Should Christians Support “Cancel Culture”?

In this episode Trent takes on the debate over whether “Cancel Culture” is justified.

Transcription:

Trent:

Recently many people have been fired because of comments they made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which kicked off a lot of debates about free speech and cancel culture. So in today’s episode, we’re going to tackle the question, should Christians support cancel culture? But first, another question we have to address. Should Christians support the Council of Trent? Yes, they should click the subscribe button and hit the like so that other people can benefit from our content. And don’t forget to support us@trenthornpodcast.com. Alright, but first we have to define cancel culture, and that’s really the source of the problem in this debate. While the phrase did not become popular until around 2017 and 2018, the seeds of cancel culture were planted in the late two thousands and early 2010s. Through the rise of social media like Twitter and YouTube, these platforms allowed large groups of people to quickly descend on a single company or a single individual and expose them to massive amounts of criticism some of it deserved.

For example, in 2012, CFO, Adam Smith of an Arizona biotech company filmed himself harassing a Chick-fil-A drive-through worker because the Chick-fil-A CEO had donated money to defend traditional marriage. Ironically, Smith wanted to be part of a campaign to cancel Chick-fil-A over so-called same-sex marriage, but instead he got himself canceled or fired for taking out his frustrations on a drive-through worker who had nothing to do with Chick-fil-A’s policies. But in other cases, the cancellation seems to be rooted in vengeance and a desire to inflict maximal harm, not just meant to correct someone who engaged in wrongdoing. In 2013, Justine Sacko tweeted Going to Africa, hope I don’t get aids, just kidding, I’m white. Before boarding an 11 hour flight. By the time she landed her tweet to less than 200 followers had gone viral and she lost her job. Tech journalist, Sam Biddle, who helped to make the tweet go viral later apologized saying Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage and outrage is traffic.

I didn’t think about whether or not I might be ruining Sacco’s life. SCO apologized for her remarks and said they were a poor attempt at sarcastic humor, but she lost her job. Nonetheless, though a few years later she ended up back at the company that fired her. But this raises questions about whether cancel culture is just or whether it goes too far because mobs deaden, our reasoning ability and getting likes on the internet is really addictive during the latter part of the 2010s Movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too ushered in what some called a great awoken or renewed interest in liberal social activism. This was also held by the stranglehold that liberals had over social media. During this time, conservatives decried cancel culture because it was seen as a mob tactic to stifle legitimate discussion about race and gender ideology and simply demand compliance with new social norms.

One pupil poll found that in 2020, the majority of Republicans believed cancel culture, punished people who didn’t deserve it. But 75% of Democrats said that it held people for their actions. But just two years later, more Republicans and more Democrats began to say this tactic results in unjust punishment, not mere accountability. Finally, after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 2024 election of Donald Trump and the shift in electoral views among Gen Z, in particular Gen Z men, the clout that liberals had to dispense online mob justice began to evaporate. Members of the far left who were stuck in the glory days of 2020 retreated to platforms like Blue Sky and Threads, which they thought were comfortable echo chambers where they could say whatever they wanted, including celebrating murder like an out of touch CEO who didn’t realize regular people aren’t like their friends in New York and hate the new Cracker Barrel design. These people insanely thought it was normal to celebrate the murder of a young man simply because he had different political views than them and now they’re paying the price for those decisions. Consider this clip from a British podcast.

CLIP:

Well, I already know because the person you just said, oh, it was just a family value man. This family value man said that gay people are in error. Transgender people are mental. So yeah, apparently free speech is only okay if you’re on the right. Apparently if you’re on the left, you are not allowed free speech. You’ve got to be some sort of upstanding citizen. Well, I’ve had enough of this hypocrisy.

