Every year there’s a season when Christians ask me the same question in a dozen different forms: how do we respond? Pride Month brings it out in force, but the truth is this question comes up year-round — at school board meetings, in family group chats after the news cycle turns, when a friend posts something you can’t just scroll past. The specific issue changes. The question underneath it doesn’t: how do we engage a culture that is running from God’s design without losing our witness in the process?

I want to walk through how I think about this, because I believe most of us only have three options when we’re faced with cultural depravity, and two of them don’t work.

Three ways to respond

The first is to be angry and self-righteous. Tell people off. Fire back in the comments. A lot of us have watched this play out on social media, and honestly, I don’t think it influences anyone. It just confirms to the watching world that Christians are exactly what they suspected.

The second is to bury our heads in the sand and disengage entirely. That’s not what God has called us to either. Silence doesn’t bear fruit any more than anger does.

The third option is to attempt to influence our culture with gospel truth. That’s the only one of the three I’ve ever seen actually work, even though it looks different for different people and different situations.

Checking our own pride first

Before we talk about engaging anyone else, we have to check our own pride. It’s easy to post a Bible verse about how pride comes before a fall and feel like we’ve done something. We haven’t. Repentance starts with us, not with the people we’re trying to reach.

I’ve also always discouraged the tit-for-tat instinct — the idea that if the world is doing something loud and public, we need to counter it with something equally loud and public on the same night, at the same hour, as a kind of spiritual rebuttal. I understand the impulse. But we should be worshiping God every day, not just when culture gives us a reason to schedule a response. When our engagement is reactive instead of rooted, I start to wonder what we’re actually worshiping.

Two audiences, two strategies

Here’s something I think we miss. There isn’t one audience out there — there are at least two, and they respond to different things.

For the individual person caught in sin, what sways them most is relationship. Loving them, sharing the gospel with them, understanding the idols their heart is actually serving, and offering real gospel hope instead of a talking point. That’s slow, personal work, and it’s the work I want the church equipped to do.

But there’s a second, much larger audience: the allies. The people who aren’t personally living out a given sin but who believe the ideology behind it and shape the culture that normalizes it. That’s not a small group — it’s the majority. And that group isn’t moved primarily by relationship. It’s moved by public discourse — by reasoning, by facts, by persuasion done in the public square. We see the Apostle Paul doing exactly this throughout Acts, especially Acts 17. Isaiah 1:18 tells us God gave us minds to reason. We’re supposed to use them — at school board meetings, in legislative hearings, and yes, on social media, because whether we like it or not, that’s where much of the public square lives now.

Too many Christians decry decisions being made by elected bodies and school boards while never once showing up to speak into them. If we want to influence outcomes, we have to be in the room, or at least in the comment section, reasoning with people — with grace, with logic, with truth.

What we say matters as much as whether we say it

There’s been a real shift lately toward Christians wanting to speak up more boldly on moral issues, and I agree with that instinct — these are biblical issues, and the church should be leading the conversation on them. But boldness isn’t the whole assignment. What we say has to be true. I see a lot of newfound boldness producing statements that are, at best, unhelpful, and at worst, flatly untrue. Christians can be far too prone to conspiracy theories with no basis in reality. We are called to be truth-tellers, not to make a point.

Ephesians 4:29 has to be the filter: let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only what is good for building up, fitting for the occasion, and gives grace to those who hear it. I run everything I post through that verse. If it doesn’t build up and it doesn’t give grace, it doesn’t go out, no matter how true it might technically be.

Counting the cost

Every interaction — online or in person — has potential for good, and it also comes at a cost. Speaking clearly on these issues has cost me relationships. I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost a ministry supporter over content I believed was worth saying. I mourn those losses; I don’t wear them as a badge of honor.

That’s the part I want to push back on hardest. A lot of Christians treat being rejected or pushing people away as proof they’re being faithful. I think that attitude is full of pride. I want to have influence on as many people as possible, which means every time my words push someone away, that’s a loss to grieve, not a trophy to display.

So before I post or say anything, I ask two questions: is this going to do more harm than good, and what is the cost I’m willing to pay for it? Sometimes the answer is that it’s worth it — shining a light in a dark place, even an unpopular one, has led to real change and protected real families. Other times I’ve had to admit that a topic, even a legitimate one, was pulling me away from the specific calling God has given me, and that the cost to my influence wasn’t worth it.

One test I’d offer: memes and slogans that feel satisfying to post rarely move anyone toward repentance. I’ve heard plenty of testimonies from people who walked away from sin toward Christ. I’ve never heard one that started with a meme. If a post isn’t sharing gospel hope and isn’t likely to soften a heart, it’s worth asking whether it’s bearing any fruit at all — or just pushing people further from the one relationship that could actually reach them.

What good public engagement looks like

There are people doing this well, and it’s worth naming them. Katie Faust uses facts, logic, reason, and truth to make her case publicly, and it’s working — support for same-sex marriage recently declined for the first time in a decades-long trend, and she’s been part of that shift. Rosaria Butterfield speaks strong words but does it with intelligence, clarity, and grace, and she’s had a remarkable influence on how the church understands biblical sexuality — without even being on social media herself. And the abolitionist movement working to end abortion, groups like Abolitionists Rising, go out, reason with people face to face using logic and biblical truth, and post those real conversations publicly. It’s gaining ground precisely because it engages rather than just declares.

What those examples have in common isn’t volume or aggression. It’s seriousness, grace, and truth held together.

Where this leaves us

Pray about how you can have influence, both in the public square and in the individual relationships God has put in front of you. Instead of just being frustrated by whatever culture is doing this month, ask what’s underneath it — what someone has come to believe, and why — and let that shape how you engage.

We need to be gentle with people, but we go to war with ideas. That war will cost us relationships sometimes, and we should feel that cost, not celebrate it. We do as little damage as we can, we fight for truth because it’s good for our culture and our families, and we keep the gospel at the center of it — because the goal was never just to win an argument. It’s to make disciples. That’s the whole reason we do any of this.