Christian Cancel Culture Strikes Again

Let’s begin with a visit from the ghost of culture wars past. In November 2016, BuzzFeed published a story breaking the so-called news that Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s hit show “Fixer Upper,” attended a traditional evangelical church. But that’s not how BuzzFeed promoted it. The headline tells the story: “Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Church Is Firmly Against Same-Sex Marriage.”

The story came a year after the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

There was no evidence in the BuzzFeed story, however, that the Gaineses had discriminated against anybody. There was no evidence in the story that HGTV had engaged in anti-gay discrimination. The story did, however, cast aspersions on the Gaines family because of the beliefs of their church and its pastor.

The Gaineses’ church wasn’t a radical outlier. Its beliefs about sexual morality — that sex should be reserved for marriage and that marriage is the union of a man and a woman — are in line with the Catholic Church, Orthodox churches and virtually every major denomination in evangelical Christianity. They reflect my own beliefs as well — though I supported the Respect for Marriage Act because it protects both the right of gay people to legally marry and the right of religious institutions to define marriage according to their own beliefs without fear of state punishment.

The fact that a Christian holds those beliefs no more makes him or her an anti-gay bigot than holding to traditional Christian theology renders Christian believers Islamophobes or antisemites.

In a pluralistic society, people will differ on extremely important things — including eternal matters — but disagreement should not be equated with disdain. The fact that others disagree with you is not proof that they possess low character, or that they’re inherently prejudiced, or that they can’t be trusted, or that they should enjoy fewer rights and privileges than you do. They are equal in the eyes of the law and should enjoy equal opportunity in the American marketplace.

In fact, if there was any animus at issue in the BuzzFeed article, it was anti-Christian, a belief that Christian theology rendered the Gaineses less likely to treat their gay neighbors with dignity and respect, and therefore we should view Christian participation in the public square — including in nonpolitical spaces like interior design — with hostility and suspicion.

The article caused an immediate backlash. Conservatives felt it was directly targeting traditional Christian beliefs, and a gay man argued in The Washington Post that the piece was “dangerous.” He said the better way to change the minds of opponents of gay marriage was to “use appeals to philosophy and — yes! — theology to thwart their arguments.” The BuzzFeed piece reminded me of everything that I dislike about far-left cancel culture: intolerance; guilt by association; absolute moral certainty.

It was incidents like this that made millions of people deeply weary of so-called woke activism. If the Gaineses had mistreated a gay employee or guest, that would be a genuine story, but to cast aspersions on the Gaineses based on their church or pastor alone? That was absurd.

Fast-forward to 2025. The Gaineses — who thrived in spite of the controversy — are working with HBO Max on a new reality television series, called “Back to the Frontier.”

The premise is simple and sounds like fun. Several families agree to give up modern conveniences (including all their tech) to live a late-19th-century life. One of the families is made up of two dads and their twin boys.

The evangelical response was immediate and overwhelming. With one voice, conservative Christians said, “See, BuzzFeed, we told you that you can’t presume that Christians discriminate against gays! We want every American to enjoy equal treatment in law and commerce. We love our neighbors as ourselves, and if it would be painful for us to be excluded from a show because of our faith, we also know it would be painful to exclude others because of their L.G.B.T.Q. status, and we would never do that.”

Nope. That’s not what happened at all.

Instead, conservative Christians roasted the Gaineses. Writing on X, Franklin Graham, a son of the evangelist Billy Graham (and a prominent Christian supporter of President Trump), said, “Promoting something that God defines as sin is in itself sin.” Allie Beth Stuckey, a prominent evangelical podcaster, said the Gaineses’ Christian fans felt “betrayed,” and other critics said they were choosing “popularity” over “God’s truth.”

Chip Gaines defended himself. On X, on July 13, he posted, “Talk, ask qustns, listen.. maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never. It’s a sad sunday when ‘non believers’ have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian.”

The backlash was intense. Reading through the replies, you see hundreds of expressions of anger and sadness. And many of the responses are particularly hateful against gay Americans, treating them as if they have indulged in a special kind of sin, as dangerous moral lepers who must be shunned for our own protection.

In other words, a large number of conservative Christians are in the midst of their own shame campaign. It turns out that they didn’t hate cancel culture so much as they hated feeling powerless and vulnerable. When they felt powerful, and when they had influence, they behaved exactly like their cultural opponents.

Yes, there is hypocrisy here. It’s a bit much to hear that it’s vitally important for Chip and Joanna Gaines to reject two gay dads (and their children!) from Christians who are also all in on Donald Trump. A gay couple on reality television is a bridge too far, but supporting a thrice-married man who was featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and was once good friends with Jeffrey Epstein is not?

But in another way, they’re not hypocrites at all: They’re budding authoritarians, and for authoritarians, a principle like “tolerance for me and not for thee” is entirely consistent. Authoritarians, after all, are supposed to rule.

When you possess a burning sense of certainty in your moral vision, intolerance is always a temptation. If you give your opponents a platform, won’t that lead some people astray? If error creates injustice (or worse, leads people to the gates of hell), why should error have any rights?

Think of the sense of entitlement here. On one hand, evangelicals say, “How dare you discriminate against us in the workplace,” and then turn around and tell a fellow evangelical couple, “You’re betraying us unless you discriminate against gay men at your job.” Evangelicals aren’t a superior class of citizen. We don’t get to enjoy protection from discrimination and the right to discriminate at the same time.

In times of religious and political conflict, I turn to two very different historic figures — the Apostle Paul and James Madison. In what might be some of the most ignored verses in the New Testament, Paul warned early Christians against imposing the same moral standards on those outside the church as those inside.

