Like a Rabid Old Yeller

The benefit of not being any sort of influencer is that you can get away with a lot more without being canceled. High profile bloggers, big-mic spokespeople, celebrity pastors, top-dog executives, and vote-hungry politicians at times back out of a situation the way one does when exiting a meeting with the Queen of Britain – slowly reversing out while constantly bending their head below their chest. You best apologize quickly and often, or else.

Luckily for me, nobody asked for my opinion around here, which gives me a bit of freedom. If you’re too small to notice, you’re too inconsequential to cancel. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everybody. Cancel culture has been thrashing about wildly like a rabid Old Yeller being released out of his booth. Who even cares anymore about Christian bakers refusing to bake wedding cakes for sodomite couples? We’re targeting vaccinated citizens who now refuse to wear a mask again, after we first forced them to get vaccinated. Ain’t nobody got time for those bakers. People are too busy going door to door to drag people to the clinics to get masked, vaxed, and re-masked. Sound far-fetched? Enter New York. You refuse? Jail. We’re pretty close to the way they get it done in Barakwa.

Tolerant inclusivity is a thing of the past. Cancel culture is let loose off its chain with the electric fence turned off. That much is clear.

Remember the little brother from Old Yeller who felt bad for the locked up rabid dog and tried to open the booth to let it loose? Yeah. That was a bad idea. But his mean mom and older brother locked the dog up. It was his best friend. He was trying to help. What else was he supposed to do? How about not let the dog out?

So, if cancel culture is the rabid dog in this animal farm of ours, then who let the dogs out? Who’s the little brother feeling bad for the sickly beast? I believe the role of the kid feeling bad for the sick dog and letting it lose has been played by the seeker-sensitive, inclusive church movement that frankly has its Marvel origin story long before Willow Creek Community in the 70s. We have to at least go back a century before Willow Creek to the likes of Charles Finney and the 2nd Great Awakening. It’s been seeping out for a while.

Now, this is where I need to be careful. Not because of getting canceled, but just because it’d be the right thing to do. I am not a pastor or a theologian. Nor do I hold any kind of church office. So, I don’t have any pulpit from which to herald cleansing truth. I am a simple church layman. Some might say I’m opinionated, which, frankly, I think discredits my views on a subject. I would really appreciate being associated with words like “mellow” and “soft-spoken.” But alas, the lot assigned to me seems to be of a different sort. Measure of faith, right?

Whatever my association, I am not in a position to criticize the Church. In my humble opinion, too many restless Christians under 30 are too eager to throw stones from the sling of self-righteousness, only hurting themselves in the process. Like the Sons of Thunder, they wish to call fire from the heavens to solve their personal irritations. They think they’re walking in the footprints of Luther and Calvin, forgetting that both men held church office and acted to reform. The Reformers weren’t loose cannons spitting out accusations. They were loving pastors defending their flock. So, before I am accused of flinging poo, let me make a distinction. My attempt here is not to criticize the Church formal. What I would like to do is analyze the seeker-sensitive movement and draw a connecting line to our current situation of unfiltered cancel culture. And then, well, light it on fire.

What do inclusive churches that focus on tolerantly including everyone have to do with tyrannical cancel culture that allows only the few and chosen an inside pass? Those seem like opposing forces. Well, our Lord said that the church is the salt of the earth. He didn’t say to be salt. He said you are salt. The church flavors the world. So, if the world tastes a certain way, that’s not necessarily because the church is absent. Rather, more of the time the flavor of the world resembles the flavor of the church.

We are now eating of the rotten fruit. But what is at the root of our situation? If I’m connecting cancel culture to the seeker-sensitive movement, what can I point to and call foul? Some would draw a line to the fear of man driving the train, and that wouldn’t be inaccurate. But to be a bit more specific, what drives churches to present their services as entertainment spectacles? What directs preachers to nuance their way through the Word of God? What dictates pastors to be over-sensitive to hypothetical audience members misinterpreting their sermons? At the root of this havoc is the subjugation of order to the feelings of people.

The seeker-sensitive movement puts the attendees and visitors of the church in the judge’s seat of this American Idol show and subjects every component of the service to be pleasing and inoffensive to them. What’s wrong with that, someone will say. Didn’t Jesus have compassion on the people? Yes, he did. He had so much compassion that after feeding the crowds he made sure to season his message in such a way that they wanted nothing else to do with him.

It’s easy to build a straw man when writing on your own. Let me give a try at the other side. The movement isn’t about people’s feelings. It’s about being culturally relevant. Contextualization. The gospel is supposed to be communicated through culture. “All things to all men.”

How’s that?

Okay, sure, I like contextualization. I read the Bible in English and Russian, not Hebrew and Greek. I also wear pants, so I don’t have to gird up my loins. But the question I’m addressing, which doesn’t burn up as easy as straw, is what sets the standard? Who plays the role of Simon Cowell, around whom every participant walks on eggshells to please? The answer in both the seeker-sensitive movement and cancel culture tyranny is the feelings of men.

Religious relevance erodes into the slumps when the highest it can reach is what people emote. As the church in America recedes down there, it drags the entire culture along with it. Feelings should be addressed, yes, and then subjugated to the order of Christ. We don’t submit ourselves to our feelings. We don’t submit others to our feelings. We don’t submit ourselves to the feelings of others. And we don’t submit others to the feelings of others. Instead, we submit our feelings to Christ and call others to do the same. But, starting in the church, social order has been bending over to appease people’s emotions and perceptions, instead of having emotions and perceptions bend to Christ.

But we need the testimony! Testimony? Okay, what testimony is the seeker-sensitive movement witnessing to? Who is in the seat of Lord and Judge in their presentation? The order of the seeker-sensitive movement does everything it can to herald that Man is at the center of this show. This relevant approach has infected the dog with rabies and then let it loose. If the Tyranny of Feels continues rotting the church, we’re wasting our time addressing cancel culture out there. Who let the dogs out? We did.

But, let me not end on a note without hope. The bright side of cancel culture is that it cancels everything it comes in touch with – including itself. So, sit back and relax. Perhaps I can even work on my soft-spoken reputation.