Earth Accuses Earth: Responding to cancel culture.

I think that God is calling me to be a peacemaker, which is really annoying because what I’ve wanted to do for most of my life is fight people. My younger self was not so much conflict averse, as conflict enthusiastic. I revelled in rage because I felt that life had dealt me some crummy hands and by God someone was going to pay for it. Now, as I take a breather and enjoy a sit down, a nice cup of tea and a biscuit in the middle years of my life, I see that God has worked a kind of miracle in me. I do hate it when God does that.

It’s been coming on for a while. In my first year of ministerial training, I posted a silly photo of myself on Twitter, wearing a cassock and a stupid grin, with a caption from 1 Timothy 2:12:"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." The juxtaposition was an obvious joke to the people who had followed me for some time. Unfortunately, the tweet went viral and that was when my problems began.

‘THIS PERSON IS A DISGRACE,’ quote tweeted one Catholic priest. Other outraged people proceeded to bombard my mentions with further accusations, questioning everything from my personal morals to my suitability to be ordained, my poor theology and exegesis, my respect for God, the bible, the church, my husband and myself. Out of the avalanche of notifications, the odd poisonous phrase leapt out like shrapnel: ‘Woke Whore.’ ‘Stupid bitch.’ ‘Devil sucker.’ One man threatened to report me to my Archdeacon. I shouldn’t be allowed to continue training. The church leadership needed to discipline me.

If their intention was to make me question my behaviour, then it backfired. Being piled-on in this manner rarely creates the environment necessary for the discomfort of self-reflection. I felt attacked so I behaved defensively, stubbornly entrenched in my own righteousness, complete with a newly acquired victim mentality that stridently declared, ‘Poor me. Why are the internet men being so mean?’ This allowed no room for personal accountability or growth. For taking a step back and looking at the situation dispassionately and with sagacity.

Cancel culture is a contested phrase, which I’m defining here as the collective shaming of people who have committed a perceived offence, often for the reward of social credit. What started out as a valuable way for marginalised people to hold institutions and powerful individuals to account has mutated into a pernicious form of internet justice, online sabotage and mass shunning. It’s a blight that is not restricted to any one political leaning or community, and at its absolute worst, it manifests as large-scale, unrelenting bullying which can have devastating consequences. It is an abysmal way to treat people and as Christians, we should be taking no part in it. 

To add insult to injury, we are told that cancel culture is not a thing. It doesn’t exist. As someone who has been at the centre of several attempts to ‘cancel’ not only my online output, but my ministerial vocation, I can tell you that it absolutely does. The fact that the attempt was unsuccessful does not in any way negate the impact these incidences have had upon my mental health. The people who participated in the bullying or complained about me to my Bishop would probably frame it as merely holding me to account, or – that ubiquitous and obnoxious phrase – calling me out, when in reality, the goal was entirely punitive.

I’ve been finding parallels with the story from John 8:1-20 concerning the adulterous woman and her accusers and contemplating it as a teaching about the politics of judgment, rather than the injustice of someone wrongly accused. Indeed, Jesus does not exonerate this woman; he doesn’t tell her that she’s blameless or even that she’s forgiven. This is a story about how we deal with sin when we are all sinners. When you understand that, you realise that this story isn’t about the woman at all; it was always about the people throwing stones.

I fear we’ve become a church that is addicted to public condemnation. We delight in citing Jesus’ example of turning tables over in righteous fury as a justification for our own rage. We criticise anyone who doesn’t express the same level of outrage as us and dismiss their appeals to nuance and mercy by denouncing them as too privileged to care, or too centrist, or too complacent. Rage, when well-directed has its place, but regularly feeding off anger in an orgy of outrage is not what Jesus told us to do.

I am wary of the cleansing seduction of giving in to my anger because my own outrage is an ocean that I dare not swim in; to just dip my toe from time to time feels spiritually draining. These are well traversed waters from my past and they are dangerous and unfathomably deep. To wallow in even the shallows is to risk drowning. I ration my outrage and take sips when I need to. I will never again use it to drown out the humanity of anyone else.

Jesus talked far more about mercy than he ever did about rage, so if we’re going to turn tables over, we need to sometimes be willing to use them to shield those who are hated and despised, as well as the ones for whom there is no cost in loving. My faith is in a God who died but was resurrected and to follow Him is to believe that no one is beyond redemption. It’s to accept the inconvenient truth that even the most awful sinners are worth more in His sight than their worst moments. This is a God who shields sinners from stones, offers them a fresh start and empowers them to sin no more; not because they are threatened, shunned or shamed into it, but because they know they are loved.

It’s offensive to me that God extends grace to people whom I find repugnant. It goes against every unwritten rule I’ve absorbed about fair play, and yet. If I want to receive that gift of grace myself, can I do no less than to extend it to everyone else? There’s something liberating about admitting that I am a sinner too, and we are all but creatures of the mud. Some scholars have pondered that when Jesus bends down in front of the crowd holding stones, what he writes in the sand is earth accuses earth. God is the ultimate judge. Not me. Not you. When the heady rush of condemnation takes hold, we cast ourselves as judge. Earth accuses earth. We miss the redemptive power of loving the hated, because we are far too busy looking for stones to throw.

~ This post was written for Via Media Blog and was posted on March 8th 2022.