Should Christians Be Meek?

By Ed Mullen

The language a society uses can powerfully shape how its members perceive reality, organize their thoughts, and prioritize values—steering cultural norms, institutions, and collective decisions in lasting ways. This idea, often linked to linguistic relativity, holds that the structure, vocabulary, and metaphors of a language influence everything from social attitudes to policy priorities. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the concept of Newspeak was introduced as a tool to influence the masses by controlling their vocabulary and thus controlling their thought.

While language has often been used as a method of control, it can also be used as an effective weapon of destruction. Teach the people that they should be timid and passive. Convince them that being weak and submissive is a virtue. Once you have achieved that, the people will not resist as their culture, their families, and their nation are torn down around them.

When modern English speakers hear the phrase “Blessed are the meek” most assume this is a commandment from God given to them by Jesus. Western churches have taught this to their congregations for centuries. The admonition to be meek is one of the most frequently quoted lines from the Sermon on the Mount. But did Jesus actually say that?

Remarkably, the word “meek” as we use it today bears almost no resemblance to what Jesus actually said to the Jewish people 2000 years ago. This misunderstanding has not been confined to Sunday school classrooms and greeting cards. Over the course of centuries, it has seeped into the core of Christian culture, shaping how believers see themselves, how they engage - or fail to engage - with the world around them, and how the world sees them in return.

The Gospel of Matthew was composed in Koine Greek, and the word that appears in Matthew 5:5 is praus (πραὰς). Jesus, speaking to a Jewish audience steeped in Hebrew scripture, was almost certainly echoing Psalm 37:11, where the Hebrew word is anav. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the translators rendered the Hebrew anavim of Psalm 37:11 as praeis—the plural form of praus. Neither of these words means what modern English speakers understand by “meek.” Both are far better translated as “gentle” - but a particular kind of gentle that the English language struggles to capture in a single word.

The standard Greek lexicons confirm this. Thayer’s defines praus as “gentleness of spirit.” Mounce’s Expository Dictionary describes it as the positive moral quality of dealing with people in a kind manner, with humility and consideration. In classical and Koine Greek, the word had a specific and vivid range of application. Xenophon, the Greek soldier and author, used praus to describe horses that had been trained - animals that possessed enormous power but had learned to bring that power under control, to stand calmly among other horses when not in battle. Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics, defined praotes (the noun form of praus) as the virtuous mean between excessive anger and excessive forbearance - the quality of a person who feels anger on the right grounds, for the right reasons, in the right manner, and at the right moment. The concept, then, is not weakness but gentleness - power under control, force governed by wisdom and restraint.

The Hebrew anav carries a complementary set of meanings. In the Old Testament, the anavim were the afflicted - those who had been ground down by oppression but who maintained their dignity and their trust in God rather than resorting to violence or bitterness. Moses is called the most anav of all people in Numbers 12:3 - and the Septuagint translates that Hebrew word as praus. This is the same Moses who confronted Pharaoh, shattered the tablets of the Law in righteous anger, and led a nation through the wilderness by force of will. No one would describe Moses as meek in the modern sense. He was, however, a man who subordinated his own considerable power to the purposes of God. He was gentle in the deepest sense: powerful but not self-serving, strong but not cruel.

When the translators of the King James Bible chose the word “meek” in 1611, they were not making the error that modern readers inherit. The English word “meek” entered the language from Old Norse mjúkr, meaning “soft, pliant, gentle.” In the twelfth century, when the word first appeared in Middle English, it meant “gentle or mild of temper; forbearing under injury or annoyance.” That was a reasonable approximation of praus. The problem however is that language evolves, and it often evolves in ways that can be hard to predict. By approximately 1300, the word “meek” had begun to take on a secondary meaning of ‘submissive’, ‘docile’, and ‘obedient’ and that meaning coexisted with ‘gentle’ for generations, eventually crowding out the word’s original meaning in later centuries. Today, Webster defines “meek” as “deficient in spirit and courage: submissive,” and lists synonyms including “spineless” and “timid.” What was once an adequate translation became a misleading one - and because the King James Version exercised such enormous influence over subsequent English Bibles and over the Christian culture at large, the distortion compounded across generations.

Language is Destiny

If the translation problem were merely academic - a footnote in a seminary textbook - it would be of interest only to scholars. But the distortion of praus into the modern word “meek” has had consequences that reach far beyond the page. For centuries, generations of Christians have absorbed the message that their faith requires them to be passive, silent, and submissive in the face of injustice and evil, that strength and assertiveness are somehow incompatible with following Christ. The result has been a slow-motion catastrophe: a faith that once stood at the center of Western civilization’s moral and political life has retreated, step by step, from the public square - not because its message lost its power, but because its people were taught to believe that power itself was something that they should not exercise.

