A Leadership Deficit

Regent Joins Wheaton in the Cancel Culture

Feb 20, 2025

J. I. Packer

Note to the reader: An abridged version of this essay appears at First Things.

“Wheaton earned a reputation for intellectual rigor, spiritual depth, and, above all, courageous witness for Christ. Unfortunately, that reputation is no longer deserved.” Such was the judgment of Daniel Davis in a piece published by First Things last week. Davis illustrate what he described as Wheaton’s leadership deficit by reference to the Russell Vought affair:

In a social media post, Wheaton offered congratulations and prayers to one of its alumni, Russell Vought, on his Senate confirmation to lead the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most prestigious posts in Washington. Apparently, this was beyond the pale. Hostile alumni flooded the comment section, castigating Wheaton for congratulating a “fascist” and demanding that the post be taken down. Astonishingly, Wheaton complied. The post was quickly removed and replaced with a tepid apology: “It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute. . . . Wheaton College’s focus is on Christ and His kingdom.”

I haven't been tracking Wheaton, I confess, though once upon a time I considered going there. I have been tracking Regent College, however, a non-denominational graduate school in Vancouver of some renown internationally in Evangelical circles. Regent I did attend, with much profit, in the 1980s. J. I. Packer co-supervised my thesis on Oscar Cullmann. I have many fond memories of James Houston and Ward Gasque and Carl Armerding, who were its founders and leaders; as of Bruce Waltke, who was among many scholars who 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.

There was a strong Anglican presence at Regent in those days, which had something to do with my becoming an Anglican. After I became a Catholic, I no longer fit the Regent mould, but a couple of years ago I was invited back by Jens Zimmermann, current holder of the J. I. Packer chair in theology and founding director of the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good. In early 2023, he had the courage to bring in Aaron Kheriaty, author of The New Abnormal, and myself for an event addressing the uncommonly bad business of the “pandemic” policies that had done so much to destroy the social, economic, and political fabric of our nation.

Almost the only good those policies did was to expose the leadership deficit in churches and Christian institutions, to say nothing of medical and other secularized institutions. Few established Christian leaders showed any leadership at all in that time of crisis. Most panicked and ran with the herd. That was true at places such as Wheaton and Regent also. So we should not be surprised at the Vought affair. Nor should we be surprised at what I will call the Biggar affair.

Nigel Biggar

The story is this: Professor Zimmermann also had the courage to invite another, far more distinguished Regent alumnus, the Rt Hon. Nigel Biggar, CBE, who is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at Oxford and is now seated in the British parliament as Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas. (You'll forgive me if I admire the title.) Biggar was invited to discuss topics related to his HarperCollins 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, took a unilateral decision to cancel the event.

This is not the place to go into the details of the story, though a good many of them are known to me, but I will mention these three. First, it was again a social media attack by recent alumni that prompted the move. Second, the Regent faculty are evenly divided on the presidential fiat, which was delivered without explanation to the principal parties, eliciting a very stern letter from Lord Biggar. Third, as at Wheaton, whose motto is Christo et Regno Ejus, so also at Regent: assurances were given that all is done for Christ and his kingdom. In Greenman's letter to the student body about the affair, 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.’”

The Back Story

The difference Christ makes to everything? Everything but politics, that is. God forbid that Christ should make a difference in politics! That's beyond his remit in a secular society. But before we come to the moral of the story I must mention the backstory, which concerns the residential schools.

Professor Biggar was coming to Regent to discuss the merits and demerits of the British Empire; that is, to help separate the colonial wheat from the colonial chaff. "Did the British Empire Promote Human Welfare?" is the question his lecture addresses. That 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, argues Biggar, 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 in Canada a chapter of the Free Speech Union, of which hugely successful British venture he is board chairman. Call that more colonialism, if you please, but the FSU is a very anti-colonial, even anti-anti-colonial, kind of colonialism. Its name tells you what it is for. What it is against is 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 cancelling speech, require conformity of speech.

In Britain, as J. D. Vance pointed out at the security conference in Munich last week, free speech is very much under attack. He made the point that, before we ask how we are going to defend something, we must ask what that something actually is. If, in the so-called free world, we are not free to speak our minds, have we a world worth defending? In Canada, however, as in Europe, there are moves afoot to criminalize non-conforming speech, especially where it does not conform to the anti-colonialist narrative and, in particular, where it does not conform to the thesis that the residential schools were instruments of genocide. Leah Gazan, MP, recently launched Bill C-413 to amend the Criminal Code “to create an offence of wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada through statements communicated other than in private conversation.”

