Futureproof Forgiveness

The hallowed halls of cancel culture where Alex Rogers ended his life

Whatever the post-Christian future looks like, one thing is for certain, it would look less forgiving. Here we were thinking that if we got rid of the vengeful, judgey, judgey God-thing, we would become a culture of harmony and acceptance. Turns out all we did was outsource the vengeance to ourselves.

And that means that if the church is to futureproof itself for whatever is coming down the line in the West, its leaders should sort out the issue of forgiveness. Ministry leaders, theological leaders, lay leaders, household leaders. We are going to have to be known as a forgiving community because forgiveness will no longer be an assumed virtue. It will, in fact, be in short supply.

A lot is said about “cancel culture”, especially by those of us who remember the days before it kicked in. We view it as an unhelpful aberration and an overreach by those who seek “justice” – whatever that slippery term is meant to mean. And we think it will eventually fade away. (Hint: it won’t).

In light of the inquiry into the suicide of young Oxford student, Alexander Rogers, who had been ostracised by his university peer group for an ‘uncomfortable” sexual encounter, the reality is starting to sink in:  the latest generation of post-Christian, those who never knew Christianity in the first place – is in terror of a culture in which there is no absolution. No matter the amount of repentance or hand-wringing.

Speaking to The Times in light of the inquiry findings, student after student from the famous two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, highlighted just how terrified – and that’s the word they constantly use – they are of being “cancelled” on campus.  Or even being seen speaking to someone who has been cancelled. Because that makes you guilty by association.

If you think it sounds all Chinese Cultural Revolution, you are right. For after all, the cultural purity ideology driving this is straight from the Marxist textbook.  Listen to these words from Cambridge graduate, Ceci Browning in The Times:

“It is the paradox of my generation. We are supposedly the most tolerant and liberal, the most concerned with getting it right, and yet when one of our comrades slips up and falls out of step, they become the enemy. We cut friends and acquaintances from our lives on the basis of second-hand information about something deemed morally iffy that they may or may not have done, but we are also all perpetually afraid that precisely the same thing could happen to us.

She’s gets an HD for that comment, only losing a couple of marks for observing that this is “the paradox of my generation”. Nope, it’s not a paradox at all. In fact it’s exactly what one would expect in your generation, raised as it was in a post-Christian justice culture that is always on the look-out for slip-ups, non-alignment with allies, permanent revolutions etc.

Secular, conservative thinker and author, Douglas Murray, came to exactly the same conclusion in The Madness of Crowds when he stated back in 2019:

We live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption.  We do not know who could offer it, who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to an endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation.

As poor Alex Rogers found out. The post-Christian culture, steeped in a purity ethic with no reason to have one, does not know the meaning of the word “liberal”. Don’t confuse a rabid progressive tutor with zealous student followers, with the dinosaur that was the liberal professor of an Arts Faculty.

Ceci goes on:

I almost got cancelled twice: once for unironically using the term “snowflake” in conversation and then for writing a piece about flirting with a man who had a girlfriend. Foolish mistakes were transformed from forgivable accidents into life-ruining events.

Unironically? I mean how can you even tell these days? And then she nails it when she says:

The other thing that defined the culture was a lack of forgiveness. A policy of “one strike and you’re out”. Being a social justice warrior is no longer about being anti-government or anticapitalism, like the heralded student activism of the 20th century. Now, it’s anti-exoneration. Prisoners — those committed for more minor crimes, anyway — eventually get released and rehabilitated. But if you’re cancelled at university, you’re cancelled for ever.

Anti-exoneration. I mean, what did she expect? Forgiveness is a Christian virtue. It’s not a universally held belief. Even St Peter, when asking Jesus, assumed that, if not one strike, then seven strikes at most. Jesus soon put him in his place.

So what is a universally held belief these days? Vengeance is. That’s the permanence of the revolution for you. Those who were once its heroes becomes its villains eventually. “Yum- yum!” says the revolution as it stares hungrily at its young. (If you’ve never seen the majestic Russian movie Burnt By the Sun, drop everything now and go watch it).

But if I’m honest, outside the gospel, vengeance is my schtick too. At 57 years of age, enough people have crossed my path, done terrible things to me and to people around me, – and gotten away with it -, that vengeance just sits below the surface. There is no replay conversation that I have not won. No imaginary scenario in which I have no humiliated someone given the chance and the circumstances.

