You shared the clip, added a sentence of your own, and signed the petition someone passed around. For a minute it felt like you had done something. The honest question is whether you had, and whether a Christian should count that as the work God calls us to in public life.
Justin Giboney’s answer is that posting and signing have a place, but they are rarely the work itself. Giboney, an attorney and political strategist in Atlanta and a co-founder of the AND Campaign, treats protest as faithful and passion as good. What he questions is the reward. A post delivers the feeling of having acted almost instantly. The change most of us actually want comes from slower, mostly local, mostly unseen effort, and it usually takes far longer than a news cycle.
Is protest even something a Christian should do?
It is worth settling this first, because Giboney’s criticism of online activism is easy to mishear as a call to sit things out. He rejects that outright. He says “the Bible is full of protests and matters that had political implications,” and he points to Moses before Pharaoh and Daniel in the lions’ den. He also cites John 19, where Jesus is handed over to crucifixion through a process full of political pressure on Pilate. Of the idea that Christians are not supposed to be involved in such things, he says, “And to me, that’s just plainly bad theology.”
Those passages are narratives. They describe what happened rather than issue a rule for every believer’s calendar. But they do show that Scripture does not treat confrontation with rulers as foreign to faithfulness. Moses and Daniel spoke to people with power, at real cost, because something was at stake for God’s people.
Giboney also defends emotion. Some people will ask why you are so worked up. His reply is simple: “It’s good to have a little fire.” So the question was never whether a Christian should care loudly about injustice. It is what that care is actually producing.
Why does sharing a post feel so much like doing something?
Here Giboney is at his most candid, partly because he is describing temptations he knows. He asks the question that spoils every online victory: “I may win this debate. I may snap on you and my clap back may be stronger than your clap back. But what did I really accomplish?”
He names what the win does deliver. It may make him feel good, he admits, and he may be prideful about getting one up on someone. Then he turns attention away from the screen entirely. There are hungry kids, he says. “There are people that are suffering out there. And me making the discourse that much more toxic is not helping them at all.”
That is the distinction this whole question turns on. A post produces two things that are easy to confuse: an emotional result in the person posting and a practical result in the world. The first is reliable. The second is often close to zero. When the first arrives on schedule, it is natural to assume the second came with it. Giboney’s challenge is to stop letting the feeling stand in for the fact.
Lisa Fields admits a version of this from her own feed. She describes retweeting something, then wondering hours later whether she should have done it before getting more facts. She also notes how often opinion pieces get passed along as if they were reporting, sometimes by people who read only the headline. The feeling of conviction came first. The information came later, or not at all.
Doesn’t a Christian need to speak up quickly when people are hurting?
This is the strongest objection, and Giboney does not wave it away. He has taken criticism for not responding fast enough. He feels the urgency himself, saying plainly, “because when I see people hurting, I don’t wanna wait.” Silence can be cowardice. Sometimes a quick public word matters.
His point is that speed and effect are different things. From almost a decade in politics, he says he has watched people go wrong by responding before they had the facts, and that “it’s not as effective as you think it is to have an immediate response, especially if that response is not informed.” He goes further. Politics, as he describes it, is closer to a chess match than a simple game, and someone who jumps in without understanding the dynamics may end up helping the very people working against their cause.
So before responding, he asks a small set of questions. Have I done my due diligence? Have I done my homework? Do I really know what is going on? He adds a phrase that captures the goal: “Because what we talk about a lot of times is righteous efficacy.” Righteous means the response fits the gospel in its substance and its tone. Efficacy means it actually gets something done. A post can be righteous in intent and still fail the second test.
He also refuses to treat every headline as a fresh emergency requiring a personal verdict. “Everything doesn’t have to be responded to,” he says. He argues that Christians do better when they decide these things together, as a body working from a long-term plan, rather than as isolated individuals reacting case by case. That is a quiet but real rebuke to the solitary feed. Much online activism is one person, alone with a phone, deciding in seconds what the whole church should think.
Underneath the method is a conviction about how Christians speak at all. Giboney roots the AND Campaign in Ephesians 4, where Paul describes a mature church that is not tossed around by every wind of teaching. Ephesians 4:15 says, “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.” In context, Paul is talking about the church growing up together, not about political strategy. Still, the verse holds truth and love in the same breath, and Giboney’s own point is that being right on an issue does not license any way of expressing it. In his words, “there is a wrong way to do the right thing.”
If not online, where does the real work happen?
Giboney’s answer is blunt: “the real work is done in the background.” He reaches for the civil rights generation, naming Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. Read their biographies and strategies, he says, and you find sacrifice and time, not quick results and good camera angles. Of those who carried that work, he says, “They were doing the stuff that nobody saw, most of the time.”
