the streets below in a midwestern city where she was attending a conference. The rioters were breaking windows, entering private businesses, and attempting to breach the front door of the hotel that Bernard’s friend was staying in. She posted a few pictures of the violence on her thread and commented that police snipers were stationed atop other buildings with rifles that fired rubber bullets. Bernard replied the police should direct a few rubber bullets toward the violent protesters and disperse the crowd because of the danger posed to the public.

Within a single hour both Bernard and his colleague were notified by their corporation’s lawyers that their employment had been immediately terminated for their “insensitive” posts on social media.

Boom! In one hour, they had lost it all. Fired! Canceled!

Jack Phillips is an ordinary businessman who owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado. But in 2012 he was thrust into the national spotlight in a way he never anticipated. A same-sex couple had wanted to hire Phillips to bake a wedding cake for their upcoming nuptials. When he refused to make a cake that celebrated a wedding he felt went against his religious beliefs, the couple sued him in court. Eventually, the case wound up in the Supreme Court, where the justices determined Jack was within his rights to refuse the couple’s request.

One would think the radical LGBTQ community would get the message and simply leave the humble baker alone. If you thought that, you would be wrong. In 2017, on the day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Jack’s case, he received a call from a customer who wanted a cake that would be blue on the outside and pink on the inside to celebrate the caller’s transition from male to female. Once again Jack refused.

As I said, the state of Colorado and the LGBTQ community should have received a very clear message from their earlier interaction with the baker, but they didn’t. Now he’s back in court defending his right to not promote anything he feels is against his beliefs.⁶

This is cancel culture. No free exchange of ideas. No respectful back-and-forth to arrive at a consensus. Just rip open your laptop or your iPhone and attack. Intimidate! Destroy! Overwhelm your opponents and bring them to their knees. Drew Brees and J. K. Rowling were punished for violating someone else’s sensibilities. They said what these people did not want to hear. But they are wealthy celebrities, and they’ll survive.

But what about Bernard and his colleague? What about Jack the baker? They aren’t high-profile people. They are just hardworking folks trying to provide a decent life for their families. Yet they were canceled, too, and for them it was very costly. And for what? Did they commit acts of treason against the United States? Were they guilty of thievery? Had they sexually harassed their coworkers? Were they dealing drugs? No, it was nothing like that.

The sad truth is that, in the cases of Jack Phillips and Bernard and his colleague, the price they paid for stating their beliefs may have been more costly than the price I paid for quoting a Bible verse. I lost a few sponsorships; they lost their ability to make a living.

In the case of Bernard, the corporation he and his friend worked for failed to defend both common sense and freedom of speech. You may be wondering why the company caved so quickly and fired them. I’m not sure, but maybe the reason is that the corporation was afraid the players within the cancel culture would publicly shame the company for tolerating offensive and hurtful speech within their corporation. Until then, Bernard and his friend had both been top producers in the company. Now, they were out on the streets for one crime: they had exercised their First Amendment rights and violated an unknown and unwritten company policy. The cancel culture crowd won when the company caved. Unfortunately, Bernard and his coworker were caught in the middle.

Perhaps you are wondering who these cancel culture warriors are. In the case of Bernard, the person who canceled him and his friend later posted on social media that he spends a great deal of his “workday” searching for “offensive” posts. His goal is to expose as many regular people’s “transgressions” as he can and publicly shame them. Apparently, there is a small army of folks like him who troll the cyberuniverse to do just what this young man did: to get people canceled. In my opinion, this is a miserable way to live, to spend your life looking through social media posts for something, for someone you can destroy. How sad!

Before we go any further, I think it’s important to point out it’s not just people on the Left who are canceling others out. Some evangelical Christians are pretty good at doing it too. In 2008, Rick Warren, the pastor of the California megachurch Saddleback, hosted the Civil Forum on the Presidency between the two presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Later, Obama asked Warren to deliver the prayer at his inauguration. Of course, many on the left side of the cultural spectrum attacked Obama’s choice of Warren to deliver the prayer, but many Christians also went after Warren for his association with Obama’s inauguration.

