You should NEVER apologize. You also MUST apologize.
Conservatives are taking exactly the wrong message if they expand this into a principle to never apologize for anything, ever.
Much of the political Right is falling all over themselves praising Sydney Sweeney for refusing to apologize for her viral “good jeans” commercial this past summer when confronted by a hack “journalist,” who then subtly threatened Sweeney with harm to her professional career if she did not denounce the white supremacists who took the “good genes” pun and used it to promote a racist agenda.
Sweeney, of course, is absolutely right to refuse to apologize. The ad was not promoting eugenics in any way. But conservatives are taking exactly the wrong message if they expand this into a principle to never apologize for anything, ever. “Apologizing is a sign of weakness” is the wrong lesson to take. Yes, when you are pressured into apologizing when you have done nothing wrong, and especially when you apologize for words or actions that are good, you show weakness that will only encourage the mob to attack you more. An apology is blood in the water to the swarm of piranhas.
But we are all sinners, by nature and by choice. We are all capable of heinous sins, and Scripture teaches us in James 3 that our mouths (and today, our keyboards and phone screens) can be a source of all kinds of wickedness. When we sin, we should apologize for those sins, repent and seek forgiveness. Scripture teaches that if we confess our sins, Jesus is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If people use that as a signal to attack us more, we should be humble about our actual sin while refusing to back down from things that are good - recognizing that even when we are going good, we may have a sinful attitude. We should also reject demands for to issue performative apologies over and over and over again. That is not reconciliation. That is an attempt at domination by people who refuse to forgive. Be wise about the motives of those demanding apologies while also being humble.
“Never apologize” is in one sense the correct reaction to cancel culture, but it is also the wrong reaction. Courage must be mixed with humility, and it requires wisdom and discernment. We are often unqualified to know when to apologize, so seeking godly counsel is often necessary. Going “all in” is intellectually and spiritually lazy.