Cancel Culture & The Christian View of History

In 1966, Chairman Mao gave regular radio addresses in which he condemned “the four olds” of Chinese society: old things, old ideas, old customs, and old habits. This emphasis on eradicating China’s past led to the Cultural Revolution which took place from 1966 through early 1969.

Consider this report from Tillman Durdin writing for the New York Times in 1971,

The “four olds” had already suffered setbacks in the years of Communist rule preceding the Cultural Revolution, but the Maoist leadership tried to use the new revolutionary upsurge launched in 1966 to eliminate them completely.

In the turbulent years from 1966 to 1968, what remained of old religious practices, old superstitions, old festivals, old social practices such as traditional weddings and funerals, and old ways of dress were violently attacked and suppressed. Visual evidences of old things were destroyed, and there was an orgy of burning of old books and smashing of old art objects.

Young Red Guards invaded homes and shattered family altars that denoted continued Confucian reverence for generations of forbears. The few temples, mosques and churches still used for religious purposes were closed and put to secular use. Even those that had been left open for sightseeing purposes, such as the great Buddhist, Lama and Taoist temples of Peking, were barred and their statues, altars and other furnishings were removed.

For the modern American reader, this kind of thing might ring a bell. For quite some time, Black Lives Matter openly advocated against it’s own “four olds” formula which included the following statement,

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

And of course we have all seen the hubbub surrounding statue removal, the renaming of schools, highways, and so forth. Recent headlines report that books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Huckleberry Finn” are currently banned in certain Californian libraries.

While the Communist contempt for the past is well documented in history and fully displayed in various parts of our modern political climate, the Judeo-Christian approach to history is worth reconsidering.

Firstly, the Bible is not a decidedly conservative book. From the beginning to the end, the bible communicates a sense of dissatisfaction with the earthly status quo. Only the godhead itself is praised for staying the same. Everything else is in process of becoming. Therefore generic nostalgia is unwise,

“Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” — Ecclesiastes 7:10

Secondly, the Bible does not sterilize its heroes. All of the great heroes of the bible are also plainly shown to be great sinners. And not only great sinners, but marvelously hapless self-saboteurs whose sins really should have prevented them from achieving the goals of their particular quests. Consider Abraham who, freshly called out of Ur into Canaan to become the father of a great nation, promptly abandons his wife into the harem of Pharaoh. The point to see there is that by abandoning his wife, he was in essence forfeiting his mission for he could not become the father of a great nation without her.

I won’t provide a full list here but this sort of thing appears all the time in the bible’s hero stories. The bible routinely presents its heroes as being way in over their heads — men and women caught up in the current of God’s providence who would have bashed their heads on a mid-stream boulder if the waters had not turned in a very particular and improbable way.

Further, the bible presents these heroes as having one particularly nasty limitation. Even if they somehow managed to walk with God, these men and women had almost no success leading future generations to keep the momentum going. In this way the hero stories of the bible are always frustrating demonstrations of the law of spiritual entropy. The books like 1&2 Kings and Chronicles reveal this problem to devastating effect. There is never any real generational momentum developed in the bible. One generation may walk with God (however imperfectly) but the next generation seems just as likely to “forget the faith of their fathers.” We know intuitively that this lack of generation continuity says something about the limitations of our heroes. Whatever greatness they may have temporarily possessed, they lacked the capacity to transfer. Some were better teachers than they were doers (Solomon) but many were better doers than they were teachers (David).

And then we have the way the Bible deals with past traditions. Certainly the bible is partially reverential toward historical traditions (Proverbs 22:28) but not to a very great degree. The first major teaching of Jesus Christ recorded in the gospel of Matthew includes a whole series of “you have heard it said, but I tell you…” statements from Jesus.

Years later, the apostle Peter spoke quite negatively of at least some of the old ways, “knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers…” (1 Peter 1:18). Indeed the apostle Paul says that his former zeal for strict historical conservatism is no longer anything worth bragging about. (Galatians 1:14, Philippians 3:4–8).

And yet these men were not radical iconoclasts. They continued attending the temple and synagogue for as long as they were allowed to do so, and their writings are saturated with references to the old patriarchs and the Old Testament in general.

In conclusion, the biblical way of dealing with history is exceptionally nuanced. The biblical approach to history is neither conservative or revolutionary but rather reformational. It does not remove the past but neither does it revere it. Instead it adopts the initial edict of Eden to rule and subdue all things (including the past) for the present and future purposes of God.

All of this is possible because the central character of the bible exists both outside and inside of history. In the Old Testament, God is the worker of the providential current, carrying his chosen “heroes” downstream toward his purposes whether they like it or not (see Jonah). We credit Abraham for righteousness but understand that his righteousness was actually foreign to him — coming from God. If God had not been for him, he would have been just another ship-wrecked soul.

Then in the New Testament, God incarnates and enters real space and time and in so doing, becomes the only real hero worthy of veneration. And this is the key to the Christian view of history. Once Jesus becomes our hero, people can be people again.

Application:

We are living in a time in which individual and institutional hypocrisy can be suddenly and catastrophically exposed for all to see. We are observing with our own eyes what king David wrote in Psalm 14,

The Lord looks down from heaven
on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.
All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.

How then should we interact with anti-Semitic reformers, slave-owning puritans, or potentially adulterous apologists?

Consider the wisdom of Jesus in Matthew 7:2,

For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.

The modern temptation to cancel past historical figures because of their transgressions is a two-edged sword. If the presence of some particular sin disqualifies a past individual from present spiritual utility — if a slave owner cannot be your teacher, then the principle applies in the other direction as well. Perhaps you cannot be your teacher either?

What I mean is that if the presence of a certain sins cancels out any wisdom a historical figure has to offer, then the presence of certain sins also cancel out the critic’s capacity to have enough wisdom to discern such matters.

If a critic decides that his anti-Semitism makes Luther into a uselessly hypocritical fool, then the critic must be sure that he or she is free of any sins which are actually making them out to be just as useless.

Perhaps a person in their 20s can get away with this as they haven’t had much of chance to really break in their total depravity shoes. As a 45 year old, with plenty of evidence of my own sinfulness (and the strong suspicion that there are blindspots I cannot see), I couldn’t possibly find enough ground to stand on to execute that kind of judgment.

So I suppose we have a few options. We can do what Mao did in the Cultural Revolution and set the 20-somethings loose on a campaign to rid the world of the “Old Things” or we can try to think about history the way the Bible does.

If we would like to have future in which anything we say or think will be considered to be useful, however stained with sin, we should consider the words Jesus issues to Peter,

“All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” (Matthew 26:52)