Trent:

You don’t have to be an upstanding citizen, you just can’t be a monster. The problem is many of these liberals who are stuck wearing masks at a George Floyd protest in 2020 think that being cruel to Charlie Kirk and Charlie Kirk’s own views are both radical fringe beliefs. So they should both be tolerated or both be punished equally. But newsflash, it isn’t 2020 anymore. Normal people see that Kirk had views typical of most conservatives, independents, and even many Democrats who were sick of an LGBT agenda that started with tolerance and ended with 10 year olds doing drag shows. They see Kirk’s views as part of the mainstream even if they disagree with them, but the views of his critics are positively ghoulish in comparison even if they agree with those critics on many other issues. Alright, so how should Christians view cancel culture? Let’s start with the words of our Lord in Matthew chapter 12.

How can you speak good when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The good man out of his good treasure brings forth good and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you on the day of judgment, men will render a account for every careless word they utter for. By your words, you’ll be justified, and by your words you’ll be condemned. Everyone agrees that there should be some consequences for the words we say where we disagree as on what the consequences should be. So I’ve broken down four guidelines when it comes to moving forward in the conversation regarding speech and cancel. Culture number one, violence is never an appropriate response to speech speech, no matter how offensive never merits violence against innocent people. It never justifies something like the shootings of the staff of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing images of the false prophet Muhammad.

The problem is when people equate speech and violence and say we should treat them the same way such as by treating people who say Nazi things as if they were literal Nazis from 1943. Other people take it a step further and say that if Muslims are told they must tolerate offensive speech and can’t punish those who disagree with them, then Christians must do the same thing and cannot punish those who say offensive things about the passing of Charlie Kirk, for example, consider this post from Hassan. He wrote, I remember how much Muslims were lectured about the importance of a right to offend being part of a right to free speech. We were told that we must accept offensive and racist remarks about our faith, our prophet, et cetera in the name of free speech and integrating into Western civilization, Voltaire, and the rest. Those same folks who lectured Muslims are now saying to people that they cannot be offensive about a dead conservative influencer and they’ll be punished if they do so, even if being offensive in one speech is literally what the First Amendment guarantees.

Oh, the hypocrisy. Oh, the gaslighting. Here’s what Hassan doesn’t understand. As a Muslim, you are free to call me all kinds of terrible names for posting this image of the prophet Muhammad an image by the way that a Muslim created in the 14th century. You can say anything you want and get angry about it. The only acceptance we ask for is that you don’t cut our heads off in response literally or virtually such as by manipulating YouTube’s community standards to maliciously flag videos in order to censor speech you don’t like. And in turn, we won’t do the same to you even if you criticize us or our religion in harsh terms. That’s how a free society works and promotes human flourishing. Sure, if a Muslim company is angry that an employee insulted Islam or the prophet Muhammad, the false prophet Muhammad, I should say they are well within their rights to fire that person.

But most people in the west do not share your view on the wrongness of criticizing Islam, so they won’t punish people for doing that and that’s a good thing. But there are other acts of wrongdoing that we all understand are evil, and so it’ll be easier to professionally punish people who engage in those acts and one of those acts is celebrating the murder of someone who simply debated college students for a living. Number two, the government should not legally punish speech in countries with totalitarian regimes. You can be legally punished for any speech that offends dear leader, but even in some western democracies you can be legally punished for speech that offends people. As is the case in England where you can be arrested for silently praying outside an abortion facility or in Germany where it’s a crime to deny the Holocaust. I’ve publicly engaged Holocaust deniers and I believe the best way to respond to error is not to outlaw it, but to refute. That’s why I’m grateful to live in the United States where there is a robust protection of speech through the first amendment of the Constitution. That’s why I was horrified when I heard Attorney General Pam Bondy say this recently.

CLIP:

There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.

Trent:

But there is no legal category of hate speech. The First Amendment exists to protect speech which is hated since unheated speech needs no protection. Bondi appeared to walk back her statement in a post where she said that speech which directly threatened violence was not protected, and I can completely agree with that definition of hate speech. Some people think you aren’t allowed to say something which could simply upset many people and cause harm like yelling fire in a crowded theater. But this is a misquote from the 1919 Supreme Court case of Shank versus United States, which said the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. In 1911 and 1913, dozens of people were killed in stampedes caused by someone falsely yelling fire at a crowded event. But you can certainly yell fire if a venue actually is on fire.