For most people, the background is closer than they think. Giboney says attention should go almost primarily to local matters, because that is where the decisions that most directly affect people are made. His example is criminal justice. If someone wants to talk with him about it, he says, they should be able to name their district attorney and know who is arguing these cases and making recommendations to judges, because most people in jail are not in federal prisons. A person can post about mass incarceration for years without ever learning who prosecutes cases in their own county.
Lisa Fields adds two observations that make this concrete. A friend who worked for a congressman told her the office would receive letters about matters that had nothing to do with Congress and simply set them aside. Those letters belonged with a council member or a school board. She also describes attending a school board meeting in Duval County, in Jacksonville, Florida, and being struck by how few people were in the room, given how many students those decisions affect. Her conclusion was that showing up gives a person a real voice precisely because so few people do.
Giboney agrees and explains why local contact works. Local officials get fewer letters, so each one is more likely to be read, and they can often act sooner. Then he describes something any small group of friends could try. He pictures what happens “if you had five friends and you and your five friends just focused on local politics,” staying in front of those officials week after week. His promise is modest and earned: “If you’re willing to stand in there, for the long term, you’re gonna get some serious things done. And I know, because I’ve seen it before.”
Asked where someone should begin, he keeps it plain. Read the local newspaper. Read the agenda of the city council and the agenda of the school board. None of that will feel like activism the first time. Notice what this kind of work lacks: no instant feedback, no count of likes, no moment of public victory. That absence is exactly why it competes so poorly with posting for our attention, and why Giboney keeps saying it is not glamorous.
Why not just block the people who make you angry?
Lisa Fields raises the habit directly: blocking someone does not change their opinion, and it trains us to be less tolerant of views we oppose. Giboney answers from Acts 17, where Paul goes into the heart of Athens to reason with its philosophers. Acts 17:22 says, “Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.” Giboney observes that Paul spoke to them on their level, using their own rhetorical tools, and the chapter supports that. Paul cites their own poets in Acts 17:28 as part of his case.
Then Giboney gives his reason for staying in hard conversations, and it has nothing to do with being nice. People tell him they will not talk to someone who does not even want them alive. He answers: “I’ll tell you why you talk to them, you talk to ’em because there’s some little 4-year-old girl in the projects who’s not being treated right, who’s being underserved.” The conversation is not for anyone’s comfort. It is for the person who needs the decision to change. Withdrawal, by contrast, “seems like you’re doing that for yourself,” he says, and he cannot square it with advocacy: “So it’s hard for me to understand how we think we can withdraw from that, but at the same time be champions for the poor.”
Lisa Fields presses the same point on educated young professionals who argue about issues over brunch and at panels while keeping their distance from the people who live with them. She asks: “do we really want to be in the trenches with these folks, or do we just wanna talk about it when it’s fashionable.” Giboney turns the question on himself: “it’s easy for me to sit here with my Starbucks and my Apple computer and type all type of crazy stuff.” Being able to refuse a conversation with power is itself a sign of protection. “It is a privilege to be able to say, I don’t want to talk to this person who’s in power,” he says, because someone directly affected would not have that option. Posting, for all its noise, can be one more way of exercising that privilege.
Who am I speaking as when I post?
There is one more thing a post can reveal, and Giboney applies it to himself first. He says that early in his political life, he entered these conversations as a progressive trying to get a win rather than primarily as a Christian. Party loyalty, he warns, can become religious in nature, so that even moral views are drawn from the party’s agenda instead of the gospel. His question is worth asking before any share: “am I primarily being a progressive? Am I primarily being a conservative, or am I primarily a Christian?”
Giboney is a Democrat and encourages party participation. His line is integrity. In a room full of people from one party, others should be able to tell who the Christian is, and a Christian should be able to criticize their own side. Otherwise, he says, something is wrong, and “under no circumstances should Christians ever be indoctrinated by a party.” This connects directly to the feeling posting provides. Much of that satisfaction is the approval of our own side, and approval from a party is a poor guide to whether a Christian is bearing witness to Christ or simply repeating the team’s line.
Where does this argument stop?
Giboney does not dismiss online tools. He says social media can be a great tool and that his own organization uses it when it makes sense. His target is posting as the primary form of activism, especially among people with the education and access to do more. The conversation does not address people whose work hours or family care leave little room for evening meetings, and his argument should not be stretched into a demand that everyone attend every council session. A fair reading of it asks something smaller: honesty about what a given action accomplished, and a willingness to take the next step that actually reaches someone who decides.
Giboney offers one more reason the slower path is bearable. Christians, he reminds us, are not the ones who finally change people: “you and I haven’t saved anybody. We’re not going to save anybody.” He adds, “It’s God that makes the changes.” That frees a believer from needing the quick reward a post provides. Faithfulness does not depend on feeling effective. A Christian can show up to the meeting nobody films, write to the official nobody else contacts, keep talking with the person they would rather block, and trust God with results they may never get to repost.