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Who Are the Canceled
The Cancel Culture is amusing in an ironic sense. The canceler knows not what he does. And here I am not addressing the troll who gets blocked for name calling or profanity or sexual content. No one has a right to afflict others in that way. I’m thinking of the one that collects triggers like trading cards. He mentioned the governor’s ignominious conduct in blackface, canceled. She defended the governor’s ban on church services and restaurants while the casinos are running wild, canceled. We find ourselves in a world where there are fewer and fewer who believe that reasonable men of good conscious can disagree. Our institutions, even our Constitution, are under assault. Refuse to sit and be viciously slandered by a venomous, racist “anti-racist” whose entire philosophy revolves around perpetuating racism in every facet of life and you can pack up your things and hit the bricks. And Washington is eager to make it worse.
So let’s look at what happens when someone is canceled, to the canceler as well as the canceled. Taking the simplest case first, social media person one rises up to denounce Christians as responsible for every bad thing that happened in the last 2000 years and social media person two crushes that block widget to consign one to non-existence (in a totally solipsistic, post-modern, subjective, by which we mean false, way. I get it, I really do. We are not always tanned, rested, and ready to engage the endless stream of haters. But the possibility of finding common ground is lost. For the one issue the canceler surrenders any possibility of discovering an ally on other issues. Or that rarest of treasure, a friend. Or even a savior.
Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez denounced and dismissed Father Damien as a part of “white supremacist culture.” Ocasio-Cortez trades freely on her Catholicism, for example, here in an article she wrote for America, the Jesuit Review. Father Damien, a Catholic, came to a place where the lepers lay like rubbish in the streets, ignored and shunned by one and all, living the most debased existence while their disease progressed. As the Christians who came before him to establish the first hospitals and care for the ill at great personal risk, Father Damien conceived and led a ministry tending to these souls with selfless dedication and, on a nearly inevitable day at the age of 45, addressed his charges saying, “my fellow lepers.” White supremacist? Jesus sees all people One can fairly debate the merits of replacing a statue of Father Damien with a statue of Queen Lili’uokalani. Some might even argue that the spirit of Father Damien is an alien intrusion into the “sacred” halls of Congress. Saint Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Father Damien lived that creed to his own destruction, in service to the very lepers that everyone else walked past or banished to Molokai, a living witness to his Savor’s true and selfless love of neighbor. His detractors, not. Ocasio-Cortez later addressed the issue with Catholic News Agency, and then her staff tried to characterize her remarks in awkward fashion. By demeaning and canceling Father Damien, she has placed a stumbling block between herself and the image of Jesus revealed through Damien.
Jesus’ career is a long chain of cancellations. Herod the Great slew the Innocents of Bethlehem to assassinate this King of the Jews. Herod developed kidney issues and gangrenous genitals, dying an ugly, itchy, painful death soon after. The scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees sought mightily to cancel the rabbi that preached to large crowds in the Temple and scattered the moneychangers who paid the Temple priests to occupy the Porch of the Gentiles, the space reserved for gentiles to stand and hear the sermons and the Word of the Lord. Three of the brightest lights among the Pharisees would come to defect to this troublesome rabbi and claim a place in history and among the saints. The Sanhedrin, the high Jewish council of Jerusalem, plotted against Jesus, tried him, convicted him of blasphemy. Surely, convicting the Lord of being a blasphemer is a huge milestone in the chronicles of the Cancelers. A generation later Titus crushed Jerusalem and destroyed Herod’s Temple. Judas Iscariot plotted to cancel Jesus, whether to immanentize the revolution or hide his thieving or something else altogether is lost to history, but it is revealed in Luke 22:3 that Judas falls under the control of Satan after the Last Supper as he goes to put the conspiracy to arrest Jesus into motion. With Judas’ suicide, hanging himself from a tree, a most grievous and dishonorable fate in Jewish eyes, Judas has also canceled himself. Pontius Pilate comes across as indifferent at the trial, finding no fault, contriving an excuse to release either Jesus or Barabbas, but once that verdict comes down he shows our Lord the fullest cruelty available to Roman law. The scourging, the mocking, the procession, and, finally, the crucifixion. Pilate disappears into history soon after, and his beloved Rome will ultimately fall to this Jewish rabbi and see its great buildings picked apart to provide materials for other, lesser buildings. And then there is Satan, the accuser himself, the tempter in the desert, the possessor of demoniacs, and finally the possessor of the Lord’s own Apostle. His tireless work to effect this cancelation is fully realized at the cross. Satan had canceled Jesus’ Davidic reign on Earth and stands a colossus over the fallen world.