Shank said that speech that posed a clear and present danger was not protected under the First Amendment, but in 1969 the Supreme Court made that standard stricter by saying only that speech used for imminent lawless action was not protected under the first amendment, such as telling a rioting mob to burn down that store. The major exception to this rule are K through 12 public schools. This was established in cases like 1980 eight’s Hazelwood School District versus Meyer, which allowed a public school to censor a student newspaper in a way the government could never do to an adult newspaper. And in 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear middle schooler Liam Morrison’s challenge to his school’s decision to prevent him from attending class wearing a shirt that says there are two genders. The courts give K through 12 schools a fair amount of leeway in preventing speech they think will impair the school’s ability to carry out its educational mission.

However, as the 1969 case of Tinker versus Des Moines says, students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. If you or someone thinks a public K through 12 school stifled their speech, contact a group like the Alliance for Defending Freedom and see if you have a case in challenging them. But outside of those schools, uttering or typing speech that merely says someone is wrong or stupid, or even speech that uses vile insults should not result in a person going to jail or paying a fine. However, that does not mean there should not be any consequences for speech. Number three, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Just because speech should not incur legal punishment doesn’t mean you don’t deserve negative consequences because of something you said. Here’s a woman complaining about how publicizing teachers who said horrible things about Charlie Kirk’s murder allegedly violates the free speech principles that Kirk promoted.

CLIP:

Charlie Kirk built his platform on free speech. Now adults are being doxed and put on watch list for exercising that same right in a space that has absolutely nothing to do with their job.

Trent:

Or consider this post from Congresswoman Ill Han Omar to those claiming they’re for free speech while punishing and silencing those for exercising. That right you are not pro-free speech. Yes we are because you can say a person does not deserve to go to jail for speech IEB pro-free speech while also saying they deserve to lose their job for the horrible thing that they said. It’s not a crime to be a bad person, but bad people can hurt their employers through negative publicity and boycotts, and so the employer might let them go. It truly astounds me the number of people who don’t get this principle. Here’s a clip of se cup from CNN.

CLIP:

We have to be able to talk about the things that we disagree with. We have to do that civilly, but we can’t punish people for disagreeing with us. We can’t punish people for being jerks and celebrating the death of someone that’s not illegal and that shouldn’t be who we are.

Trent:

The conservative movement does not want the government legally punishing people for being jerks. All that’s happened is we are letting employers know your employee is a jerk and it’s up to the employer to decide, no he isn’t. This is just a dumb online mob or oh wow, I can’t believe he said that. Yeah, he’s got to go. It’s not illegal to be a bad person. If someone is morally compromised, however, then they should not be trusted with things like the education of young people. Ilhan Omar believes this, that bad speech yields bad consequences because she wrote the following in 2022 on Twitter back before Elon Musk bought the platform. Does the First Amendment protect your freedom of speech? Yes. Does it protect you from being shamed or shunned by others? No. Bottom line, your opinions have consequences like everything else in life. What’s happening now is liberals are basically saying, Hey, in 2020 you said cancel culture was bad, but now you guys are canceling us. How is that fair?

CLIP:

Right now, Republicans are trying to expose and get people fired from their jobs if they mocked Charlie Kirk’s death on social media. Now let me be clear, I don’t think anybody should be mocking it, but aren’t the Republicans, the ones who decry, cancel culture for years,

Trent:

Cancel culture that used an artificially riled up online mob to get people fired for simply uttering truths about the world like that marriage is between a man and a woman is wrong. These were virtual lynch mobs designed to keep people in line with leftist dogma, but merely pointing out when someone does something truly awful and thus deserves appropriate social consequences for their actions is not the same thing. Matt Walsh. Put it this way. There is a big difference between the left canceling and the right canceling people. The left cancels you for saying things that are true to the extent that the right cancels you. It is for saying things that are aberrant and sick, a pretty important distinction. So we see the problem isn’t cancel culture just like the problem isn’t guns, guns are only bad if you shoot the wrong people, and canceling is only bad if you cancel the wrong people.

