J. D. Greear's Cancel Culture

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're going to talk today about a tweet that J .D. Greer put out there. Actually now I think it's a few weeks ago. It's just been on my list of things to respond to about cancel culture because I think what Greer expresses in the tweet I'm about to read to you, and there's an article that kind of accompanies it from last year, is a common talking point and misperception I hear progressives use against conservatives who might want someone to be fired or replaced or in this case leaving their church, if you can believe that.

That's cancel culture. So I'm going to explain what cancel culture is, and that's really all there is to it. It's going to be a short episode. We don't really need to say a whole lot, but I wanted you to see this just because I don't want people being taken in by this kind of thinking if at all possible.

J. D. Greear's Tweet About Cancel Culture

It is a tool that's been used, deployed against conservatives. Here it is. J .D. Greer. He says, it's amazing to me, and this is March 22nd, so it is a few weeks ago, it's amazing to me how many Christians who rail against cancel culture have canceled their church membership over disagreement with their church leaders.

And this past year over things that compared to the gospel will probably seem rather insignificant in the light of eternity. Doesn't that sound nice? Doesn't that sound nice? He just cares about the gospel, and that insinuation, I guess, is these people probably don't as much because they're leaving churches that have the gospel, and because that's the only thing that really matters, except they jam so many things.

J .D. Greer specifically, I've been reading a lot of things that he's done, jamming all kinds of things into that understanding of what it means to care about the gospel. Getting rid of the Brodus gavel, we got to do that because of the gospel.

So, it does go beyond the gospel for J .D., but he uses that term. It sounds nice. It sounds like he cares about it. People who are leaving their churches probably don't, and they're hypocrites. That's the other insinuation here.

They rail against cancel culture, but really, they're the ones that are part of cancel culture because they've canceled their church membership. I mean, this is just, it is juvenile thinking, but I'm seeing this kind of thinking get traction, and so I wanted to respond to it, and I'm going to show, or read, I guess I'll read.

Let's see. Here's the Apostle Paul's response to our cancel culture. This is a short blog, and I'll read it for you. Recently, I typed in how to be happy on our collective consciousness, Google, and one of the first articles was three ways to be happy always, quite a claim.

This article had some legitimately good advice, but it was sprinkled with some proverbs that were less than helpful. Let's see here. One suggestion, let me see if I can turn this so you can see me here as I'm reading it.

One suggestion, he says, was that seek out our positive relationships with happy, optimistic, and cheerful people. If you're struggling with your current relationships, seek out new ones. In other words, the moment things get difficult, try deleting and replacing those people.

This is enthroned activity in our society. Now there's an element of truth here, and it's one that in many circles is too often missed. There are times when it's wise to regulate relationships. If you're abused, if you're taken advantage of, you give some scenarios.

Sadly, however, he says this kind of relational regulation gets warped when it is applied to other conflicts. The recent rise of cancel culture, for instance, is an extreme version of this impulse. For many people, the way to deal with difficult relationships is not to fix them, but simply to end them.

Got a friend causing problems in your life? Cut them out. Someone in your small group says insensitive things? Leave that small group and find a new one. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 12, if possible, be at peace with everyone.

So let's see. He says that the gospel, again, I knew he'd bring it into this somehow. The gospel, by contrast, sends us into the world to love people as we have been loved, and that means that we don't resort to ending relationships.

We walk the messy road of confrontation, which is, it's just interesting him saying this because I don't know how many people have tried to reach out to him. I know some personally to confront him on some of the things he said, but anyway, that's his article on cancel culture.

Why Leaving a Church Is Not the Same as Cancel Culture

So, and Danny Akin, I think it was around the same time, it wasn't too long after this, had also put out a tweet, I remember. He's also in that area, the Durham-Raleigh area, because he's in Wake Forest, just north of Raleigh at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Greer graduated from there. Greer's in Durham. I'm not saying that they colluded. Greer wrote his article, Danny Akin put his tweet. But there's a lot of groupthink in the SBC and in that area in particular.

And Akin had put out a tweet, I remember, that was similar to this where, you know, cancel culture has gone too far. Actually, it was more recently, I think, because it was the Dr. Seuss thing. And, you know, and it's just the way, though, cancel culture is used so often is so sloppy.

When, so we're talking, so J .D. Greer, let me kind of categorize this all. J .D. Greer's talking about ending relationships because you just personally don't like the person or you're offended by something very small and insignificant.

