After the killing of Alex Pretti, Blake Guichet, a popular Christian influencer, resisted the emotional undertow of social media. One of her Instagram posts declared open resistance to what “the internet tell[s] you … to carry.”
“Faceless strangers don’t get to tell you if you’re a good person or not because of the events you do or do not post about,” Guichet wrote—though not incidentally, as Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic reported, Guichet posted seven times after the death of Charlie Kirk.
Her purported retreat from public political speech, a tactic other influencers like her have taken, mirrors the resignation many of us feel in this civic moment. Our sense of powerlessness grows, and we’re tempted to limit our sphere of care and compassion, even to believe that when we do so, we imitate Jesus, who, according to Guichet’s post, “withdrew when crowds demanded more.” To avoid emotional overwhelm and partisan rancor, we are tempted to abandon public concern for private faithfulness.
This may, in some cases, represent a sober wisdom about the limits of human capacity. But a retreat from grave social matters can also be a dangerous form of self-protection. From William Wilberforce to Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King Jr., we see compelling examples of Christian faith that emboldened public dissidence with—and even resistance to—obvious evil.
The question remains: Is their moment ours? And if it is, will their courage be ours too?
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Today’s problem is not, as Guichet argues, the scope of global suffering, even if we succumb to doomscrolling the news and carrying the emotional weight of global tragedy. The problem isn’t that social media demands swift responses, nor is it the moral sifting of said responses. The problem isn’t even the shallow performativity of internet speech that is more committed to rallying the base than persuading the unconvinced.
Although it is wise to turn from online outrage, we cannot, as followers of Jesus, turn a blind eye to the least of our neighbors, whom we love as an act of worship (Matt. 25:45). To do so may indicate we have failed to imagine meaningful public engagement—love, in the name of Christ, performed not simply in “words or speech” but “with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18).
At this particularly charged American moment, a more widespread problem is resignation to the plight of the refugee, asylum seeker, and immigrant in our midst, those who are being detained and deported without due process. The logic of an inward turn, toward our families and the four walls of our homes, thrives in a society of haves and have-nots. The haves enjoy a privileged isolation from the trauma the have-nots suffer: family separation, jail, and credible fear of returning to their home countries. It’s the have-nots who need our voice.
Many public Christian influencers like Guichet can afford the idyll of a quiet domesticity that men like C. and M. and S., three of my church’s ESL students, cannot. These West African asylum seekers (whose names I’m withholding) entered the United States under a then-legal process, yet they were recently detained after they lawfully presented at their immigration appointments. It’s unclear if and when their cases will be heard in court.
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These are law-abiding immigrants with authorization to work. Through no fault of their own, their once-legal status is pulled from under their feet. Their faces represent many others, including at least 10,000 Haitians who sought refuge and employment in Springfield, Ohio, just 90 minutes from my house. This hardworking community, unjustly indicted by smears during the last presidential election, will be vulnerable to deportation if the courts allow the administration to lift protections, as they did in the case of Venezuela TPS holders.
These are not crises of far-flung places. They haunt my proverbial backyard. Should I ignore them?
When neighbors like me do not defend these and others loudly and publicly, when we do not decry our government’s aggressive campaign to terrorize immigrants rather than afford them due process, we cannot believe we represent the heart either of good government or of the God to whom the psalmists pray: “‘Because the poor are plundered and the needy groan, I will now arise,’ says the Lord. ‘I will protect them from those who malign them,’” (12:5). Collectively, Christians must recover our prophetic voice.
When we do not clearly challenge Christian silence that masquerades as virtue, we do not love with sufficient courage. This is not a partisan argument—but it is distinctly political. If politics is the way we speak of our civic housekeeping, everyone has a responsibility to keep the house in order.
Performativity is a word that rose to prominence after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests. In 2021, Merriam-Webster added a new definition to its entry on performative: “made or done for show.” Rightfully, we reject performativity in the name of Jesus, who called out the religious leaders of his day for their blatant sins of hypocrisy. They performed their prayers on street corners. They gave to the needy—but only when a noisy brass band could trumpet their offerings, lest their generosity escape notice. “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward,” Jesus said (Matt. 6:2).