“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.”

“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” Paul asks. “Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”

One of the fundamental problems with the American evangelical church is that it so often gets that equation exactly backward. It is remarkably permissive of abusive Christian individuals and institutions — especially if those individuals or institutions are powerful or influential — even as it can be remarkably hostile toward those people outside the church.

Evangelicals then compound the problem by viewing with deep suspicion and mistrust those people who blow the whistle on church misconduct while revering those people who are “bold” and “brave” enough to focus their fire on everyone else.

Paul’s words represent basic Christianity. Jesus himself admonished his disciples to remove the planks from their own eyes before trying to remove the “speck of sawdust” from someone else’s, and he warned that “you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others.”

This doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t make moral judgments, but rather that we should do so with extreme humility, focusing on addressing our own flaws first.

But that’s a command to believing Christians. How should we all deal with disagreement on fundamental matters?

In Federalist No. 10, Madison wrestled with the question of how to create a lasting republic that would invariably include a broad range of competing factions. It’s easy for us to look back at the founding and dismiss its diversity by comparison to our own. After all, the founders were mainly a collection of relatively privileged Protestant white men.

That statement is true, but incomplete. Early America was remarkably diverse by the standards of the day. The religious complexity of early America was its own small miracle. When Europe encountered similar divisions, it descended into the Wars of Religion and drenched itself in blood.

The Wars of Religion are ancient history to us, but they were much more present in the Colonial era. The Wars of Religion were as recent to James Madison as World War I is to us, and they were destructive on a vast scale. The challenge of genuine religious diversity was very much on the founders’ minds.

How do you live in a pluralistic republic without abandoning your core convictions? Madison admonished us not to yield to two related temptations. Don’t try to diminish liberty and don’t try to establish uniformity of opinion.

Instead, he said, the answer was to “extend the sphere” of the republic, to “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” In this circumstance, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”

The sphere of the American republic extends to conservative evangelicals and to gay dads. It includes people who believe every word of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and those who think it’s no more credible than a comic book. One of the beauties of our culture at its best is that no side of the American divide has to abandon any of its core convictions to enter the public square or to engage in the stream of American commerce.

There is no real tension between arguing for your own deeply held values while also recognizing the rights and dignity of people who disagree. Or, to put things even more simply, our country would be far better off if more Americans embraced a version of the Golden Rule — defend the rights and privileges of others that you would like to enjoy yourself.

The application of the Golden Rule should be clear in this case. If Christians want the freedom to participate in the American marketplace without facing reprisals for their faith or their beliefs about God’s design for the family, shouldn’t they extend that same courtesy to those who disagree?

Some other things I did

On Sunday, I wrote about the Justice Department’s decision to seek a one-day prison sentence for Brett Hankison, the ex-police officer convicted of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights during the 2020 shooting incident that cost Taylor her life. On Monday, I’m happy to report, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the officer’s case defied the Justice Department and issued a nearly three-year sentence — a much more fitting punishment for the officer’s crime:

Here’s the key point: Trump’s corruption of justice isn’t just individual; it’s categorical. We have grown accustomed to him rewarding his loyalists and punishing his critics. That he fired the prosecutors who worked on his federal criminal cases while pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters represents a textbook case of individual favoritism.

The Trump administration’s abuse of the civil rights division is something else entirely. It had already initiated a “litigation freeze” on filing new civil rights cases, and it had indicated that it was even going to reconsider previous settlements and consent decrees intended to address police misconduct.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a new administration evaluating the actions of the old, but if that evaluation is resulting in perverse miscarriages of justice — as it is in Hankison’s case — then the very purpose of the civil rights division is being subverted, right before our eyes.

Civil rights laws are designed in part to protect innocent citizens — including, of course, innocent citizens from minority communities — from unjust government officials. Here, the legal world is turned upside down. The Justice Department is using its civil rights division to protect an unjust government official who violated the civil rights of an innocent individual.

On Saturday, we published a podcast conversation I did with my Opinion colleagues Michelle Cottle and Jamelle Bouie. We covered a number of topics, from Jeffrey Epstein to the Supreme Court, and I tried to explain exactly why MAGA is mad at Trump’s lies now, when he has lied to them so much in the past:

He’s lied to MAGA a ton, but generally, when Trump lies to MAGA, he’s telling them something they want to hear.

For example, if he’s lying to them about, “There’s nothing to the Russia investigation,” they want to hear that. If he’s lying to them and saying the election was stolen, they want to hear that. This is the first time really that I can think of, that he has lied to them and contradicted core elements of their worldview.

But it isn’t just that they have a defeated worldview. It’s that they are now faced with two terrible options. One, all the whole conspiracy is correct and Trump’s in on it, or they were lying to us all along. So what’s going on here?

How are people reconciling themselves to it? I think the answer is really, really simple. At the end of the day, MAGA is going to turn to all of its people and say: “Whatever you do, you can’t help the left. Whatever you do, you can’t undermine Trump because if you undermine Trump, that’s what the media wants. That’s what the left wants.” So you’re going to begin to see a lot of this, “Well, whatever else Trump is, the left hates him. So you have to stand by him.”

And a lot of this is going to drill down to ultimately, why did people support Trump? Why have they been with him? And if the ultimate answer is because he hates Democrats and fights Democrats, then they’ll probably keep on clinging to Trump.

If their ultimate answer is, “I genuinely really thought he was going to be God’s angel of vengeance against the global pedophiles,” then you might see some cracking in that support.