What's good – and bad – about cancel culture?

An ancient story of compassion inspires an ethical response to social censure.

Erin Crider

Erin studies and explains modern churches. She is an Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Torn fly posters layered under graffiti on a wall.

Ripped-off posters and graffiti.

Jazmin Quaynor, via Unsplash.

You cannot ignore cancel culture today. In her 2022 BBC Reith Lecture, the writer Chiamanda Ngoni Adichie called it “social censure”. Even beyond universities and other public forums, many of us worry about the effects of cancel culture in everyday social settings. Saying the wrong thing, or trying to respond well when someone else does, can quickly lead to awkward family gatherings, strained meetings, and broken friendships, or awaken the ever-present social media trolls. In a post-pandemic moment, when people are already struggling to re-establish healthy human interactions, cancel culture can make social engagement seem even more challenging. How can we navigate this moment well?

Behind the fraught discussions and growing angst around cancel culture, we can perhaps detect something well worth preserving: compassion. Some of the most heated controversies today involve language concerning people who have been historically disadvantaged. Genuine compassion motivates many who want society to speak more kindly, with more understanding, in order to avoid perpetuating harm to people who have already suffered. People who have been hurt deserve to be acknowledged, and that means taking their pain seriously. This compassion is an important and noble instinct. Many faith traditions call us to honor the vulnerable and pursue justice.

'Silence out of fear of ending a relationship itself ends the relationship.'

At the same time, resistance to cancel culture also includes an element of compassion. Within the voices expressing concern about cancel culture can often be heard a humble awareness that we all are prone to say the wrong thing at times. We cannot hope to learn or grow without honest risk and mutual, human grace. A brief period of silence to let emotions cool can be helpful; ending a relationship permanently seems less helpful. It might seem easier to say nothing than to risk offence, but silence out of fear of ending a relationship itself ends the relationship. Seeking to continue a difficult but important conversation can also be an important and noble instinct. Many faith traditions also encourage humble self-assessment and generous engagement with others. As the Bible records Jesus saying, “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone.” None of us is wholly above reproach, and we all need a bit of compassionate grace.

So how do we balance these conflicting calls of justice and grace?

This conflict might seem peculiarly modern, but in the story we re-tell every Christmas, we see a young man named Joseph wondering how to balance justice with gracious concern for someone who had deeply disappointed him. Joseph is engaged to Mary, but she has been found to be pregnant. Joseph is sure the baby isn’t his. In their culture, a woman who was pregnant outside of marriage brought shame to her fiancé, her family, and the whole community. Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph was “a righteous man,” which means that he appreciated the demands of justice. Ignoring her situation meant ignoring the pain they all felt, papering over a grave offense which they wanted no part of. At the same time, though, the text also tells us that Joseph was “unwilling to put her to shame.” Like many people today, Joseph wanted to leave Mary some way to move forward with her life, but their culture did not provide people much opportunity to learn from tragic mistakes. Sometimes, it can feel as if ours doesn’t, either. If you’re familiar with the story, you already know how it ends, but it’s important not to skip too quickly past Joseph’s dilemma. It feels strangely modern, Joseph’s desire for justice coupled with his equally strong desire not to see someone condemned because of a single mistake.

'Courageous compassion creates much needed opportunities to heal, learn, and grow.'

Thankfully, the story also describes a way forward from Joseph’s dilemma: the baby in Mary’s womb, Jesus. In Jesus, we see the depth of God’s compassion for all who suffer. Jesus never ignored the painful consequences evil can create. Indeed, he allowed himself to experience the absolute worst of humanity. As an adult, Jesus was thrown out of his home village and religious community. According to the gospels, he endured one of the most unjust trials ever recorded. Jesus was tortured, beaten, and sentenced to a cruel death. When we suffer injustice, we are not experiencing something alien to Jesus, and therefore, alien to God.

But there is another side to Jesus’ suffering that is equally important: Jesus also demonstrates profound compassion for people have made terrible mistakes. Jesus never mis-stepped or said a single cruel word, but he allowed himself to experience the full shame and isolation of being cast out of society. Crucifixion was the ultimate censure, being publicly put to death outside of the walls of the city. Yet even in this moment, Jesus demonstrated compassion for people who had harmed him. While on the cross, he forgave those who put him there. Jesus offered forgiveness to the man dying on the next cross to his own, who by his own admission deserved his fate. In contrast to aspects of cancel culture, Jesus’ actions at that moment of extreme injustice tell us that human redemption is always possible. Jesus created a compassionate way forward from guilt and shame. Whatever our situation, we can find life-giving grace and healing in Christ.

Compassion isn’t easy. It cost Jesus dearly, and at times it will cost us, too. Courageous compassion creates much needed opportunities to heal, learn, and grow. When we suffer and when we err, cruelty and failure do not get the last word. As it says in the last few pages of the Bible, Jesus is making all things new. Cancel culture ends conversations and damages relationships, but a better balance between the righteous demands of justice and the need for redemptive grace remains possible.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Psychology

4 September 2024

5 min read

Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.

Inside Riley's head.

Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us.

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture:

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.