And I woulda done it all, either in my mind or in real life, if not for the gospel. And if that shocks you, then you truly don’t know your own heart. Or you are in denial.

But take the gospel out of it. Take out the man who on the cross called out for forgiveness to his Father for his executioners, and you see how much the Christian framework has changed the air we breathe (thanks Glen Scrivener).  And that air is increasingly toxic.

The late Tim Keller, who wrote so many wonderful books about culture and theology, in his final flourish turned his attention to forgiveness, it’s requirement and its increasingly cultural rarity.

Why? Because, as always, he was prescient about the direction that the post-Christian framework would take.  He said this in a The Atlantic article just before he died:

The new shame-and-honour culture either produces a heavily inquisitorial, merit-forgiveness approach or leads people to abandon forgiveness altogether.

He was right. He notes in his last book, Forgive: How Can I and Why Should I? that younger generations who become Christians will have to be discipled into this very strange notion that forgiveness is the right thing to do.

They won’t possess the framework of the older non-Christian who had grown up in the more obviously Christian era, who knew, even if they didn’t want to, that forgiveness was “the right thing to do.” That idea is gone, as the Ceci Brownings of the world will tell you.

Another graduate, Chris Ablett, told a similar set of tales to The Times, before adding this sombre conclusion:

Now I’m out of university, I’m still wary of getting cancelled. I may even have said things in this article that could get me cancelled. Sticking your neck out shouldn’t necessarily spell the end of your social life. But I’ll let you know if that’s true in a week’s time.

Wonder how he is going with that. There are those who will say “Oh that’s just university life, they will grow out of it.”

But here’s the rub: the university ideas of the 1960s are the universal ideas of the 2020s. That’s how these things work. You might shake your head at the excesses, but those at university now, will set the tone in the coming decades.  Never mind your social life, your work life, relational life, or – as in the case of Alex – your actual life. Unforgiveness is here to stay. It will be the new virtue, albeit under a different name.

In my latest book, Futureproof: How To Live For Jesus in a Culture That Keeps on Changing,  I write this:

The watching world struggles to do forgiveness at any level. It’s a cancel culture. But imagine a church in which, when we get it wrong, we don’t have to cancel anyone or leave the community and find another one because sorting out the problem is too hard. What if we neither hid our sin nor held the sins of others against them, but in both instances sought confession and redress? What if we decided to “drip-filter” Bible verses to each other during the week to encourage each other? What if we asked questions such as “How is that relationship going with the colleague who you are attracted to?” or “How can I help you with the bitterness you feel towards your mother?” Individualised piety is not our calling. Growing together as a holy temple is. Throughout the letter to the Ephesians, we see the possibilities. Indeed, what is striking about the New Testament letters is just how practical they are and how realistic about how communities truly flourish. There’s no sense of being satisfied with an outward uniformity that hides disfunction and discord.

It would be dreadful if the Alex’s, Ceci’s and the Chris’s came to our church doors, worn out by the constant need to hunt out the supposed oppressor, all the while hiding their own cancelling-worthy actions, and asked “How do you do forgiveness?” and all we had to say to them was “Oh the same way you do. If Mr Jones has a problem with Mr Smith then we just get them to sit on opposite sides of the building.”

But let’s not just get that right for pragmatic “missional” reasons. In the end that not futureproof forgiveness. Futureproof forgiveness has to be costly. In fact it’s not forgiveness at all if it doesn’t cost something to someone to forgive (cue caveat about forgiveness not being the same as reconciliation or restoration).

Such pragmatic thinking – let’s get this right for the world’s sake, – is simply immanent-framed thinking. We need forgiveness even if no one else sees it. Even if no one else turns up at our church.

For if you could peel back the materialist curtain of a church where unforgiveness was viewed as a feature rather a bug, something to be accommodated rather than rooted out, you would see a blackened, wizened fly-blown spiritual reality. Which is also true of your own unforgiveness towards someone.

You see, futureproof forgiveness in the church does not start with everyone else. That’s how the zealous purity culture of the Oxford and Cambridge types got a foothold in the first place. Everyone else is wicked, and I along am zealously righteous.

Futureproof forgiveness starts with you. Actually, it starts with me.