Previous Articles (One, Two, Three)

“Cancel culture” has a nice ring to it, a kind of poetic rhythm when one says the two words together.  Go ahead, say them, “cancel culture.”  It does now have a Wikipedia article.  When I googled books with the terminology “cancel culture,” a glut of books appeared written in 2020-2021 with “Cancel Culture” in the title.  I’ve not read one of them.  I wanted to know how early the term appeared, because it’s been on my radar for at the most two years.

A book, Environmental Impact Assessment, written in 1979, reads:

We have come to the realization—yet again—that knowledge is power, that we need to keep building on our science and be ever mindful that a democratic society is based on genuine public engagement, not the so-called cancel culture that is denying genuine dialogue (author’s italics).

Before I graduated from high school, the quote appeared.  Surprising.  That’s the first and only usage I found in the twentieth century.  I don’t know who popularized it.  I went about trying to trace it, but I don’t know who originated the terminology.  Originally, it seems, it was “call-out culture,” the idea here being that described by Adrienne Matei on November 1, 2019 in The Guardian:

The contemporary idea of a “call-out”, however, generally refers to interpersonal confrontations occurring between individuals on social media. In theory, call-outs should be very simple – someone does something wrong, people tell them, and they avoid doing it again in the future. Yet you only need to spend a short amount of time on the internet to know that call-out culture is in fact extremely divisive.

She pointed to a statement by former President Obama in an Obama Foundation Summit, which was on October 30, 2019, in which he said:

If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong word or verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’ That’s not activism.

The rise of the term “cancel culture” seems to occur in the middle of 2020, which also happened to be right at the beginning of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic.’  Now it is well entrenched, and the earliest popular book seems to be Primal Screams, which said:

Consider an example that materialized in March 2019, captured in a New York Times piece called “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture.”  It reported the case a (sic) young black man who identified as gay and was employed as a “sensitivity reader” by various publishing houses.  In that capacity, he enforced “cancel culture” (i.e., the flagging that progressive groupthink would deem unacceptable).

Wouldn’t it be an interesting job to be a “sensitivity reader”?  I had never heard of it until this quote.  I googled that too, and it appears a lot, 40,000 times.  As a pastor, a chunk of your congregation could take that job while listening to your sermons.  The New York Times article was written on March 8, 2019.

Cancel culture emerged as perhaps one of the top issues for the 2022 mid-term elections.  The cancel culture tried to cancel Joe Rogan on Spotify and failed.  On the other hand, Whoopi Goldberg said something offensive about the Holocaust on her show, The View, and they cancelled her for a few weeks, so she could take time to reflect on her ignorance, stupidity, or callousness.  Another aspect, it seems, of cancel culture is a reaction to the unvaccinated, losing one’s job even if he has natural immunity.  This relates to the trucker protest on the U.S. Canadian border, which is bigger than a vaccination issue.

During this last six months I’ve worked on a lot of writing projects and wrote almost two chapters on sanctification for our book, The Salvation That Keeps On Saving.  The two chapters are “Dedication and Sanctification” and then “The Biblical Theology of Sanctification,” the latter of which I’m halfway done, the former I’ve completed.  For the latter, I am looking at every use of the related Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament words for sanctification, which is almost 1,000.

You reader know that God canceled in the most severe way everyone on earth except for eight people in Genesis 6-9.  He ordered the cancellation of all the Canaanites.  When Israel didn’t, Israel suffered greatly for that.  The Assyrians and Babylonians tried to and succeeded greatly at cancelling Israel.  The Bible requires churches to cancel someone’s church membership, called by us, “church discipline.”  Jesus taught that in Matthew 18:15-17 (See our book, A Pure Church).

God says in Leviticus 20:24, “But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.”  Two verses later, He continues: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.”  It’s not just Old Testament.  Jesus said in Matthew 13:49, “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just.”  Many more examples occur.