I’ll admit I’m not the most subtle man to ever live, nor am I all that familiar with thinking about the optics of a move such as Warren made. But the way I figure it, even if Bubba asks me to pray at closing time at the local redneck juke joint, I’ll jump at the chance. What better opportunity to go before the Father and proclaim his name in the presence of the people who need him more than they know? Perhaps the evangelical naysayers hadn’t considered the opportunity that Warren’s prayer in front of the nation presented before they attempted to cancel him.

Shades of Cancel Culture in Christians

I want you to contrast how cancel culture tries to coerce folks to submit to an agenda with how mature believers attempt to spread their message. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:11, “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others” (emphasis added). In my younger days as a Christian, my goal was to back people into a corner and intimidate them into baptism. As I grew in maturity, though, I realized the real power is in the message, not the messenger. Coercive or heavy-handed preaching may have resulted in a boatload of conversions, but I had misunderstood my role in leading others to Jesus.

Today? Well, I’m still very passionate about speaking the name of Jesus into the hearts and minds of people who are messed up in the same way I once was. Now, however, I am more about persuading. I want to make an appeal that gives people an opportunity to change their minds about the direction of their lives. I want them to make up their own minds and approach God with the full confidence that he will accept them and that he loved them while they were still enemies with him (Rom. 5:6–8). I want them to be fully persuaded that the sacrifice of Christ is all the proof they’ll ever need to know how much he loves them. But no matter how passionate I am about others putting on Christ, I decided years ago I would not use coercion and intimidation to “get people in the water.” I guess you could say I abandoned cancel culture tactics long before cancel culture became known as cancel culture.

I also decided years ago that I would handle disagreements the way God told me to handle them. Jesus said, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over” (Matt. 18:15). You may think I’m a bit naive here, but the way I figure it, the simplest approach is to handle it in God’s way. I never go wrong when I listen to the Spirit of God. I’ve noticed that people who do the opposite of what Jesus said in this passage have a cloud of chaos and disorder trailing behind them everywhere they go. We’ve always had people who take their disagreements to the streets and announce them publicly, and usually they were trying to cancel another person, to convince others to side with them and shun the person with whom they disagree.

As I said earlier, it’s not just people of the world who publicly attack their opponents. In the months leading up to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention, Twitter and other social media platforms erupted with Baptists attacking one another over issues such as critical race theory, women preaching, sexual abuse cover-ups, and social justice issues. I wondered at the time what would have happened if the parties involved had first obeyed Matthew 18:15. I’m assuming some of those involved had already attempted to sit down with one another and open the Book and pray for God’s guidance. But I suspect few of them did, judging by their language in the exchanges.

I don’t want to repeat their comments here, but many were reproduced in a June 12, 2021, Washington Post article titled “Secret Recordings, Leaked Letters: Explosive Secrets Rocking the Southern Baptist Convention.”⁷ I’m not in the inner circle of the Southern Baptist Convention, but this sounds more like Washington, DC, than it does the representatives of the bride of Christ, the church of God. The article quoted several prominent church leaders who had publicly blasted one another on a variety of issues. Publicly! Jesus followers ripping one another publicly to cancel the influence of the other. I’m just an average man, but I am certain Christ is not glorified in this. Not even a little bit.

I’m saddened by all of this, but I’m not shocked. I wasn’t around in the first century, but from what I’ve read in the New Testament and from what I’ve observed about human nature, attempting to cancel others is as old as the hills, even among Christians. This is what Paul was referring to in Philippians 1:15–17: “It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.” Those who were attacking him also preached Jesus, but they were perverting the message of the gospel in an effort to neutralize Paul’s influence.

Of course, the ultimate attempt to cancel was how the power brokers in the Jewish religious institution orchestrated the murder of Christ. They were religious leaders too. When the chief priests and the Sanhedrin stirred up the hastily assembled crowd, they began to parade a slew of witnesses to bring a string of false accusations against the Lord. When nothing worked, they said, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58, emphasis added).

You may not be familiar with this tactic of the chief priests, but it’s an old one. Take a little truth and tweak it a bit to make your accusation stick. In this case, Jesus had s...