NAE Survey: 48% of Evangelical leaders report being canceled for views or ‘guilt by association’

NAE’s write-up: https://www.nae.org/evangelical-leaders-cancelled/

Looks to me like this is business as usual, since “evangelical leader” became a thing—because a good bit of the time, these guys are being canceled by other evangelicals.

It’s probably a bit worse now because of the Politicization of Everything. But it’s been standard operating procedure for a long time for leaders of institutions to cancel speakers from other ministries/organizations when they discover these speakers have views that aren’t compatible with the host organization’s emphasis or ideological boundaries.

Only two things are different now: 1) there’s more of it than in the past and 2) when you get canceled, you can now whine about ‘cancel culture’ to protest… rather than protesting about the substance of the points of disagreement and whether they’re that important, etc.

Cancelling leaders is the very core of Christianity. It is the foundation of our creeds and confessions and even councils. Certain leaders were excluded because they were no longer aligned to the principles of the church, association, committee… The conservative resurgance in the SBC was an example of leaders and teachers being excluded because of what they believed or taught.

With that said, the examples that they used in this article, were once again weak examples. They were leaders who were broadly evangelical who were excluded because of their attack on social constructs. I read one sermone by Ed Young, titled, “Woke or Awake”. It had practically no Scripture, used silly props, and his solution proposed was that the US needed to take on a more biblical worldview. Totally bypassing that only conversion in the heart through the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the gospel is the only way for a population to take on a biblical worldview.

We praise the freedoms that the church has been afforded in the US over the last 250 or so years. The older I get the more I feel that it has been a curse. It has made the church weaker in the US and has led people to view righteousness as a set of laws that protect practices in the Bible.

It strikes me that the “canceling” ought to be described by degrees. It’s one thing to have a post taken down on Facebook or to get blocked by someone on Twitter (I’ve had the latter). It’s entirely another thing to lose your job altogether.

And with David, I agree that adopting a more truly Biblical worldview—e.g. actually using Scripture as the meat of the sermon instead of using it as a launching point for what one really wanted to say, minding manners a bit—it would at least go down a LOT, or at least, we’d be suffering for Christ, instead of being general jerks.