And then there was Sunday, and the canceler was canceled. The battle continues, but the war is over. He is risen. He is risen indeed.
This post originally appeared on my blog, here.
Happy Sunday.
Published in History
Have you noticed ‘cancelled’ is now spelled ‘canceled’?
I always thought the correct spelling was with 2 L’s not 1.
AOC is Catholic? Another example of Democrats pretending to be religious
Let me guess: her faith has shaped who she is and cultivated ’empathy’
The way I was taught was that if the final vowel was short you doubled the consonant. But my spell check preferred the single L. Your note sent me to Merriam-Webster, who provides this:
So my grade school tutoring is either insufficient or misremembered but I have overcome the linguistic tyranny of the mother country. (Actually, if my mother country had prevailed we would all be speaking Gaelic (one L).) Two peoples separated by a common language.
cancellation or cancelation?
Hillary or Hilary?
There is Catholic and then there is Catholic. A few attend Latin mass every Sunday and fret about crumbs from the eucharist being stepped on while others are more shaped by what they see in the Jesuit magazine America, linked in the post, which tends to be more temporal and “progressive” in their matter.
I prefer Hilary, who was a doer, to Hillary, who is a taker.
Perhaps your mother country did prevail. After all, in a few days, we will be celebrating Saint Patrick, not Saint George.
And traveller is now spelled traveler. It’s an American thing, I think.
@sisyphus
Wow … this is great. I just posted something on Cancel Culture … less than a minute ago. Seems like we’re pondering the same issues. Have you read Henry Drummond’s essay entitled The Eccentricity of Religion? It’s in his book The Ideal Life. It’s a wonderful walk with Jesus through his ever narrowing path to the cross, many cancellations along the way as you note in your post. I know it will encourage you greatly.
Thank you for your comment. The number of Ls, while always a welcome topic, is not what I had imagined would be the conversation.
In composing the part on Father Damien I, as is always a risk in describing a saint’s life and witness, started seeing the parallels with Jesus’ life and thought that fellow Christians might find the parallels interesting and fortifying. I have found the Drummond piece in a PDF from Be Still. I was astonished to find he was a 19th Century figure. I note in passing, if only to continue an earlier theme, that Rev. Drummond spells dullness with only one L. We have come so far. The whole book, The Ideal Life, is available in much less decorous form from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Here is an excerpt, I suggest that a diagnosis of madness, as described here, is a 19th Century corollary to modern cancellation (my checker wants the two Ls):
It is well worth a read. There is nothing novel in the current conflicts. Christianity was always madness in the eyes of the world, and the New Testament said as much many times.
His peace be with you all.
like Pope Francis?
Did Pat Sajak run out of consonants?
I apologize for commenting on spelling.
No more comments on spelling
It’s all good!
They’re the worst. Give me an honest atheist any day over these ‘devout’ Catholics carrying rosary beads around like a lucky charm.
The same people who never stop talking about the Hollywood blacklist are pushing the cancel culture
One of the first people I remember being cancelled is Count Dankula. He was arrested in the UK for teaching his dog to do the Sieg Heil salute then posting it to social media. At the time he maybe had 20 subscribers on Youtube.
I just checked he has 817000 subscribers now on Youtube. I am not saying being cancelled is a good thing. I am saying it doesnt seem to always work.
I never got that one right.
So are we now to pronounce cancelled as cansealed rather than cansulled? And travelled as traveeled? (Which sounds like one is taking a trip with eels.)
This started happening about fifteen years ago… Did this have to do with the “spell check” feature being improperly configured, or what?
I don’t know, but I think we’ve found our next Dr. Seuss.
@patsajak – I would like to buy a consonant and a refund for my vowel
Joining the consonantal army?