‘Cancel culture’ is nothing new — it dates back hundreds of years

Many on the political right recently have been bemoaning the rise of a new nefarious social phenomena they label “cancel culture,” where individuals or corporations are publicly rejected and scorned for expressing beliefs that run afoul of a new social norms advocated by those on the political left.

While the label “cancel culture” may be new, a look into religious history shows that this social dynamic is actually one of the oldest in humankind.

My original research in religious studies focused on the origins of Christianity in the East, particularly the roots of the Greek Orthodox Church. One of the indelible lessons of this research was that the great debates of “orthodoxy” (meaning “true belief” or “glory”) versus “heresy” (false belief) were less about divine revelation and more about societies negotiating the boundaries of acceptability within groups. While Truth may be absolute, human’s access and articulation of Truth has proven to be a much messier process.

For example, during the first few centuries of Christianity, it was acceptable to hold a wide variety of views about Jesus, as long as such views fit within rather broad limits. After the First Ecumenical Council and the pronouncement of the Nicene Creed in the Fourth Century, many of the beliefs commonly expressed in the second century would lead to a mob attacking your home or threats of excommunication; the boundaries of acceptable definitions of Jesus had narrowed dramatically. What was acceptable in the second century had become heresy by the fourth.

While the social worlds in which we live are no longer as dominated by theological questions and we all can condemn past abuses by churches enforcing their preferred beliefs, the rise of “cancel culture” is another example of society negotiating the boundaries of social acceptability, the new American orthodoxy. Over the last half-century, the loudest voices in the debate of acceptable norms have typically come from the political right, such as rejecting restaurants that refused to enact segregation in the 1960s or calling for boycott of Harry Potter books in the 1990s or expelling Rob Bell from the graces of American Protestantism for rejecting the notion of an eternal hell in 2010.

Today many of the loudest voices advocating for new social norms may come from the left, and the right has coined a new catchy phrase — “cancel culture.”

But the process of defining the boundaries of acceptability within society is parallel to debates on orthodoxy and heresy. The norms of society are always shifting and heated debates are part of that messy process. It is not the rejection of “freedom” to shun individuals and corporations that advocate for ideas abhorrent to the norms of society; few on the political right would come to the public defense of anyone advocating eugenics, slavery, or a flat earth — these positions are settled, at least for most. The question is, and has always been in theological debates in the past, where to draw the line of acceptability.

Commentators on the right should not raise the specter of “cancel culture” as if it were some new, foreign assault upon American freedoms; such a characterization is neither accurate nor productive.

Rather, you win social debates about the boundaries of acceptability by offering responses with new ideas and arguments. When society is at its best, the human attempt to live up to our highest ideals occurs through respectful debate, not by bemoaning and blaming the process whenever it is not your team playing offense. Even if the process can be messy, the hope is that the better angels of our nature win out eventually.

How we conduct this debate is a test of our society and it begins by honoring the good intentions of others. One of the enduring lessons of historians of early Christianity is that nobody ever chose to be a heretic; each side argued for positions they believed were right and good for society. Heretic is the label placed upon the losers of debates, only after the messy process that determined orthodoxy was settled.

Likewise today, the vast majority of those on either side of the debates around the boundaries of contemporary social acceptability have good intentions and wish for the best for our society.

So instead of raising fears of the novel rise of an unprecedented “cancel culture,” perhaps we should look to common ground discovered in these shared good intentions and the collective hope for a better, truthful and more just society.

Contributing columnist Stephen Lloyd-Moffett is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.