You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.
In The Times this week was a disturbing piece by Alice Thomson on cancel culture on university campuses. A student is deemed by their peers to have behaved or spoken inappropriately, and they are then intentionally shunned by their peers – even to the extent that those who do befriend the offender are also shunned. Thomson says this is worst at Oxford and Cambridge, whose smaller-social-group collegiate structure makes ostracism both easier to effect and harder to escape.
She tells the tragic story of twenty-year-old Alexander Rogers, an Oxford student ‘who became the subject of rumours after a post-pub tryst.’ No formal allegation was lodged, but he was shamed by peers, and a week later took his life. An independent review requested by his college described a culture in which ‘students could rush to judgment without knowledge of all the facts, could shun those accused, and a “pile-on” might occur where a group would form a negative view about another individual.’ Some students are shunned for years; it makes people terrified to put a foot wrong.
There are dangers of much wickedness in such a culture.
Cancel culture makes it easy to break the ninth commandment, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.” This is God’s prohibition of the making and spreading of false allegations. It covers damaging but baseless rumour, speculation and all forms of slander. It is so important to the God of justice that, even though it is surprisingly specific, it is placed in the Ten Commandments. It underlies the principle in English law that a person is deemed innocent until proven guilty.
Do not get me wrong: there is such a thing as immoral behaviour, and it needs to be properly dealt with. Whistleblowing and proper safeguarding process where criminality is suspected are essential for the proper working of justice. But to our God, that same concern for justice also requires that no-one be condemned falsely. As the reviewer above wrote, ‘students might rush to judgment without full knowledge of the facts.’ The coroner in Rogers’ case spoke about ‘the exclusion of students from social circles based on allegations of misconduct, often without due process or a fair hearing.’
A further danger with cancel culture is that it is often associated with the dreadful sin of self-righteousness, so often condemned by our Lord Jesus in His conversations with the Pharisees. The temptation to join the ‘pile-on’ is strong, for it’s a great way to signal our own virtue; moreover, we fear being ostracised ourselves for failing to condemn. But here is a self-righteousness which is often full of hypocrisy and has little awareness, it seems, of our own weakness. The word ‘unforgivable’ is used with little sense of our own urgent need for forgiveness. And in our desire to score points, we become blind to our own cruelty.
Our Lord Jesus Christ has a better way. He did not sweep sin under the carpet, but He did mix with the cancelled of His day. He brought them new life and a fresh start. But He also warned us, by including slander as one of the sins emanating from our hearts that make us unclean before God (Mark 7:23).
Of course, this kind of cancel culture extends beyond universities. We all need to ask ourselves: how might we be tempted to join the ‘pile on’?
There is more on the ninth commandment here.
