Is cancel culture real, or just a figment of partisan imaginations? It’s both, argues Reason’s Robby Soave in presenting The Case of the Canceled Composer. Faith-music creator Daniel Elder had a promising career and a solid foundation with his published material, until he decided to publicly scold arsonists after the George Floyd protests and riots broke out last summer.

“Enjoy burning it all down, you well-intentioned, blind people,” the progressive-leaning Elder posted on his social-media platforms. “I’m done.” He didn’t know how prescient that statement would prove:

The post was unambiguous: Elder was criticizing the activists who had set the courthouse on fire. He did not malign their cause or their ethnicity (and in fact, the perpetrator was white). He did not attack the Black Lives Matter movement or criminal justice reform. He implied that the militants had good motives (“well-intentioned”) but were oblivious (“blind”) when it came to the self-defeating nature of their tactics.

These sentiments are not racist; in fact, they are correct. Social science research and voter surveys show that violent and destructive protests tend to backfire, eroding support for the cause in question. While a small number of far-left agitators support these tactics, the overwhelming majority of people oppose looting, riots, and arson. That is especially true of those who live in communities of color.

One might not have expected Elder’s mild declaration to attract much attention. But when he woke up the next morning, critics were spamming his Facebook and YouTube pages with comments accusing him of being a racist and a “white supremacist piece of garbage.” He began to receive nasty emails as well. Some were anonymously authored, expletive-laden, and ugly from start to finish. Others confessed a previous appreciation for Elder’s music but noted that they could never listen to him again.

If that’s all that happened, then this wouldn’t be much of a story. Social media mobs are a quotidian part of the landscape these days, unfortunately. Just as unfortunate are those who surrender in the face of those mobs, and even more unfortunately for Elder, his publisher is one of them. GIA Publications is a giant in the religious-music publishing industry, and they demanded an abject apology from Elder. In fact, they wrote it for him and demanded Elder post it:

LaBarr added that while “we know that you write music that promotes social justice,” this was not clear to people who had read the Instagram post.

“We’re feeling time pressure on this as some people are calling for boycotts,” added LaBarr. “It’s all very heavy.”

Elder wasn’t inclined to make such a groveling apology, and was dismayed to see his colleagues siding with his critics.

“I chose to be that guy who didn’t issue the apology,” he says. “Things went from there and it wasn’t good.”

That’s an understatement. Despite the acknowledgment that Elder supports social-justice agenda items and no hint of racism in his criticism at all, GIA threw Elder under the bus. That’s quite a remarkable decision by a publisher of Christian music. They could have just chosen to ignore it, but instead LaBarr announced that GIA would terminate its business relationship with Elder over his “incendiary” remarks, a term loaded with unintended irony.

In other words, GIA burned Elder’s career and reputation to the ground over his opposition to arson. Rather than stand by an artist whose work had benefited them, they torched him publicly for no good reason other than to save themselves a few days’ worth of criticism. Perhaps someone can show me in the scriptures where we are called to abandon the innocent to save ourselves from mobs, as I don’t quite recall the chapter and verse on that particular teaching.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending for Elder, who has had to deal with the trauma of betrayal and financial ruin. But it did have one “strange silver lining,” Elder told Soave:

Nevertheless, the experience has positively impacted Elder in one way, he tells me: It has made him less ideologically narrow-minded.

“Because I was exiled, I started listening to voices on the right and the center, especially these classical liberals who have been exiled from the leftist movement,” he says. “The strange silver lining is this shook me out of my prejudices a little bit.”

Too bad it hasn’t done the same for those who tormented and abandoned Elder.