Cancel Culture Comes to Conservative Country
Five lessons Samford University failed to teach by disinviting a prominent historian from speaking because he's also pro-choice
The true crime of a censor isn’t muzzling someone’s mouth. It’s muffling everyone else’s ears.
That lesson and many others on the importance of free expression and the exchange of ideas were lost recently when Samford University in Birmingham relented to the joint demands of an online petition and its Student Government Association to disinvite historian Jon Meacham from speaking about American history during inauguration ceremonies for the school’s new president.
Meacham is well-known for his presidential biographies, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for writing American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.
But the crime that got him canceled in conservative country? From the petition:
“Jon Meacham is significantly involved with the Planned Parenthood organization. He has spoken at their fundraising events, his book is used for the Planned Parenthood fundraiser, and overall his beliefs and core values do not align with those of Samford University, as it is a Southern Baptist institution.”
It’s no surprise that Meacham is liberal and pro-choice. Anyone who has ever seen him on cable news mixing his historical perspectives with his personal political preferences knows that.
But it’s disheartening to see a conservative campus community adopt the Marxist tactics of the left (and of the Pharisees, by the way) by insisting that unless you share all of their beliefs, you’re unwelcome in their midst, even if only to share your views on an unrelated issue, even if only as a guest, even if only to break bread for an evening.
Have we really reached the point in America, and in academia most alarmingly, where in order to gather to discuss a topic, everyone present must already agree on everything? Can we not see that this is a blueprint for ignorance?
Meacham wasn’t coming to one of the most conservative campuses in the Bible Belt to advocate for abortion rights. While he is indeed pro-choice, and while he did speak at a Planned Parenthood event, abortion policy isn’t his stock-and-trade. He’s a historian, and as the university noted, his lecture was going to flow from his latest book, The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, which is, rather ironically, about how our nation has overcome periods of deep, sometimes violent, political and cultural division.
But since Meacham’s also pro-choice (along with half of our country, sadly), the petitioners and SGA representatives presumably think he’s not worth hearing from, and also by extension, half of our country isn’t worth hearing from, or talking to, or treating with the same courtesy we’d want from people who hold different beliefs from our own.
To place the petitioner’s argument in its best and strongest light, they’re concerned that by giving someone a platform to speak on their campus about American history, who has also been involved with events elsewhere promoting abortion rights, it significantly tarnishes the strong, Christian reputation of Samford and weakens its ability to fulfill its mission.
Maybe so, in the minds of some.
But this is exactly what the far left is doing all across America — in schools, universities, workplaces, clubs, even on sports teams — and their quest for purification and uniformity is making everybody angrier, meaner, and in the end, dumber.
And it has to stop.
There are many lessons the university could have taught, and even learned, from this situation other than teaching students that closing their doors, and their minds, to outsiders is how one successfully defends and spreads their beliefs. Here are just a few that leap to mind:
1. A voice for a voice leaves everyone mute
If you’re okay with what Samford did, then you’d also have to be okay with someone who happens to be pro-life being cancelled from speaking where their values “do not align” with whatever progressive institution to which they may be invited to speak on an unrelated topic.
If you’re okay with what Samford did, you’d also have to be okay with Brandeis University disinviteing Ayaan Hirsi Ali from its campus because, as a survivor of female genital mutilation and the target of Muslim terrorists, she’s a critic of Islam.
You’d also have to be okay with the City of Atlanta sacking its fire chief, Kelvin Cochran, after he wrote about his traditional beliefs on marriage and sexuality in a book for his church’s Bible study class.
You’d also have to be okay with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cancelling a lecture from Dorian Abbot, a professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, simply because he supports merit-based college admissions rather than race-based standards.
And you’d also have to be okay with students from Arizona State University demanding that Kyle Rittenhouse not be allowed to attend the school as he planned.
The list goes on and on.
What do they all share in common? Review the comments left on the Samford University petition to disinvite Meacham. They read like photo-negatives of far left thought, replete with phrases about how the speaker’s thoughts go against the institution’s core values and are incompatible with the university, and that greater scrutiny needs to be applied to future guests. Swap a few nouns here and there and it’s the same argument used to banish conservatives, Christians, and other “deplorables” from public life everywhere.
It’s also very clear that many who signed the petition were willfully uninformed; their comments show that they thought Meacham was invited to discuss his views on abortion. This is another characteristic they share with the far left’s cancel culture warriors — a rush to judgement, eager, maybe even happy to discover a reason to separate themselves from those who aren’t in the tribe.
Conservatives, independents, and free-minded liberals across the country have been rightly criticizing the wave of cancel culture washing across our institutions. Its high watermark has yet to be reached, sadly, and it won’t anytime soon if the more reasonable side of our nation throws in the towel and starts behaving just as bad.
They cancel your voice, then you cancel theirs, and we’re all left mute and ignorant. Nice job, folks.
2. Censoring perspectives weakens your own
The petition stated that the talk needed to be canceled to “protect” Samford University.
I understand what they’re implying, but are the core values and beliefs of Samford University, and those of its students, so delicate that they’d be blown over by a lecture on American history from someone who also supports abortion rights?
No, of course they’re not. Southern Baptists, at least the ones I was raised with, are made of stronger stuff.
But cancelling people for their beliefs, both related and unrelated, does significantly weaken one’s ability to understand and combat those beliefs and, more importantly, causes one to lose the opportunity to witness, to testify to the truth, and to change minds.
