#652: Cancel Culture at Christian Colleges

An essay at Christianity Today.

I went on hiatus from this newsletter for a few months, my first such break since I began this project a few years back.

As happens every time I abscond from a platform, controversies quickly erupted in areas that I have both the interest and aptitude to address. Specifically, Wheaton College found itself in the middle of a maelstrom for mishandling its social media presence, after which Regent College made headlines for canceling a talk by my advisor Nigel Biggar.

I had written previously in this newsletter about how ‘cancel culture’ might be inevitable. The Wheaton controversy has more-or-less proved the point, I think: the ForWheaton strategy of threatening to withhold funding or resources and publicly shaming faculty for their thought-crimes is indistinguishable from the “woke” strategies that its organizers (who I consider genuine friends!) so strongly oppose. This is not a criticism of what they are up to per se, so much as a plea for more self-awareness.

But I said nothing substantive in that essay about how Christian institutions might think about their responsibilities to engage in a politics of (dis)affiliation well. So I decided to sketch a few ideas toward that end in Christianity Today:

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).

There is much more that must be said about scandal and institutions to develop substantive counsel for how Christian universities might navigate the turbulent waters that they often find themselves sailing.

One important distinction that got cut in editing, for instance, is between the speech that happens in classrooms and that which happens in invited talks. As I wrote in a draft of the essay:

A university professor’s speech is of a different kind than that of a pastor, even if their content might overlap: the exploration and contestation of questions in a classroom requires freely and frankly confronting all manner of ideas in their strongest form, as students are being brought into maturity. Universities are inherently ordered toward the cultivation of “strong” Christians—(unequivocally) not Christians who are more sainted than anyone else, but Christians who might be less scandalized by considering questions at the edges of the Gospel’s acceptability so that they can ultimately better see the beauty and truth of God’s revelation and have deeper confidence in it for the sake of the whole church and the world.

The possibility of scandal in university contexts is not limited to what happens in the classroom, though. One of the central domains of “cancel culture” in higher education has been policing the “platforms” of invited lectures and talks. The one principle that everyone seems to agree upon is that institutions offer some kind of endorsement when they invite a speaker to address students. Prof. Nigel Biggar’s critics seemed to treat his invitation to speak as an honor while he seems to have regarded its cancellation as an insult. Invited talks set the boundaries for an institution’s acceptable speech: even when an institution disagrees with a talk’s content, providing an official venue and advertising legitimates it as an acceptable part of the community’s discourse. Such “legitimacy” is only controversial, though, when the ideas being presented might be taken as part of the institution’s own way of seeing things: there is a much lower probability of a conservative Christian institution getting into hot water by having a known atheist talk about why God does not exist than inviting someone who identifies as a Christian to defend same-sex sexual relations. Paul’s higher standard for affiliation with Christians in 1 Corinthians 5 is deeply intuitive in this regard: if no one expects an institution to adopt the framework the speaker is defending, then the institution invites no controversy by entertaining it for an evening.

There is more to say about what Christian universities should do. But specifying our responsibilities as Christians cannot be done unless we attend closely to the logic of speech and (dis)affiliation as it is given us in Scripture.

The Bulletin

I went on Christianity Today’s podcast to discuss the essay with Mike Cosper and Russell Moore. I wasn’t particularly effective on it, in part because I was not entirely clear on the groundrules of agreeing with/disagreeing with my hosts. I failed to signal my deep disagreement with Cosper’s rights-absolutism, for instance.

The Q&A is Fun.

I visited The Lewis House at the University of Kentucky during my hiatus and had a terrific time, which was far too short. I had a ton of fun giving the talk and said a few new things about questioning in the midst of it.

But I thought the Q&A was especially provocative. I was pushed to consider holiness in Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and to think about why God might reveal himself as ‘froward’ to us.

The Penultimate Word

“So if we are all going to fall asleep, how do we keep awake? Keep awake in your heart, awake in faith, awake in hope, awake in charity, awake in good works; and when you fall asleep in the body, the time will come for you to rise. When you have risen, get your lamps ready. Then may they not start going out, may they be fed then from the inner oil of conscience. Then may that bridegroom be embraced by spiritual arms, may he lead you then into his home where you need never sleep, where your lamp can never go out.” — Augustine