Cancel Culture vs Amazing Grace

Posted: November 25, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the song Amazing Grace. I know, weird, right? I mean, it’s not as if I spend a whole lot of my time mulling over Christian hymns, but what can I say? Things have been strange for the last couple of years.

As a song, I love Amazing Grace. Everything from the melody to the incredibly important message in its lyrics, this song has always hit all of the right notes for me. Personally, when I think of Amazing Grace, I picture an old black lady sitting on a rickety porch in the American south, strumming her battered old guitar and croaking out those incredible words:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see.

I don’t know why I’ve always considered this song, one of the most famous songs in the world, as a black-traditional. Probably because of the way it has been used in the media through movies and television shows, such as Mother Abigail from Stephen King’s “The Stand”, or any of the hundred films about slavery or the Jim Crow and segregation-eras have burned that image of the song into my head, and probably yours as well. In that respect, I’m sure you’ll probably be just as surprised as I was to learn that the song was written by an old, white, British guy around the close of the 18th Century. My mind was appropriately blown when I learned this, and I’m going to assume that most of the people reading this had similar cultural upbringings as I did, so my guess is that this is pretty surprising news to you as well. If not and you already knew this tidbit of trivia, then good for you and you win the bragging rights to say you’re more knowledgeable than I was in respect to the origins of Amazing Grace. Tell your friends.

Now, it’s not as if I’ve been thinking about Amazing Grace just through random happenstance. In these times of what can only be called unbridled cancel-culture, the message of Amazing Grace has really been resonating with me. From Al Franken, a man who I fully believe did not deserve his cancellation over an admittedly tasteless and sexist joke photo about twenty years ago, to Kevin Spacey, a man who absolutely did deserve to suffer consequences for his actions in my opinion, there seems to be a lack of disparity around the outcomes for very differing levels of offense. I mean, if a picture of Al Franken, a comedian at the time of his bad behaviour, pretending to grab some boob can be equated with an A-List actor like Kevin Spacey pathologically abusing his position to get underaged boys into his bed both lead to the same level of punishment, I think that says a lot more about us as a culture than it does about the two perpetrators in question because the two things are definitely not equal by any stretch of the imagination. Especially since Franken displayed genuine contrition over what he’d done. He took responsibility for his past behaviours and was remorseful; times have changed and what was acceptably funny twenty years ago is no longer seen in the same light and he acknowledged that and accepted his responsibility for his actions. So, of course he lost his job, because that’s what cancel culture deems must happen. Spacey, on the other hand, put out a half-assed statement that pretty much blamed his gay-ness for what he’d done, and the end result was the same – Both men have all but disappeared from the public eye.

Stick with me for another minute, because I really am getting to a point here.

As a society, we really seem to be fetishizing consequences lately with very little thought or regard to the actual offenses in question, and that’s a dangerous place to be. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of chatter on the interwebs about how John Lennon once admitted to being abusive to his first wife, Cynthia, and how it puts all of The Beatles music into question. Yes, people are actually talking about cancelling The Beatles. You know, only the most influential musicians of the 20th Century who are very much responsible for helping to shape any and almost all of the music we listen to today. And here’s the rub, even back in the 1960s when abusing one’s wife was sadly not uncommon and was mostly just swept under the rug and not talked about, Lennon publicly acknowledged what he’d done and why it was wrong, not something you hear of happening very often from men in those times. Again, someone who apologized and in this case was given the opportunity to show much better behaviours past his admittedly egregious offense. But now, in 2021, people want to cancel him. So much for learning from our mistakes to potentially become a better person, right? It seems that judging people only on their worst moments is just where we are, and that just doesn’t sit right with me.

All of this left me wondering about how much we really want to believe in Amazing Grace. I mean, the message of the song is pretty obvious: “I used to be a wretch, blind to my crimes, but I’ve learned and now I see how horrible a person I used to be.”

I suspect that it’s a safe assumption on my part to say that we’ve all done things in the past that we’re not proud of. True, most of us haven’t raped or murdered anyone or done anything truly heinous like that, but we have all made mistakes, whether it was being mean to someone for no reason, taking something that didn’t belong to us, or even simply accidentally hurting someone’s feelings by acting thoughtlessly for a moment or speaking out of ignorance. We were all young once, and we’ve all said or done things that we regret, and if you don’t think you fit into that box, you probably need to examine your past with a bigger magnifying glass because we’ve all had moments that we’re less than proud of and if you don’t think you have, then you’re still in the ‘blind’ part of the song.  We’ve all done shitty things at some point or another. It’s called growing up and you can’t really become a mature adult without learning and growing from your past mistakes. We all make mistakes; that’s what makes us human.

Then, a few years ago, I read Jerusalem by Alan Moore for the first time. In this monumental book, one of my favourite characters, Black Charley aka Henry George, is an American ex-pat who moved to England at the end of the 19th Century. Like I had up until this point, Henry, who was born a slave in the American south, also considered Amazing Grace to be a black-traditional song and he is shocked when he comes across the news that the song was actually written by a white man, a pastor named John Newton, about a century earlier. 

However, it’s when we learn about Pastor Newton’s past that things get really interesting. You see, Newton hadn’t always been a man of God and didn’t actually find that calling until his later years. Before that, he was a slave-trader, so pretty much the most despicable type of human being that there is, and if you know anything about the 17th and 18th Century slave trade, you know exactly what I mean (and if you don’t know anything about that, go learn about it because there’s some seriously shocking and fucked up shit in there that really shows just how inhumane people can possibly be when they set their minds to it).

But wait! There’s more!

Before Newton was himself a slaver, he himself had been a slave at one point, captured in his teen years after leaving service to a different slave ship where he’d been a bum-boy since his adolescence. So it’s not like this dude didn’t know what it was like to be mistreated before he, in turn, profited greatly off of the same and worse mistreatment to others. Quite the wretch, indeed. I can’t even imagine the kinds of nightmares this asshole must have suffered through.

Here’s the thing, though. Sometime after Newton found religion during a horrible storm at sea, he quit the slave trade, no longer able to reconcile the horrible man he’d been with the good human being he was finally becoming. He sold his ships and became an abolitionist, reportedly donating much of his time and fortune to ending slavery altogether. Admitting that he’d been blind and ignorant to what he was doing, and now saw and understood exactly the kind of horror-show his life had been built from. And then he went on to write an incredible song about it and the rest is history.

Should John Newton have even been forgiven in the first place? And now that we know all of this information, should we cancel him posthumously? I don’t know. Slave-trading and human trafficking are pretty fucking awful. I can’t really think of anything worse outside of outright genocide. But if Newton had been cancelled in his time instead of forgiven, we never would have gotten the beautiful little piece of a musical miracle we all call Amazing Grace.

How sweet the sound the word ‘sorry’ can be when it’s said in truth. People can change. People can grow. If there’s anybody out there I’ve ever hurt, know that I’m sorry and know that it probably haunts me even more than it haunts you. And for anyone still reading, if there’s anyone you owe an apology to, give it to them. They may not want to receive it, but the best thing you can do is offer it and respect their decision. Amazing grace isn’t always easily earned, but it can’t be given without taking that first step of acknowledgment and admitting that now we see.