Whenever you fail to study the other side of an argument, or even hear a different perspective, you leave yourself — and those you lead, teach, or mentor — vulnerable to being led astray. Millions do not subscribe to entire schools of thought, join political parties, support government policies, or even share popular opinions because those ideas lack the ability to be persuasive. On the contrary, they can be very convincing to the untrained or unsuspecting mind, and college students in particular had better be prepared to meet them or else they’ll swallow them whole.
You’d also be surprised at what happens when you offer someone of good faith the courtesy of your attention. People will often return the favor, and if your point is well made, valid, and has the added benefit of being True with a capital “T,” then you’ll have made real progress in the world rather than just spending your time preaching to the choir.
I’m 100-percent pro-life, and believe that life begins at its beginning — conception. My wife and I have literally written tens of thousands of words and have spoken publicly many times advocating for a complete ban on abortion. This experience has taught me one large lesson: in order to end abortion in our world, we need to change people’s hearts and minds, not only laws, and especially not only the legal opinions of five of nine lawyers in Washington, DC.
Things would have gone much better at Samford had these concerned students nominated the most articulate and persuasive among them to attend Meacham’s talk, and confront him — firmly yet politely — on the issue, challenging his position and noting the contradictions between his professed religious and scientific beliefs and his continued support of abortion rights.
Meacham is a partisan, and a little long in the tooth, so while it’s unlikely that his mind would have been changed, such a conversation could have impacted others in the audience. Maybe it would have been shared and seen online, reaching even more. Perhaps Meacham, as a man of good will, would have recounted the exchange at his next speaking gig, telling others about the persuasive pro-life student at Samford who gave him something to think about.
The free exchange of ideas. One heart at a time. One mind at a time.
That’s how genuine change is made.
3. Censorship robs one of our society’s most precious commodity — knowledge
Meacham probably wasn’t bothered by having his talk cancelled, financially or professionally. He has plenty to do. But focusing on him misses the larger point that censorship’s largest impact isn’t on the person being censored, it’s on everyone else.
The signatories of this petition, and members of the SGA, essentially told everyone else on campus that they weren’t allowed to hear from Meacham, and thus robbed them of whatever benefit they might have got from the talk.
That’s not only arrogant and patronizing, it’s self-inflicted ignorance.
The late Christopher Hitchens put it best when he said:
“It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.”
Considering this setting is a university, where all ideas should be openly shared and vigorously debated, makes it especially wrong.
4. Never give the heckler a veto, because they’ll never stop using it
Meacham wasn’t being recognized with an honorary degree from the university, or holding the much celebrated, and more often forgotten, role of commencement speaker, either. But the administration tried to split the baby on that basis anyway, saying Meacham would be rescheduled “at a more appropriate time to an event not so closely connected to the symbolism of the inauguration.”
Good luck with that.
First off, if I were Meacham, I’d probably be like, “ … those rude people,” and spend my time some place else.
Secondly, Samford just taught its students that they have a veto on who comes and speaks at their school, and you can bet they’ll use it again.
If one is inclined to scour the background of every potential speaker for signs they’re not sufficiently aligned with the “beliefs and core values” of Samford, you can bet they’ll find it. Just read the petition’s comments about applying “additional scrutiny to future speakers.”
Get ready for your string to be pulled, Mr. College President, and often.
5. Online mobs aren’t real
You could have written, launched, and shared an online petition with thousands of people in half the time it has taken to read this essay so far. And you could have signed one in the time it took you to read that last sentence.
The point is, the “Twitter Mob” isn’t a real mob. A thousand signatures on an online petition demanding something isn’t remotely synonymous with a thousand people, or even a dozen people, chanting the same demand outside of your office window.
Most people older than 30 seem incapable of being unbothered by social media. Most people younger than 30 seem to know that, and use that knowledge imbalance like one dances a laser pointer around an increasingly frustrated cat. Our CEOs, university presidents, politicians, and newspaper editors are like the cat — they think that little red dot … that tweet, or post, or online petition … is something real, something enticing, or perhaps something a little dangerous. Their reaction would be as equally cute and funny, if it weren’t so corrosive.
Online mobs aren’t real, and their perceived power rests entirely on scaring someone with actual power into taking the actions they demand.
The solution? Take a lesson from Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It takes next to nothing to form or join an online mob. Our reaction to them should be the same — next to nothing.
So be a smarter cat. Ignore the red dot. The fake mob, like the person holding the laser pointer, will eventually grow bored of not getting a rise out of you and move on to something else, and your world will return to a saner plane of existence.
Resist the temptation to be a censor
Where does the tenancy to cancel, to censor, or banish wind up in the end?
Look no further than the wisdom that comes from a lecture delivered by German Pastor Martin Niemöllerm, who initially welcomed the Third Reich to power before realizing his grave mistake:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
There is hope, though. The only good thing about mobs, online or otherwise, is that they tend to eat themselves. We’ve seen this movie before, from the French Revolution to Stalin’s purges to the Jim Crow South.
But those movies didn’t end Hollywood style, with a leading man boldly rising from the ground with a clinched fist, staring down the tyrant and delivering a speech that rouses the mob from the errors of their ways.
They ended when regular people — the nameless extras, the walk-ons — thought better of themselves, and worser of the mob, and decided to put their torches down and simply go home.
That is what’s needed now: regular people to simply ignore all of this, resist being cancelled, and resist calling for someone else to be canceled, as well.
Or, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s words against being neither a slave or slave owner, adopt this adage from here forward:
“As I will not be censored, I will not be a censor.”
And cancel Cancel Culture once and for all.
(Coming next, I’ll analyze what’s happening with bail being set unreasonably low for suspects charged with murder in Alabama.)