Hours after the 47th President took his oath of office, his pettiness was on full display. He attacked government employees on social media by name and announced “YOU’RE FIRED!” He ordered the removal of a portrait from the Pentagon of a general who criticized him. And he rewarded the loyalty of January 6th rioters who violently assaulted police officers on his behalf by granting them pardons. Unfortunately, the petulance wasn’t limited to the President. A minister at the inauguration ceremony used his invocation to take a swipe at the departing President standing beside him. Why have such insecure and unserious men been elevated to lead us?
I’ve been searching for the right words to explain the type of men that seem to be in power today, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of so many chest-thumping men’s ministries that define “manhood” and “masculinity” with cultural values masquerading as biblical ones. I roll my eyes every time I hear someone talk about David as a paradigm of masculinity because he was a warrior, but then never mention his proclivity for nude choreography. Or when they highlight Nehemiah as a model of ballsy male leadership, but conveniently fail to mention that he was a eunuch—he literally had no balls. All that to say, I don’t really buy the notion that the Bible has a single, discernible set of qualities we can label “masculine.” But I digress.
In my search to describe what we are seeing, I’ve concluded that our society and the church is full of small men. Obviously, that is a metaphysical description, not a physical one. Not long ago, I saw a documentary about theoretical physics and Einstein’s contribution to the field. His theory of relativity presented a unified understanding of space, time, and gravity. Basically, Einstein said that gravity was the result of massive objects literally bending space-time. That’s a crazy idea—the weight of something warping the fabric of the cosmos. In fact, according to Einstein’s theory, every object bends space-time, but most are far too small to register any perceptible effect.
That’s what I mean by small men; they lack a gravity of soul—the mass of presence—to bend reality in any perceptible way. Of course, this quality may be carried by women as well, but my concern is why there are now so few men who possess the silence and stillness of a weighty soul. The sun has no need to reach out and grab a passing comet or to manipulate a planet into its orbit. The sun’s massiveness just is. By its simple presence space-time bends and everything that passes by it is drawn closer.
Small men, by contrast, lack this silent dignity and the unforced attraction of a soul with mass, and therefore they must resort to all kinds of theatrics to hide their vacuousness. One common distraction used by small men is anger. With outrage, volume, and passion small men try to convince the world of their power and weight, and unfortunately, it’s often enough to attract an audience in our noisy, consumer culture. They tell us who to blame. Who is our enemy. What to fight. And they point to their hot- headedness as proof of God’s Spirit within them. But they and their fanboys have forgotten that anger does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20).
The other mark of small men is an insistence on their own self-righteousness detached from any self-reflection. Within them is a need to diminish others as a means of elevating themselves. This is why a small man is always drawing lines of demarcation to show who is in, who is out, what is right, what is wrong, with himself perpetually at the center of all rightness. And it explains why personal loyalty is the small man’s only measure of another’s value. A ridiculous compliment will get you a seat at his table. A wise word of correction, however, will get you banished to the outer darkness.
The small man will defend this behavior by appealing to the importance of “truth.” Of course, truth is valuable in so far as it helps us see and know God as he is. A relentless battle for the truth, in which the small man’s loyal tribe always possesses it and his opponents do not, is not the kind of truth Christians affirm, and the collateral damage it produces is not evidence of godliness. There is a reason truth is not listed among the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus and his apostles understood that even demons can possess the truth and yet be agents of evil (James 2:19).
Truth should play a role in our communities, but not a divisive, external sort of truth. The truth Jesus wants from us is not mere doctrinal purity that does little but inflate the heads of those who claim to possess it. Instead, he leads us to recognize and admit the truth about ourselves—to see both our fallenness as mere mortals, but also our sacredness as redeemed rulers. I believe this is the kind of truth God wants and that marks his true worshipers (John 4:24).
