Every time I see a crowd gather for justice, I feel something in my chest loosen. Something that gets tight every time the world pretends everything is fine when it clearly is not. There is a tenderness in protest that outsiders never see. The homemade signs. The nervous laughter. The people offering snacks or sunscreen or a bottle of water to total strangers. 

It is messy, hopeful, human, and holy.

I think we forget sometimes that the holiest things are human things. Courage. Grief. Rage that refuses to abandon compassion. The stubborn conviction that our neighbors deserve better. That is protest in its truest form. It is people refusing to let the world shrug off cruelty.

And for the life of me, I cannot understand why some Christians treat protest like a spiritual failure. As if God gave us voices so we could keep them to ourselves.

There is a myth floating around that a “good Christian” stays calm at all times. Keeps the peace. Never raises a voice. Never rocks the boat. Smiles politely while the world burns.

Bless our hearts. Whoever sold us that myth must have skipped a fair portion of the Bible.

I do not know how anyone can read about Jesus and come away thinking he was a passive bystander. He healed on the wrong day. Challenged religious leaders. Crossed boundaries people insisted were sacred. And yes, he flipped a table or two. The man could cause a stir.

Yet here we are, generations later, with folks clutching their pearls any time someone stands up against injustice. They call it disrespect. They call it disorder. They call it a lack of faith.

But if faith never disrupts anything, what good is it?

Look around at any protest and you will see the seeds of scripture. 

People demanding fairness. 
People calling out the systems that harm the most vulnerable. 
People saying, “We refuse to keep participating in something that breaks human spirits.”

That sounds a lot like the prophets to me.
It sounds a lot like Mary’s song.
And it definitely sounds like Jesus.

Protest is not a failure of faith.
Protest is faith finally stepping into daylight.

Some folks talk about faith as if it is meant to be tidy. As if God prefers everything to be quiet and orderly. But quiet and orderly has never saved anyone. Quiet and orderly has never stopped oppression. Quiet and orderly has never healed a community.

Love needs movement. 
Love needs voices. 
Love needs people who refuse to let fear be the loudest thing in the room.

We are in the season when Christians are supposed to look inward and ask hard questions about themselves and their world. Lent is not about self-shaming. Lent is about clarity. It is about honesty. It is about asking whether the way we are living matches the Love we claim to believe in.

And when you look honestly at the world, you see plenty worth protesting. Policies that break families apart. Rhetoric that dehumanizes whole communities. Leaders who wear piety on Sunday and cruelty the rest of the week. In moments like these, protest is not optional. It is faithful.

Jesus’ path to Jerusalem was not a quiet spiritual journey. It was a public confrontation. It was an act of courage. It was protest embodied.

Lent is not the season to shrink back. It is the season to show up.

I will be the first to say that silence is sacred sometimes. But silence is only holy when it honors life, not when it protects injustice. There is a difference between contemplative quiet and complicit quiet. One heals. The other harms.

When institutions crush people, Love gets loud. 
When laws target the vulnerable, Love gets loud. 
When the powerful use religion to control, Love gets loud.

Christian Nationalism hates loud Love because loud Love breaks the spell. Loud Love exposes the lie that obedience is the same thing as faith. Loud Love lets the world know that Christianity was never meant to be a chaplaincy for empire.

I named this project Southern Fried Heresy for a reason. I grew up around cast iron skillets. They are tough, honest tools. They get scratched, scraped, and banged around. But they hold heat like nothing else. Over time, they season. They get more resilient, not less.

Real faith is like that. It holds heat. It does not fall apart when things get uncomfortable. It can handle a little fire.

Protest seasons our faith. It teaches us what we care about. It teaches us to trust that Love’s call is worth following, even when the path is risky. It teaches us that our voices matter.

And maybe most importantly, it teaches us that we are not alone.

So here is my invitation, spoken to you with as much humanity as I can muster. 
Let your compassion push you to act. 
Let your heartbreak become fuel for courage. 
Let your faith lead you into places where Love is needed most.

If Jesus had chosen silence, nothing would have changed.
If Jesus had chosen safety, nothing would have healed.
If Jesus had chosen obedience to empire, there would be no Christianity to speak of.

We are here because Love protested.
We are here because Love refused to sit down.
We are here because Love chose the harder path.

Protest is not the breakdown of faith.
Protest is faith learning how to breathe again.