I am not alone in lamenting the foolishness and the ugliness of “cancel culture”. Expressions of “cancel culture” take many forms, from outright shunning, to virtue signaling, to quiet but pretentious attitudes of superiority and self-righteousness simply because one sees himself or herself on a particular side of a cultural issue.

Among the more foolish and frustrating consequences of the cancel culture phenomena is the misuse and abuse of certain words – words which, of themselves, are perfectly good and useful, but which for any number of reasons are hijacked from their actual meanings and used as weapons of cultural warfare.

My old friend, Randy Nabors, offers some wise words reflecting upon this unfortunate and misguided trend in a post he titled The Word Snatchers:

Watch out for the word snatchers, these thieves of beautiful and important words. They sloganize to demonize, so as to thought despise. By taking words out of context, (and context is everything) they label to divide. The tactic is simplistic so the simple minded and the gullible will hear “signal” words and assume they have met the enemy. This is propaganda so the target’s very words become weaponized against them. Remember, even the word God is a bad word in the Devil’s mouth, he refers to God often enough in his lies, but his use doesn’t make God bad or his name less than glorious.

Take a word like justice, add the word social to it (which is a bit redundant since all justice is “social” in that it is only revealed in relationship to others-between God and man, and between persons) and then associate it with causes one might despise, and you have taken one of the attributes of God and made it something to belittle and fear.

These word thieves have taken away diversity, equity, and inclusion as if they were bad words when they are in fact artifacts of love, kindness, and reconciliation. It is their context which matters, who is being included for what purpose? I speak as a Christian, I don’t want sin in the camp, I don’t want to open the door to evil, so I discriminate based on the Truth (God’s word) but not on the basis of skin color. I can be discriminatory without practicing discrimination.

These deceivers have tried to steal away our use of the word empathy. Now they seek to steal the word missional. Just associate it with liberals and it gets caught in our mouths. We become suspicious of those who use such words, we stop using the words ourselves lest we become suspect. The insidious and pharisaical word police have used social media to such powerful effect that we have failed to keep our cool under fire, we wilt under the onslaught of false associations and ad hominem arguments.

Let this storm of slanted dribble pass you by; false association is the same as slander, it is a lie. Just define what you mean, and mean what you say, and take time to think, time to listen, time to understand, time to explain. Show some grace by asking, “what do you mean by that?” instead of being guided by political presuppositions. We live in an age of demogaugic denouncing for propagandic and political posturing to belittle and thus divide, by twits who tweet. We have abandoned wisdom for the clever, and abandoned analysis for instant reaction in the name of idealogical self-protection.

It is time to have the mind of Christ, and to think, and not lose our minds.