“Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson is no stranger to cancel culture. In fact, while many people did not become familiar with “cancel culture” until recently, Robertson first experienced it over eight years ago.
During an interview with GQ, Robertson was asked about his views on homosexuality. In response, he paraphrased 1 Corinthians 6:9.
“Don’t be deceived,” Robertson said. “Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
However, Robertson said, many media members did not realize he was simply quoting the Bible. In his new book, “Uncanceled,” Robertson explained how his response was taken completely out of context.
“By the time the article was in print, they made it sound like I had equated homosexuality with greed, alcoholism, and swindling, that I had just pulled an opinion out of my hat,” Robertson wrote.
“In the reporter’s mind, and in the minds of those who don’t know God or his Word, I immediately became a bigoted, self-righteous religious zealot, a New Age neanderthal.”
According to The Washington Post, A&E suspended Robertson from “Duck Dynasty” in December 2013 after the GQ article was published.
The punishment was short-lived, and the network announced Robertson would rejoin the show just a week after his suspension. But that was a secondary concern for him.
In an interview with The Western Journal, Robertson said he was never really worried about the prospect of being canceled.
“If you remember when they tried to cancel me, God’s already uncanceled us,” Robertson said. “We’re not under the written code. We’re under grace.”
The problem, in Robertson’s mind, is that not everyone lives according to this truth. Instead, too many people are seeking to define others based on their worst mistakes.
“They’re dragging out people’s sins where someone made a mistake 200 years ago and they’ll tear down a statue and say, ‘We will never forgive you,'” Robertson said. “What they forget is that Romans Chapter Two is a good place for the audience to dig into.”
Robertson went on to read Romans 2:1, which says, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”
God is pretty clear in this verse that no man is meant to be the ultimate judge. Every person who attempts to cancel someone has skeletons in their own closet as well. No one is able to survive a world where every sin is held against a person forever.
As Robertson put it, “We’re all sinners, so we can’t set ourselves up as God and hold this one against this one.”
Thankfully, Robertson said God has given us a solution to this problem in the form of his son, Jesus Christ.
“God just says I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll wipe your sins away,” Robertson said. “I’ll wash them away with my blood. I won’t hold any future ones against you. You’ll have my spirit in you to help you, and it’s by faith in me and what I’ve done for the human race.”
That is the Gospel in a nutshell, and it is completely antithetical to the very fabric of cancel culture. Robertson said when men like George Washington, John Adams and James Madison founded America, this Biblical truth was at the core.
“Yes, they made mistakes,” Robertson said. “Everybody does. But these were some Christian guys, and they loved God. And that’s our foundation. I’m just trying to get America to go back to that.”
Robertson also pointed out that the ideas behind cancel culture are not independent from many other problems plaguing America today. Instead, he feels increasing murder rates, destructive riots and cancel culture all stem from what he calls a “love problem.”
“I mean, just think of the murder rate,” Robertson said. “You say, ‘Well, what’s what’s behind the fuel behind that?’ They don’t love. They don’t love each other. They practice hate instead of love.”
The same is true, Robertson said, for people who take to the streets to burn businesses and loot stores.
“You love someone, you will never do them harm,” he said. “And look at the situation. They burn people’s businesses. They loot people’s livelihoods…they get people fired.
“You’re like, ‘What in the world?’ What you end up with is you know that all of this cancel culture and all of this misery that we’ve put on each other, all the hatred and all of that, it’s of the evil one.”
It is easy to look at all of our country’s problems and feel they are insurmountable. The level of hatred and division in our nation feels as high as it has ever been.
Yet Robertson says there is a reason why Paul says in Romans 13:8 that the only remaining debt we have is “the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.”
When Paul says loving others fulfills the law, he is talking about each of God’s commandments. If you are truly loving someone, you would not want to steal from them, lie to them or harm them in any way.
You also would not want to get them fired or make their life miserable because of mistakes they made in the past, which is why it is impossible to square cancel culture with Biblical truth.
In Robertson’s view, Americans must choose which idea to embrace, and the choice between those two options is crystal clear.
“I recommend that everybody in America repent, and we start all over and we go back to our Founding Fathers and this Bible that our nation was built on,” Robertson said.
“And I just would challenge them to start loving one another instead of all this hateful business we’re into.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
