Imagine the following scenario. A host invites a guest to his home. The guest fully warns the host, “Are you sure? Some of your neighbors will think I’m not one of them and will not like me.” The host reassures the guest that his invitation stands. So, the guest packs up his bags and leaves for the host’s home. Just before the guest arrives, the host indeed hears loud complaints from the neighbors — the substance of which amounts to “He’s not one of us and we don’t like him.” The host caves to the pressure, and throws the guest under the proverbial bus by broadcasting a message to everyone that the guest is suddenly no longer welcome, and is indeed suspect.

Wouldn’t this scenario represent an obvious violation of our basic understanding of hospitality?

This scenario also describes the standard cancel culture script whereby institutions cave to mob-like pressure and rescind invitations to speakers that others find objectionable. We don’t have to look far to find numerous examples of this, including what happened to my friend and The After Party co-founder David French.

The critique of cancel culture has tended to appeal to secular values like free speech, tolerance, and pluralism. I agree with such critiques, but as a Christian, I’m especially interested in an analysis located firmly in Scripture. In particular, I believe Christians can helpfully make sense of cancel culture through the Biblical emphasis on hospitality.

The New Testament repeatedly commands the church to show hospitality (e.g. 1 Peter 4:9; 3 John 1:5-8). In particular, the church must especially welcome the stranger. Why? Because this kind of hospitality is how the church reflects God’s welcoming of humanity. In Jesus, God extended hospitality to us while we were still “alienated and hostile to him;” thus we all needed a reconciling welcome from him (Col. 1:19-23). Hospitality to the stranger is core to God’s character and how the church bears the image of God. Romans 15:7 makes this connection explicit: “Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

In the case of my friend David, this Biblical emphasis on welcoming the stranger refutes any justification of the PCA’s decision to uninvite him. Some have tried to justify the cancellation by pointing to how David left the PCA such that he should be considered a “stranger” to the denomination. This misses the Biblical point: it is precisely because David is the “invited stranger” that he deserved institutional hospitality and protection in the face of vociferous right wing complaints directed to the PCA.

It would have been the PCA’s right to not invite David in the first place because he’s no longer a member of the denomination. But once invited, the PCA leadership dishonored itself by violating the requirements of hospitality, especially by throwing him under the proverbial bus in its public statement that misleadingly conveyed it had somehow suddenly discovered how David was viewed as a “stranger” by some in the PCA.

All who are tempted to give in to cancel culture would be wise to meditate on Hebrews 13:2 which commands: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” The author is probably echoing the story of two angelic visitors to Lot in the city of Sodom (Genesis 19). The story is complex, disturbing, often misunderstood — and yet in all those aspects, this ancient story is also surprisingly relevant to the dynamics of modern cancel culture.

The precursor to the angelic visit is God’s revelation to Abram that divine judgment is about to fall upon Sodom (which is the home to Abram’s nephew Lot) “for their sin is very grave” (Gen 18:20). This judgment is shared with Abram to teach him how God’s chosen people must avoid the city’s grave sin, so “that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (v. 19).

But exactly what was this “grave sin” of Sodom that God’s people are to avoid?

We have been conditioned to assume that this “grave sin” was a homosexual act, hence the term “sodomy.” But surprisingly, this is not what Scripture itself emphasizes. Ezekiel 16:49 instead diagnoses Sodom’s institutional sin in this way: “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

Sodom’s guilt was its failure to welcome the outcasts in its midst. The city possessed the resources to make a home for the “poor and needy,” but it refused to share its food and prosperity with those it deemed outsiders. Biblical scholar Leon Kass, in his brilliant commentary on Genesis, explains the “pride of Sodom and her daughters:”: “Sodom is a city notorious for injustice, for that unqualified love of one’s own and that unqualified hatred and mistreatment of strangers…every city defines itself by magnifying the importance of the distinction between who’s in and who’s out, between those who are like us and those who are other.”
(Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 328-9.)

This understanding of Sodom’s sin as inhospitableness is supported by how Genesis originally told the story. The two angelic visitors appear at the city gate, the place where outsiders are identified. Lot sees that they are strangers to the city. Recall that Abram must have been thinking of his nephew when, just a few verses earlier in the narrative, Abram bargained with God about Sodom’s fate by emphasizing the presence of a righteous remnant (Gen. 18:22-32). And how is Lot’s righteousness proven in the narrative? Precisely by how he extends hospitality to these two strangers (Gen 19:1-3).

To drive home the contrast with the broader culture of Sodom, that very night, “the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know [i.e. sexually assault] them” (Gen. 19: 4-5). Sodom’s cultural hostility to the stranger takes the form of a rapacious mob.

The Sodom story reminds us that Biblical hospitality is so much more than just being polite or setting out snacks. Biblical hospitality requires courage. Courage is necessary because the hospitable people of God must resist the “who’s in and who’s out” mentality endemic to fallen humanity. Biblical hospitality requires courage because when you welcome those who your neighbors deem as “out,” those very neighbors can turn into a mob at your door, demanding that you cancel your invitation and expose your guest to harm. In that moment of testing, hosts must courageously lead their house in a manner that reflects the welcoming nature of God.

The story of Sodom sheds further light on the temptations for any institutional leader facing the cancel culture mob. Lot models a mixed picture. He has internalized the holy code of hospitality such that he will not throw his male guests under the bus. But he also embodies the temptation for institutional leaders to appease the mob through dishonorable means. In the story, Lot displays cowardice (and misogyny) by trying to placate the mob with an offering of his own virgin daughters. The story demonstrates how mobs once aroused are never easily appeased. The mob’s hostility instead shifts to cancel Lot himself as a “sojourner” and they begin to assault Lot directly (Gen 19: 9). Leaders ought to heed this lesson: give in to the mob, and you end up giving away much more than you should — and in the long run, you are just as likely to get canceled yourself.

Institutional behavior practiced by the church should be held to a higher standard than what prevails in our wider culture war. The church is especially meant to bear God’s image. Whenever a Christian institution violates the Biblical mandate of hospitality to strangers, the people of God must call it to repentance. At stake is the very image of God, the One who welcomes us all as strangers.

Thanks for reading along – and for being a friend in this work,