Naming the Source of My Faith Witness: Is it Activism?

There is a question I have carried quietly for some time—not because it is unimportant, but because I know how uncomfortable it can be to raise.

As I give it more space within me,
I can almost feel the air leave the room I’m standing in.

I want to name clearly from the outset who this reflection is for.

I am writing primarily to fellow Christians—especially those who care deeply about justice, who are resisting false witness in the church, and who may already be engaged in protest, advocacy, or public dissent.

I am not questioning that engagement.

I recognize the urgency many feel. I share the grief. I share the refusal to remain silent in the face of harm.

The question I am asking is not whether Christians should resist injustice,
but how we understand and name the source. For me, it is a knowable source – a relational bond from which that resistance flows. I commune with Christ. I am known. In my daily walk, I listen for and follow his voice, and I experience God moving in me and through me.

Jesus did not call himself an activist.
The prophets did not.
Abolitionists, civil rights leaders, martyrs, and saints largely did not.

I sense this pattern not only in my own life. It vibrates throughout the chamber of Christian history.

Many of my friends, whom I love, care for, and admire, together with historical figures I have long regarded as exemplars of courageous faith, are often described by others and sometimes by themselves as social or political activists. I understand the moral seriousness of that naming and the sorrow it carries in response to the church’s repeated failure to bear faithful witness.

Like them and with them, I believe in carrying the burdens of those who are suffering and feel grief and sometimes outrage at witnessing the harm done to the vulnerable. The compassion inside of me gets fierce as I watch the marginalized targeted by state violence. This is my solidarity with faith based activism.

Right now, something sharper and energized is especially alive in response to a perversion of Christianity often referred to as Christian nationalism, where political ideology is fused with the language and symbols of Christ in the pursuit of power and dominance.

Let me say it clear and firm: Christian nationalism is false witness.

It distorts the gospel.
It sanctifies social and political domination.
It harms the vulnerable.
It confuses coercion with discipleship.

As I have resisted it, I believe God has been shaping in me a way of being truthful to what animates my words and deeds.
It is clear that Love does not remain neutral in the face of harm.
My faithfulness must work itself outward into a sacred non-violent resistance.

So the question I am asking myself is not whether my Christian faith should resist injustice.

I experience what I can only describe as a compassionate ferocity on behalf of those harmed by abuses of power. I dissent in public. I grieve the trauma inflicted on communities of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ identities. I am deeply troubled that the name of Christ is being invoked to justify cruelty to those who bear the image of God.

The question I am asking is this:

What is my source, and why am I doing what I am doing?

How do I name the fervor alive in me?

Do I orient and organize my faith witness primarily around the scripts and strategies of activism?

This may sound like semantics to some, but for me it is not trivial. It is a matter of spiritual integrity. I need to be truthful before God and others in naming how I sense the church’s lived witness is taking shape.

When someone asks me why I am taking this stand, what do I tell them?

That I am part of a political campaign?
That I am a social activist pursuing a collective aim?

Or do I say something closer to what I actually experience:

that I am responding to Christ,
seeking to be faithful to his teachings,
and acting from a life shaped—however imperfectly—by his Spirit.

There is also something else at stake here:
a reverence for the lineage of those who have been called activists,
and for the real sacrifices they made.

If we are going to name them that way,
we should at least be honest about how they named themselves.

I want to be clear about what this reflection is not.

It is not an argument for social disengagement or passivity.
It is not an attempt to control outcomes, persuade skeptics, or pass judgment on Christians who name themselves activists.
It is not an effort to appease critics or preserve the comfort of the privileged.

I am concerned with something far more costly:

truth, source, and the repair of what the church makes visible through its shared life.

I am forming language that does not merely describe resistance,
but tells the truth about where it comes from.

And that matters.

I believe it matters not only to me,
but to God.

As I process what is happening in America and beyond, I cannot avoid the reality that the church’s witness has been gravely damaged. Many have left congregations disillusioned, convinced that what once claimed moral clarity has become entangled with fear, authoritarianism, and the pursuit of power.

Again and again, people name hypocrisy—the gap between what Christians profess and how they live—as the reason they leave.

That history demands repentance.
Not a cosmetic repentance.
But deep reckoning.

And yet, here is an uncomfortable truth I keep returning to:

For much of Christian history, outward love and resistance to injustice did not require an external structure to justify their obedience.

Believers fed the hungry.
Tended the sick.
Protected abandoned children.
Challenged rulers.
Resisted unjust authority.
And absorbed the cost of dissent—

sometimes in prison,
sometimes through persecution,
sometimes through death.

From what I have encountered in memoirs and historical accounts, many did not understand these acts as participation in a “movement.”

They understood them as obedience.
As discipleship.
As mercy.
As love of neighbor
(Matthew 22:37–40; Luke 10:25–37).

