Cancel Culture and
the Future of Christianity A major cultural change is taking place right before our eyes. Christianity—long a traditional and accepted part of society—is increasingly being silenced by governments, courts, businesses and technology. What does this mean? Where is it headed?
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by Mike Kelley
n the streets of Jerusalem, the apostles Peter and John experienced great success in preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. Following the spectacular response on the Day of Pentecost, when some 3,000 had been converted, God had opened the minds of hundreds of others to the gospel message. Before long the Church at Jerusalem numbered in the thousands (Acts 2:41, 47; 4:1). The Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish judicial council, took notice of the apostles’ success. Largely composed of Sadducees, a priestly sect who controlled the Jerusalem temple, they viewed the growing power and influence of Jesus Christ’s message as a threat. Peter and the other apostles had to be stopped. An occasion to arrest Peter and John presented itself when they miraculously healed a man who was lame from birth (Acts 3). With the temple guard to provide muscle, the Sanhedrin leaders swept in and seized the two apostles (Acts 4:1-6). “By what power or what name did you do this?” they demanded of Peter and John (verse 7, New International Version). Peter answered them, “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed” (verse 10, NIV). The Sanhedrin could not deny that many had witnessed the healing. This was no fluke. So in what was in essence an early case of attempted cancel culture, the Sanhedrin put a gag order on the apostles, ordering them to cease preaching in the name of Christ. But Peter boldly responded: “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:17, NIV 1984, emphasis added throughout). They refused to be canceled! Today in America we see cancel culture everywhere, but no one is more targeted than religious Americans, especially Christians. Traditional morals, ethics and values are under assault. Those who hold the Judeo-Christian values that were common for the first 200 years of the nation’s existence now find themselves mocked, belittled and attacked
if they dare to express or stand up for their views. As the influence of atheistic, secular humanist culture grows, it strives to obliterate references to God and Christianity in the workplace, on social media, in the classroom, in government and in mainstream media. And when God and Christianity are mentioned in these venues, it’s often in a hateful, disparaging way. Traditional values banned as Christian belief declines Despite being founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, religious influence in America has steadily waned, as shown by the most recent statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute. Its survey showed that the proportion of white Americans identifying as evangelicals dropped from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent in 2020. White Catholics dropped from 16 percent to 11.7 percent. During the same time, the percentage of respondents of all ethnicities not affiliated with any religion increased from 16 percent to nearly 24 percent. This has gone hand-in-hand with assaults on traditional values. Anti-God secularists have conducted a decadeslong war on Christianity with the goal of expunging it from American life. Classroom prayer, for example, was common in American public schools for the first nearly two centuries of the nation’s history. But in a complete corruption of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that the practice violated the First Amendment—in spite of the amendment’s plain wording that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” Free exercise of religion in schools was banned overnight. The following year the Supreme Court banned Bibles from schools. These two rulings have been used to suppress the free exercise of religion in the United States ever since. Vile practices legalized and normalized God is the Creator of life. All life is precious to Him, B Tm a g a z i n e . o r g
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May-June 2022
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