That's part of cancel culture, apparently. Danny Akin talks about, you know, cancel culture, he says, was always wrongheaded. And it's gone too far when they're trying to cancel Dr. Seuss books. When in reality, Danny, Danny Akin, it's his seminary that canceled Bode Backham from coming and speaking at the seminary in 2019.

It's it's him personally, actually, who wanted to cancel because I remember it was right before I think I went back on campus. They wanted to cancel the Confederate battle flag, basically. And they also wanted to cancel one of his professors there did an article and it was hosted on Southeastern's website.

They wanted to cancel Confederate monuments as well. These were bad things. And I'm sure it goes beyond that, because I remember in 2017, there was all this all these statements that were being made against Donald Trump.

Danny Akin had signed some of them or against the alt-right. Very clearly, if you if you define cancel culture as being very broad and it's just something you don't like and getting rid of that thing, if that's all that cancel culture is, then cancel culture is just it's always been around.

There's this the new term cancel culture is nothing new. And of course, in one sense, we know because of, you know, Ecclesiastes teaches there is nothing new under the sun. Of course, there have been people cancel culture has always been around, at least in some form that attitude, that tendency.

But there is something new, at least in our immediate context, our immediate memory about the cancel culture happening now. And that would include things like getting rid of monuments, trying to, you know, get rid of the president in some way or limit his speech by kicking him off Twitter, these kinds of things.

All the actors that have like the actor just recently on The Mandalorian who was canceled, lost her job, people losing their jobs over and over. Juan Riesco, we did a whole documentary on that. And number one business in Chicago on Yelp, gone.

That list goes on and on and on and on. And there's something different about that. I think we know that. And that's why we have the term cancel culture, because this is something that in our at least immediate memory is new.

Of course, people have always ended relationships. Of course, there's always been figures, voices, individuals, types of music, whatever that people have. Certain people haven't appreciated it and they haven't had or wanted to have around them.

Of course, that's always been the case. But there's something new about what's happening now. And that's what I want to talk about, because this tweet, especially from J .D. Greer, just doesn't seem to understand that.

It wants to broaden the definition of cancel culture to just leaving your church can be cancel culture. And here's the thing. This is what I want to say. The reason that it is something new, and we have a term for it, is because it involves people losing their livelihoods.

And rooted in that is this idea that certain people should not have the same privileges or rights as others that are generally afforded in public discourse, civil discourse, society. That's what cancel culture is.

The logical end of cancel culture is getting force involved, getting the government involved to restrict some people's rights to free speech or freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, these kinds of things.

If it's not on that level, it will be on a corporate level of some kind, and that's what we're seeing with social media. That's what we're seeing with businesses who are firing people, sometimes as sacrifices to sacrificial lambs to appease the woke gods, the egalitarian woke gods in our culture.

So cancel culture is about more than just leaving your church. It's about ruining lives. It's about preventing people from accessing what has normally been afforded to most people in society. If you want to move somewhere and get a job, you can do that.

Cancel culture is trying to make that so challenging for someone that they can't. Think of someone like Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab. I mean, they've had to build their own browser. If you donate to them, you can do it with, I think you have to do it through Bitcoin or I don't remember the other way, but they've basically been canceled from their banks.

He's been blacklisted from so many things. It's hard for him to just engage in commerce. So he's having to go around all these things. It's very difficult for him. And what's the reason for it? Well, because there's bad press associated with him.

You know, Gab is supposedly anti-Semitic or something like that, because they allow people on, they allow free speech. That's basically what that amounts to. Torba himself hasn't, you know, it's not him personally, but he's basically, that's what's happening to him.

I remember back, what, a year ago? Well, not even. It was last summer. There was a police shooting in Atlanta. Ray, I think it was Ray Shard, if I'm not mistaken. Brooks, I think was the name. And if you remember correctly, the officer, the situation was, the officer was, there was someone in a Wendy's drive-thru, I think it was, that was drunk or something, had stopped the car.

Police officers gave him a sobriety test. He failed. They were arresting him. And then he somehow like overpowered the police officers and tried to run away, stole one of their tasers and shot it at one of the police officers.

And in return fire, the police officer took the life of this young man. After that though, that police officer, not only was he reprimanded and canceled for lack of a better term, his family members were targeted, losing their jobs.

That's what cancel culture is. It's so much bigger than just, I have a disagreement with an individual and I don't want to be around them anymore. Cancel culture is, I don't want, there's a hatred. I want to take away their civil liberties.

