“Wash yourselves. Cleanse yourselves.

Remove your evil deeds from My sight.

Stop doing evil.

Learn to do what is good.

Seek justice.

Correct the oppressor.

Defend the rights of the fatherless.

Plead the widow’s cause. Isaiah 1:16-17

Isaiah 1 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. It’s a gripping indictment of a people obsessed with legalistic religiosity, while forgetting the heart of the religion they claim to follow. It’s a reproach that’s echoed later in James – unsurprisingly, another of my favorite books.

I love these passages because they’ve served as an inspiration for me as I’ve pursued and entered into a career in advocacy. They’ve helped show me the importance of using my voice as a tool for social change, and they provide a solid, biblical, framework for what it is. And I think, when we dive right into it, the Bible provides a powerful case for why every Christian can and should be involved in advocacy on some level.

So what is Advocacy?

The four lines in Isaiah 1 bolded above provide a solid framework for what advocacy is, and what it entails. Fundamentally, I’m defining it as any attempt to use one’s voice to enact or encourage social change. A letter to a Congressman is advocacy, and a tweet can be advocacy too. Signing a petition fits the bill, and a sermon almost always does. When we encourage and exhort our neighbors to join in a certain cause, we’re doing advocacy — and over time, all these droplets form together into floods, and that’s when change starts to roll like a river.

Seek Justice

Advocacy is rarely something someone stumbles into, and Isaiah knows that injustice ignored is injustice enabled. The Israelites lived in a culture and context that’s not so similar from our own in that way. The plight of the poor could be chalked up to laziness or sin, and what injustices were occurring as often as not happened behind closed doors. Today, it’s easier than ever to focus our attention on celebrity culture, entertainment news, or even theology, philosophy, or politics divorced from practice. Ephemera is everywhere, and suffering is buried far down in our newsfeeds, if it makes it there at all.

Correct the Oppressor

Just this Sunday, my pastor gave a sermon on correction, focusing on the clear Biblical need for Christians to seek out and respond to correction and reproof. There’s an important flip-side of that: the Biblical need to provide correction and reproof. And often, that correction will be directed at our Christian brothers and sisters who need it. But as Isaiah shows, it can also be directed towards those deliberately instigating injustice, be it a factory owner refusing to pay his workers a fair wage, or a government leader restricting basic freedoms of speech, or corrupt law enforcers working more for their well-being than for the public good.

What’s difficult about this kind of correction is that it’s almost always unasked for, undesired, and unheeded. It’s the kind of correction that’s bound to return with an extra helping of bitterness and scorn, if it’s returned at all. One only has to look to interviews of Omar al-Bashir (President of Sudan), or Bashir al-Assad (President of Syria) to see how oppressors tend to respond to criticism. So why bother?

I’d argue that there are three reasons, and the first is plain as ink. The Bible tells us so. In no uncertain terms, Isaiah demands that the Israelite “correct the oppressor.” No matter how apparently hopeless advocacy directed at the unjust is, it plays a vital role in establishing precedent and expectations, and to ignore a tyrant’s misdeeds is to give them an air of approval. Silence has never won a battle. Secondly, by voicing opposition to injustice we establish solidarity with the oppressed. One of the most powerful tools any dictatorship has is the ability to isolate its population, make them feel cut off from the world at large. Often, we facilitate that process by ignoring war crimes or oppression, but when we advocate on behalf of those affected, we establish connections to a world not defined by dictators, and that can be a powerful source of hope for both us and them. Finally, advocacy against oppressors can start movements needed to unseat them. When William Wilberforce began his advocacy against slave traders, he set forth on a path that ended the British slave trade, and helped inspire generations of abolitionists after. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke boldly against racist institutions enshrined in the South and at a Federal level, and changed the American status quo forever.

Every major social change began with ordinary citizens (often Christians) stepping out of their comfort zone and speaking against the unjust. That ability isn’t isolated to the charismatic or the influential – in the era of social media and organizations and existing movements dedicated to ending injustice, anyone can help contribute to the cause and amplify their own voice. And given the opportunity to do something so potentially impactful at so little a cost, everyone should.

Defend the Rights of the Fatherless; Plead the Widows Cause

Isaiah’s final two verses in this section both address a common cause: being a voice for the voiceless. Like it or not, there have always been those with the ability to access the influential, and those who haven’t. As Americans, living relatively comfortably in a democratic republic, we belong squarely to the first group. Unfortunately, disenfranchised folks (like widows and orphans) often lack advocates in the public space. And because these people have first-hand knowledge of the situation, and because these people will be impacted by our advocacy, there is no job more important to the advocate than that of understanding the stories of others as comprehensively as possible.

When I was studying reconciliation and justice after genocide in Rwanda 3 years ago, my constant question was “How can I help?” The answer I heard back more times than any other was “tell our story.” The Rwandans I met wanted someone who understood, to some extent, the pain they had endured and the progress they have achieved. They wanted advocates internationally to speak up for those affected by genocide and mass atrocities, and advocates who could share stories of hope in the face of utter terror. By God’s grace, that’s a job I’ve had the pleasure of doing.

The stories you share, the people you advocate for, and the causes you choose will very likely be different than mine, and that’s okay. What isn’t okay is a life spent insulated from the worst this world has to offer, and what’s worse is a voice gone unused. If you’d like to learn more about using your voice, or about organizations you can connect with, feel free to comment below or to send me an email. I’d love to hear about the causes you care about, and how you share the stories that have moved you.