The absence of the word activism did not signal passivity.

It signaled coherence.

Action was already embedded in the moral grammar of their faith.

Jesus himself embodied this coherence.

He healed publicly.
He confronted power.
He overturned tables as a prophetic demonstration
(Matthew 21:12–13).

And then he stood silent before accusation,
refusing to defend himself
(Matthew 27:12–14).

One day disruptive.
The next seemingly passive.

Yet always faithful.
Always free.
Always attentive to what the Father was doing
(John 5:19).

His discernment did not come from a handbook on activism,
or political tactics,
or talking points handed down by a savvy political guru.

It flowed from abiding.

He knew when action spoke truth,
and when silence or stillness did the same work.

The word activism is a relatively recent arrival in Christian vocabulary, emerging from secular political movements and later adopted by Christians navigating modern public life.

Its usefulness in academic, journalistic, and policy contexts is not in question.

Such language was developed to describe public expressions of faith without assuming the truth of spiritual claims—especially in a post-Enlightenment context shaped by suspicion of church authority and superstition.

I understand these purposes.
I see no threat.

If others want to describe public faith witness differently, I am not afraid of those who choose their own language.
It would not be the first and only time the presence and movement of the Spirit of Christ was given other names.

What I must protect is my source.

When language meant to translate Christian witness is adopted by Christians as the main way they name themselves, something vital is at risk of being lost.

The source begins to fade from view.

Many figures now described as activists did not understand themselves that way.

Sojourner Truth believed the Spirit had called her to testify.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood himself as standing in a prophetic lineage, accountable to God before he was accountable to any movement.

That way of naming came later.

The source was spiritual.

What is different now is that Christians are increasingly naming themselves using language never meant to bear the full weight of faith.

And that naming carries consequence.

Here is the guardrail I feel forming in me spiritually.

I want the source in me to be named accurately,
lest I begin to mistake my own insight, courage, or alignment
for something I have authored myself.

Scripture warns how easily human wisdom can masquerade as righteousness.

Paul insists that faith must not rest on human wisdom,
but on the power of God
(1 Corinthians 1:18–31; 1 Corinthians 2:1–5).

I know my own susceptibility to pride. I am not immune.
I know how easily admiration for moral clarity can eclipse humility.

I need to remember that the light I carry is not mine.

Jesus names himself as living water
(John 4:10–14; John 7:37–38).

Jeremiah names the alternative plainly:
“They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and dug cisterns—cracked cisterns that cannot hold water”
(Jeremiah 2:13).

I am called to drink from a spring.
Not from a container.

For me, when I frame my faith witness as activism, something inside me becomes sharp and well-trained—

but also less childlike,
less dependent,
less attuned.

I do say this not to oppose education, learning, creativity, or agency. All of these hold the potential for how development forms.

I choose.
I decide.
I act freely.

But the self who chooses has been changed.
My will has been reshaped by grace.

“We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life”
(Ephesians 2:10).

I do not invent these works.
I do not organize them as a project.

I discover them.
I step into them.

Guarding that source matters more to me
than guarding any label or mission statement.

Here is my central concern, stated plainly:

When Christians resist injustice primarily under other names—
activist, movement member, faith-based advocate—
the church’s embodied witness is further eroded rather than repaired.

Faithful action begins to appear as something that happens elsewhere—
outside the church,
adjacent to it,
or in spite of it.

The church remains associated with harm.
Justice becomes associated with alternative identities.

Even when unintentional,
this is the message that lands.

It creates a false and devastating binary:

Christian nationalism on one side,
and secular, Godless progressivism on the other.

That binary is false.

It erases a long, lived story of Christian witness
sourced in the Spirit of God
and animated by new-creation life
(2 Corinthians 5:17).

The church does not repair its witness by distancing itself from its own name.

It repairs its witness by reclaiming it—
trembling, repentant, honest, but present.

When Christians love their neighbors,
resist injustice,
tell the truth,
and protect the vulnerable,

that is not activism supplementing the church.

That is the church being the church.

Jesus did not say,
“By this everyone will know you are my activists.”

He said,
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you love one another”
(John 13:34–35).

Discipleship is not a posture toward society.

It is a life rooted in him.

The work of healing false witness is slower, quieter,
and far less containable than a movement—

more raw,
more exposed,
and harder to live inside.

The Spirit cannot be organized.
She moves where she wills—
like the wind
(John 3:8).

But the church can attune.

And when it does,
it does not need a new name for its obedience.

It needs the courage
to be seen again
as what it is called to be.

So the question is not whether Christians may use the word activism.

The question is whether we need it
in order to bear faithful witness.

I am not convinced we do.

What the church needs now is not another label,
but the costly integrity of calling love what it is:

the life of Christ made visible in his body.

When that coherence is restored—even imperfectly—
the witness will speak for itself.