I want to prevent them from having access to things like free speech and freedom of assembly and ability to even work to get a job for their family. I want to make them a leper so no one wants to touch them.

And I want to, I want to, you know, exert dominance over them. That's, that's what cancel culture is. That's why there's a new term for it. That's why, that's what makes this different. These certain, these statues are not acceptable in our society anymore to be displayed.

They must be memory hold. They must be forgotten. They must be, there is no honor associated with them whatsoever. Nothing worth, valuable, worth remembering. That's cancel culture. It's closer to the memory holding of 1984 than it is, you know, just having a disagreement so you leave a church.

So J .D. Greer here is playing fast and loose with this definition by putting his own spin on it and taking it out of the historical context that has created this term to basically minimize it to just leaving your church because you disagree with, and what?

You disagree with your church leaders over things that compared to the gospel probably seem rather insignificant. Well, let's see the two big things that people are leaving their churches over. Number one, they're not open.

They're, you know, it's amazing to me. Some of the churches that even are opening still are having restrictive openings or certain ministries aren't going, or there's, most churches still have some kind of a restriction because of COVID, in my experience at least.

And many people are leaving their churches because sometimes they're not open a period, but other times it's like they don't, you know, maybe you can go to a service or something with a mask probably, but your Bible studies are canceled or something.

You're not getting the interaction that you used to have, which is part of, you know, going to church is the fellowship, the interaction, using your spiritual gifts in a corporate context. I mean, what's the point if you don't have those things?

If it's just going to listen to a lecture, you can do that on YouTube. You get exegetical preaching on YouTube, right? There, there's a reason you go to the physical location and you meet with believers.

And so that's, that is a significant enough disagreement, especially since gathering together is pretty much an assumption. If you're going to be using your gifts, using the full spectrum of gifts and to leave your church over that, because that's not happening is completely legitimate.

It doesn't have to be somehow tied to the gospel, you know, directly to justify leaving a church. What's the other thing that people are disagreeing over? Well, social justice, right? The whole BLM movement and churches that got on the bandwagon and bought into postmodern ideas, standpoint theory, bought into the neo-Marxist ideas, redistribution schemes of some kind, or at least they bought into the Marxist critique of America and made that tethered that often is the case to the gospel in some way.

I either creating something similar to a Galatian heresy where you have to do these social justice things to be true to the gospel somehow, or it's part of your gospel work, or just making that part of Christian ethics when it's not, it's egalitarian and it actually contradicts Christian ethics.

That's also significant enough to leave a church over. Their view of truth is significant enough to leave a church over. If they don't believe in objective truth, then that destroys revelation. Why go to a church like that?

You're no better off going to a church like that than you would be going to a completely modernist liberal church that thinks that the Bible is not true, but it's got some nice stories that we should believe because those stories are significant in some deeper spiritual way.

Either way, you're dealing with the same problem. You don't actually believe this is true. So those are significant enough disagreements and they don't have to be tethered to the gospel. This whole tweet is terrible and all it is is manipulation.

It is insinuating people who have left their church are hypocrites and that they don't care about the gospel. That is what J .D. Greer is trying to communicate and it's pretty disgusting. The words coming to my mind is slithery, slippery.

He's got a really slippery way of communicating all that and it's sad. I wanted to put that out there just to correct that notion. The next time you hear someone saying, well, you know, conservatives or Christians or I don't know, whatever group is, they're forwarding cancel culture because, oh, I don't know, maybe they want someone apologizing for something they said, which was an error.

Or maybe they want someone fired from their job because they don't actually believe the gospel, but they're teaching at an institution that says they believe the gospel. That's not cancel culture, not necessarily.

And you can correct that. You can say, well, are we trying to make that person a leper? Are we trying to take away their civil liberties? Are we trying to prevent them from making a living to feed their family?

Are those people trying to somehow change laws or corporate policies to prevent people from having the ability to freely communicate their ideas? If that's not the case, then it's not really cancel culture because cancel culture is unique.

And I just thought that was obvious, but apparently not. So hopefully that was helpful for some of you. If you hear that kind of thing, God bless. Rant over, I guess. And last but not least, I do want to just mention if you are, and I said this yesterday, but if you are in the Lynchburg area, even if you're not, if you're close by, come join us on Saturday on April 17th here at Juan Riesco.

We're going to screen paint the wall black. Link is in the info section, and he's going to be there to take questions. I will be there as well if you want to meet me, and I hope that you can make it. There is a limit to the seating, so you want to sign up now.