What has me exhausted and saddened today is the realization that our world is not only filled with small men, but that both the church and the culture celebrate their smallness. We have become enamored with men of anger and division believing these are marks of true leadership because it has been so long since most of us have encountered anything else. What we long for, what I long for, is leadership of true gravity—men and women of undeniable mass who do not need to rely on the false manipulations of anger and rightness to affect the world.
Returning to the metaphor from Einstein, a man with true gravity of soul does two things. First, he bends space. Again, this just happens. It’s not some tactic or strategy. Rather, it is the unavoidable consequence when a soul of great weight is present. The space around him bends and draws others inward. Where a small man seeks to divide people and drive communities apart in order to elevate himself, a man of weight transcends divisions and pulls seemingly incongruous people together into his orbit.
Amartya Sen warned about what he calls “miniaturization.” It’s the tendency to reduce our many identities down to a single, simple one. For example, I have many identities including husband, father, writer, Christian, American, etc. Miniaturization would eliminate all but one identity until I see myself (and others) through a single lens. I am a Christian and you are either with me or against me. I see you as merely a believer or non-believer, all other aspects of who you are—and who I am—are irrelevant. This inevitably causes division. The instinct to miniaturize is the mark of every small man.
A man of true gravity sees others as whole, integrated persons and not as single labels. As a result, he respects others and builds connections. Under his leadership, people from seemingly opposing identities discover they have more in common than the world would have them believe.
The second mark of a man of gravity is that he bends time. Einstein’s theory says that when you draw closer to a massive object time actually slows down, and objects of exceptional mass (like a black hole) can arrest time entirely. Likewise, a soul with great mass creates an oasis from the chaos and hectic pace of life. Time slows around him and others find a serenity that cannot always be explained. I don’t mean to say that men of gravity are all monks who escape every worldly responsibility. Instead, men of gravity remain aware of their callings and the work they are to accomplish, but without the burden of carrying the outcomes alone. They understand the world is in God’s hands, not theirs. This frees them from the hurried need to accomplish everything immediately. In addition, those whom the world has chewed up and spit out, who feel used and cast aside by the endless race to achieve, discover renewal in the presence of a man with real soul gravity. This is precisely why so many broken and burdened people were drawn to Jesus and his “easy yoke” (Matthew 11:30).
And, so I return to my original question. Why have so many insecure and unserious men been elevated to lead us? Why is this the age when small men rule, and how do more of us cultivate souls with real mass?
Rather than emphasizing some secret formula, curriculum, or new trendy program, I believe we are called into deeper communion with Christ through the indwelling presence of his Spirit. This, I regret, is exactly what is missing in so many churches and Christian communities, and why so many Christians are willing to follow small leaders. We lack the language to describe the life we are called to in Jesus, and the age of giants in the American church has passed. We do not have a critical mass of men in our Christian communities with weighty souls because the values of pop Christianity have caused us to replace true shepherds with mere managers. We have given up the difficult work of cultivating true communion with God for the more lucrative profession of entertaining religious customers. Simply put, shallowness sells.
This, I think, is what people found amazing and perplexing about Jesus. After delivering his Sermon on the Mount, the people remarked that his authority was unlike their other teachers. His message was not loaded with passionate denunciation like the zealots, nor was it a call to judgment of those outside some artificial line of righteousness like the Pharisees. He did not employ outrage. He did not spark division. He did not miniaturize his opponents, and he did not burden his followers. Instead, he spoke the heavy, cosmos-bending words of his Father. And he did so without fear or anger. Perhaps more perplexing to the audience was how Jesus did not seek their approval or applause. His sense of self-worth was not linked to their response. Instead, he was grounded in his communion with the Father. He would remain the beloved Son with or without the crowd’s affirmation. He was unshakable; the One of ultimate gravity who draws all people to himself.
I cannot claim to know what our Lord is doing in our culture or why petty leaders like the ones on display yesterday at the Capitol have been granted so much influence. What I do know is that the future of God’s kingdom will not be entrusted to them. It will be put into the hands of heavy souls who lead with a quiet authority that does not come from themselves. Until such giants return and the church welcomes them, we are fated to live in a land of small men.