Bill C-413 died when parliament was prorogued so that the Liberal Party could hunt around for a new prime minister, but the controversy has not died with it. And this is where the backstory becomes the main story. The Facebook attack on Lord Biggar alleged that he is a residential schools apologist, even perhaps a mass-graves denialist, hence a justifier of atrocities. Definitely persona non grata, then, intent on what some think should be a criminal act. It was in response to this that Regent's president declared him persona non grata.

Now, I myself would become a criminal were Bill C-413 to be revived and passed in a new parliamentary session. For I am on record as a critic of the prevailing residential schools narrative—indeed, as a critic of the overly cautious nature of my criticism. So I have skin in the game, as they say. And the game is heating up, not cooling down. Sugarcane is seeing to that, with its beautifully told lies, which are themselves incitements to hatred. Sugarcane's sweet slander, and the Oscars it may win, worry me rather more than a dead bill in a parliament euthanized by Justin Trudeau. But what worries me more yet is a Christian graduate school that has drifted so far from its original inspiration as to be governed by people who think it morally right to capitulate to an ignorant mob, a passionately ignorant mob that actually believes that residential schools operated incinerators for unwanted babies and dug mass graves for abused children.

If someone tells me that this mob is really quite small, I shall express some hope, even some confidence, that it is so. But I shall be forced to observe that it has the president's ear, and that some who belong to it are graduates of the president's institution. Dr Greenman, to be fair, went no further in justifying his last-minute cancellation of Lord Biggar than saying that he deemed the framing of the event insensitive. It seems, however, that to be sensitive one must frame things in a way that satisfies those who bandy about charges such as genocide and denialism.

Regent itself, I will add, is so determined to be “sensitive” that it has already cancelled its cancellation by wiping every trace of the Biggar affair from its web pages. Which brings us round to the moral of the story. I've no doubt that Jim Packer, were he still with us, would put his finger on that moral with more facility and more force than I can muster, but I can at least try, if you'll be patient with me.

The Moral of the Story

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 at McGill to cancel the very first minute of my very first class last term. That's how cancel culture works. It doesn't give you a chance to speak at all, not if it can help it. Certainly it refuses to be cross-examined. It is an anti-truth culture; for truth, which can withstand scrutiny, invites scrutiny. Cancel culture abhors scrutiny.

But you don't need me to tell you that we live in a cancel culture. You don't need illustrations from Wheaton or Regent or McGill. From 2020 to 2024 we all witnessed the most impressive cancel culture anyone has ever had the misfortune to witness. Indeed, we witnessed a war of colonial powers conducted at a speed and on a scale never before seen, a war in which every effort was made, as much in the “free” world as in the communist world, to suppress individual thought, speech, and action. And what did we learn from that? We learned that such attempts at suppression must be resisted with all our might. If we are Christians, we learned that we had to resist them in order to be faithful to Christ. We learned that we cannot use his call to “seek first the kingdom of God” as an excuse to avoid political controversy in secular kingdoms.

Claiming that Christ makes a difference to everything while ducking political controversy is contradictory. It is also cowardly. Wishing to make some sort of amends, presumably, Dr Greenman invited Nigel Biggar to lunch with faculty members, that they might discuss his book privately. Biggar, however, has rightly refused to be complicit in this Nicodemus exercise. In a second open letter, he points out that this way of handling things only encourages replication of an abusive 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 leading Evangelical institutions such as Wheaton and Regent have become party to the cancel culture tells us that they have lost their bearings. They have borrowed the faulty compass of their neighbours. What's more, they have done so just as some of those neighbours are beginning to clamour for a better compass, one that actually works. The path these institutions are on is the path mainstream Protestantism has already trod, and that many Catholics are treading as well, following a compass that no longer points toward Christ. Despite their claims, they don't study the difference Christ makes to everything. They merely practice applying pious Christian language to whatever their social compass is pointing toward at the moment.

That is the very opposite of what J. I. Packer did. Packer was courteous in controversy, not inconstant in controversy. He had a functional Christian compass and the courage to follow it. Nigel Biggar is like him in that respect. He can be cancelled but he will not cancel himself.

The Biggar affair suggests that Regent is well on the way to self-cancellation. 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. It wants quiescence, then acquiescence. It doesn't really give a damn about "sensitivity," save as a step toward acquiescence. A cancel culture is colonial, colonial in the worst sense.

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 really too absurd that refusing to engage publicly an honest attempt to distinguish good and evil in the imperial legacy of Great Britain, or in the residential school enterprise itself, should be deemed a following of Jesus Christ.