Yet we might misunderstand Jesus’ correction and throw the public good out with the performative bath water. When Jesus called us to pray and give in secrecy (6:3–6), did he forbid public gestures of committed Christian principle? In cautioning us against the insincerity of public spectacle, did he command us to refuse interest in anything other than our private concerns?
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I don’t think so. Though performative actions and speech are suspect, public life and speech are not. Jesus was a public figure.
When the chief priests and elders finally seized Jesus, his arrest was a covert operation—an irony Jesus couldn’t help but highlight: “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me” (Matt. 26:55). Jesus was never simply a private citizen, and if his revolutionary movement was to be stamped out, Rome understood it would necessitate a private arrest but a public crucifixion, his limp figure hanging as a stark imperial warning.
So too the apostles’ ministry was public. The attention they generated put them in the murderous sights of the same authorities that put Jesus to death. In private homes, the apostles broke bread, and in the public square, they preached and performed wonders and signs. As crowds gathered, Peter loudly and boldly proclaimed the mystery of God made flesh, this Jesus of Nazareth crucified, dead, and buried, then raised on the third day and ascended into heaven (Acts 2).
When public speech put Paul and Silas in prison in Philippi—and the magistrates suddenly reconsidered their rashness, begging the inmates’ quiet departure—Paul was indignant. “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison,” he said. “And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out” (16:37).
Perhaps some will argue that these biblical examples stand out as apolitical. Critics could argue the gospel is a message of eternal salvation (it is!) and we did not find the apostles in the public square, throwing stones at Caesar’s policies. Yet as Larry Hurtado argues in Destroyer of the Gods, simply claiming the name of Christ was political resistance.
In the Roman Empire, residents were expected to participate in “processions and sacrificial offerings to the guardian god or goddess of the city,” Hurtado writes. “Even in ordinary activities such as giving birth, or eating, or travelling, in the meetings of guilds and other social groups, or in the formal meetings of a city council, people typically offered appropriate expressions of reverence to the relevant divinities.” Discipleship in the reign of the Caesars was always a public affair, as Christians pledged allegiance to a different king.
For a more recent example, in the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and her siblings grew up in a Christian home that underscored the social and political responsibilities of all Christians. As Obbie Tyler Todd details in his recent book The Beechers, “All of Lyman Beecher’s children were certain that the family unit was the building block of American society.” Though Stowe’s public activism against slavery is more widely known today, her older sister, Catharine, was an early and outspoken critic of the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly resettled many Native Americans . Lyman Beecher’s children were raised to understand that Christian faith begged active public involvement in their neighbors’ good.
Catharine and Stowe’s younger sister, Isabella, a suffragist, spoke of the influence of their childhood home on her own social activism: “I date my interest in public affairs from those years between eleven and sixteen, when our family circle was ever in discussion on the vital problems of human existence, [where] the United States Constitution, fugitive slave laws, Henry Clay and the Missouri Compromise alternated with free will, regeneration, heaven, hell, and ‘The Destiny of Man.’” The Beecher family did not always see eye to eye on public policy, but even as they diverged theologically as they got older, the Beecher children agreed Christianity was a matter of not only private conversion but also political responsibility.
My work as a public writer began within the explosion of social media platforms, and until now, I have largely agreed with Guichet’s refusal to “be reduced to whatever this year’s version of a black square on Instagram is.” But as a citizen of this democracy and of the kingdom of God, I can only conclude that public speech and action are becoming more necessary, not less. Silence can be a means of complicit concealment of injustice.
I am not suggesting we take up more social media tirades. Yet Christians must allow their public lives and words to instruct the people of God in the confusion of our moment, when lies parade as truths and vice is mistaken for virtue. Every conversation counts right now, as we seek to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6:8). Public—and private—speaking matters for every neighbor, especially those who cannot speak for themselves.
Jen Pollock Michel is an author, speaker, and spiritual writing mentor for Whitworth University’s MFA program. Her most recent book is In Good Time, and her forthcoming book publishing this fall is A Rule for the Rest of Us.
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