Cancel Culture at Regent College

I attended Regent College, a non-denominational graduate school in Vancouver, in the 1980s. The school is of some renown internationally in evangelical circles. J. I. Packer co-supervised my thesis on Oscar Cullmann. I have many fond memories of James Houston, Ward Gasque, and Carl Armerding, who were its founders and leaders, as well as of Bruce Waltke. These professors inspired students from all over the world. It was through Regent that I got to know T. F. Torrance and James Torrance, Anthony Thiselton and N. T. Wright, all of whom were enormously helpful to me. 

After I became a Catholic, I no longer fit the Regent mold, but I remain grateful for what I received there. I happily returned in 2023, when Jens Zimmermann invited me and Aaron Kheriaty to campus to discuss the pandemic lockdowns and other misconceived pandemic policies. It was a courageous invitation, given the fecklessness of Regent’s own leadership, which panicked and ran with the herd in that time of crisis.

More recently, Zimmermann had the further courage to invite another, far more distinguished Regent alumnus: Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford and a recent appointee to the House of Lords. Biggar was invited to discuss topics related to his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Three weeks before his arrival in Vancouver, scheduled for the first week of March, there was a moral reckoning of another sort, however, one with which Biggar is all too familiar. The president of Regent College, Jeffrey Greenman, made a unilateral decision to cancel the event. 

A social media attack by recent alumni prompted the move, though assurances were given that all is being done for Christ and his kingdom. In Greenman’s letter to the student body, he insists that “with joyful confidence in the Gospel, we will continue to pursue serious exploration of what Dr. J. I. Packer said was most distinctive about Regent’s approach—that we study ‘the difference Christ makes to everything.’” It’s a shocking assertion, given that the cancellation amounts to the negation of “the difference Christ makes to everything.” 

Biggar was coming to Regent to discuss the merits and demerits of British colonialism—that is, to help separate the wheat from the chaff, in historical and in moral terms. “Did the British Empire Promote Human Welfare?” is the question his lecture was to address. Everyone knows, of course, that the British Empire has been vilified by wave after wave of anti-colonialist rhetoric and protest. But waves of vilification, even when deserved, wash away the good with the bad. It is both a scholarly and a Christian task to distinguish the good from the bad, as dispassionately as possible.   

Biggar was also coming, under other auspices—he is still coming, I should make clear—to help launch a Canadian chapter of the Free Speech Union, a British venture of which he is board chairman. Call that more colonialism, if you please, but the FSU is very anti-colonial. It is against the colonization of speech, whether by social media mobbing or any other kind of mobbing, including the kind so regularly performed by university and college administrators who, by canceling speech, require conformity of speech. 

Greenman, to be fair, went no further in justifying his last-minute cancellation of Biggar than saying that he deemed the framing of the event to be insensitive. It seems, however, that to be sensitive one must frame things in a way that satisfies those who bandy about words such as “genocide” and “denialism.” It seems that Regent itself is so sensitive that it has already canceled its cancellation by wiping every trace of the Biggar business from its web pages. 

We live in a cancel culture, as I can testify from my own experience. As a matter of fact, I am due to give testimony in March regarding an attempt to cancel the very first minute of my very first class last term at McGill University. That’s how cancel culture works. It doesn’t give you a chance to speak at all, not if it can help it. A cancel culture is an anti-freedom culture and an anti-academic culture. As such, it is an anti-truth culture. For truth can withstand scrutiny. Truth invites scrutiny. 

Regent’s president, presumably wishing to make some sort of amends, invited Nigel Biggar to a lunch with faculty members where they might discuss his book privately. Biggar has rightly refused to be complicit in this Nicodemus exercise. In a second open letter, he points out that it replicates a destructive pattern.

Repressive agitators use their intemperate, aggressive emotions to browbeat conflict-averse managers. The managers, thinking they’re protecting the reputation of their institutions and oblivious to what else is at stake, comply by cancelling lectures that the agitators don’t want other people to hear. Observing this, students and junior professors sympathetically inclined to the views of the cancelled lecturers note which side their institution has taken, contemplate the career-costs of dissenting, and resolve to keep their heretical views to themselves. . . . Thus, the narrative of the repressive dogmatists prevails and its distortions of public policy are allowed to continue, damaging the whole of society. And on campus? Fear reigns and demoralisation spreads, as the conscious gap between secretly held belief and openly spoken word testifies of the failure of integrity. This phenomenon, formerly confined to totalitarian societies, is now common in the increasingly less liberal West. And it has now come to Regent College.

That Regent has become party to cancel culture, and shies from scrutiny, tells us that it has lost its bearings. “We study ‘the difference Christ makes to everything’”? On present evidence, it would be truer to say, “We have learned how to apply pious Christian language to whatever our faulty moral compass (adopted from the secular world) is pointing toward at the moment.” Which is the very opposite of what J. I. Packer did. Now, there was a man with a spine. Always courteous, but always firm. Not always right, but always generous in debate about what is right. Nigel Biggar is like him in that respect. And there are still people at Regent who honor Packer’s legacy. 

The Biggar affair suggests that Regent is well down the path of canceling itself. For, in the end, that is what a cancel culture demands. That indeed is the whole point of a cancel culture. A cancel culture knows nothing of Christ and wants nothing of Christ. It wants conformity. 

So here is the moral of the story: If you want to study the difference Christ makes to everything, cancellation is not the way to go about it. Engagement is the way to go about it, engagement with genuine knowledge of Christ as your guide. Christ engaged all the way to Golgotha. It is absurd to cancel an honest attempt to distinguish good and evil in the imperial legacy of Great Britain, and then to deem the moral cowardice a following of Jesus Christ.