Which leads to my final point. Number four, the consequences of cancellation should be just when I say cancel the wrong people. I don’t mean that liberals should only be the victims of cancellation and people on the right should always get a free pass. What I mean is that on a case by case basis, one should determine if mass protest online should be made over what someone said based on their culpability as an individual and the precise nature of what they said. For example, someone who is apologetic for a post they made a decade ago, especially if they were a child at the time and now disavow what they said should be treated differently than an adult who unapologetically defends something objectively offensive. They recently said we should also use reverse hypotheticals to determine if public shaming is justified and not the product of internal group biases.

For example, this Texas tech student was arrested and expelled for publicly mocking supporters of Charlie Kirk saying their homey dead and then allegedly assaulted one of them. If you’d agree, a conservative doing the exact same thing to a liberal would justify the same punishment, then this actual case would also be justified. Likewise, if a liberal who engaged in good faith discussions who also believed in LGBT ideology and legal abortion was murdered, I would condemn the murder. But I might also say I also vigorously disagreed with some of his views. If this would not justify me being fired from say, a teaching job, then the same leniency should be granted to teachers or others who make similar statements about disavowing the murder of Charlie Kirk while disagreeing with some of the things that he said. In contrast, if you would fire a teacher who cruelly mocked a liberal victim of an assassination, then it’s justified to do the same to a teacher who cruelly mocked Kirk’s assassination because in both cases you are not trying to punish a political opponent.

You are making the public aware of a morally deficient person who should not be entrusted with whatever job they have serving the public, especially if it’s a job where people entrust you with their lives and futures like something in healthcare or education. So for example, informing an event of the gravely confusing views of Father James Martin that results in the event being canceled is not unjust. Cancellation and accountability culture can help people who are genuine victims of cancel culture like the people who helped a nurse who was fired for reporting a surgeon who unprofessionally mocked Kirk’s murder. Ultimately, everyone should be treated with the same standards of justice as James two one says, my brethren show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. The problem with cancel culture from the 2010s to the early 2020s was that it punished people simply because they were rejected the dogmas of terminally online liberals who are good at whipping up a mob that overwhelm the owners of companies who weren’t familiar with how Twitter works.

However, the newer accountability culture says you cannot espouse insane ideas from blue sky or Reddit, ones that repulse even average people on the street and think you are free from the consequences of those actions. But frankly, we have a long way to go when it comes to evangelizing our culture. Most people, even non-religious people, were horrified at Charlie Kirk’s murder because they considered him to be a good person with controversial views. In contrast, hardly anyone was canceled for celebrating the murder of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, because he was allegedly a villain due to his involvement in the healthcare system. Finally, some people may say that cancel culture and the risk of being doxed or having your personal information leaked online justifies using an anonymous account. I talked about abusing online anonymity in a previous episode, and a lot of surprise, surprise anonymous accounts took offense at what I said and accused me of saying that it’s always sinful to be anonymous, which I never said.

Instead, all I said was that I personally consider anonymous accounts to tempting for Christians to use, but I’ll slightly amend this moderate position that I had. I’ll say this, Christians can use anonymity online, but it comes with many temptations toward evil. So these accounts must be used with great care. In many cases, anonymity is too tempting for individuals. This should be something everyone can agree with, and you can see my previous episode where I talk about the dangers inherent in anonymity, but there’s another point to consider. You could completely protect yourself from harm by only expressing your Christian views through an online avatar, your friends, your extended family coworkers, really anyone except for those at your church, they’d have no idea you were a Christian if you only express Christian views anonymously online. But in doing this online anonymity results in a kind of historian heresy, where the Christian is divided into two people, an anonymous avatar who publicly proclaims the faith free from any risk and the actual person who lives in the real world with all its risks, but free from the burden of publicly proclaiming the faith at that point. Who truly deserves the heavenly glory for speaking about the faith you or your online avatar de use Volt four 20. So to put all this together, Christians should not be part of a partisan knee-jerk vigilante online lynch mob that is out to get opponents in any way that they can. But Christians should hold people accountable, who spread evil and pray for their repentance from their evil deeds. I hope this episode is helpful for you and that you have a very blessed day.