The damage caused by this misinterpretation accelerated dramatically in the post-war Western world. In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The following year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court struck down Bible readings in public schools as well. The decisions were enormously consequential: they removed from millions of American children a daily ritual that had connected the public school system to the nation’s religious heritage since its founding. While individual citizens reacted with outrage - public denunciations, letter-writing campaigns, and proposed constitutional amendments - the institutional response of the church was remarkably timid and subdued. No sustained, coordinated legal or political movement emerged to reverse the decisions. The churches backed down. They did not fight. And a fateful page had been turned.

Take the Money

In 1954, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas - then embroiled in a contentious reelection campaign in which tax-exempt organizations were supporting his opponent - proposed an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that prohibited all 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, from participating in or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. The penalty for churches that disobeyed this rule was the loss of their favorable tax status. Churches that refused to self-censor would have to pay taxes. The amendment was slipped into the tax code without a single hearing, without a single minute of floor debate, and without a single recorded vote. It passed in silence - and the churches received it in silence.

If the Pharisees had offered Jesus money in return for his agreement to stop criticizing them, how would he have reacted? The word ‘fury’ and ‘anger’ do not do justice to the outrage he would have expressed. Now fast forward to 1954. American churches were given the same choice: stay true to the word of God – or take the money.

They took the money.

Not one major denominational body objected. Not one prominent Christian leader raised a public alarm. Not one organized campaign of resistance materialized. A provision that effectively placed a gag order on the pulpits of America - prohibiting pastors from speaking to the important issues of the day in the way that ministers had done for centuries - was accepted without so much as a murmur of dissent. The message to the people was clear – the secular state was higher, more powerful, and superior to the church. And by example, the church taught its people that, when faced with the choice between money and the word of God, take the money. The irony is staggering: for the first 165 years of the American republic, pastors had spoken freely on all important and relevant matters of the day. Now they quietly accepted censorship in return for tax breaks.

The churches’ acquiescence to the Johnson Amendment was not a one-time failure. It established a pattern of self-censorship and subservience to the state that deepened with each decade. Pastors learned to avoid all topics that could even remotely be connected to politics. Congregations learned not to expect moral leadership from the church on the urgent questions of the day. The separation was so thorough that when the Alliance Defending Freedom began organizing “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” in 2008 - encouraging pastors to deliberately violate the amendment by preaching political sermons - the IRS did not even bother to comment, so accustomed had everyone become to the silence. The gag was no longer necessary. The churches had internalized it.

The Harvest of Silence

The cumulative effect of this long retreat can be measured with devastating precision. When Gallup first measured church membership in 1937, it stood at 73 percent, peaking near 76 percent shortly after the Second World War. It held near 70 percent for the next six decades—and then collapsed. By 2010 membership had fallen to 61 percent, and by 2020 to 47 percent, dropping below half the population for the first time in the eight decades Gallup had asked the question. Weekly church attendance told the same story: Gallup recorded 44 percent of Americans attending in the week prior in 2000, a figure that fell to roughly 30 percent by the early 2020s.

Pew Research Center found that the share of Americans claiming no religious affiliation rose from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014 and to nearly 29 percent by the mid-2020s; measured against the roughly 6 percent who claimed no affiliation in the early 1990s, the religiously unaffiliated had multiplied nearly fivefold in a single generation. Over the same span, the proportion of Americans who told Pew that religion was “very important” in their lives fell from 56 percent in 2007 to 38 percent—a nineteen-point drop in fewer than twenty years.

By choosing to self-censor in exchange for tax breaks, churches kept their marble palaces and their gold-plated trinkets – but they lost the people.

Some may argue that there are other factors behind these numbers - institutional scandals, the rise of Hollywood influence, dominance of Leftist ideology in public schools. But the role of the churches’ own self-imposed passivity should not be underestimated. A faith that presents itself as timid, that refuses to engage with the moral and political questions of its day, that teaches its adherents that strength and courage are somehow un-Christian, will inevitably lose the respect of the very people it seeks to attract. Young people in particular - precisely the demographic most alienated from the institutional church - are not drawn to weakness and cowardice. They are drawn to conviction, to courage, to leaders and communities willing to stand for something. When the church chose the path of passivity, weakness, being inoffensive and unwilling to make waves - it made itself irrelevant to the Western world. And so, the Western world abandoned it.

This is the tragic irony at the heart of the misrepresentation. Jesus did not call his followers to be passive. He called them to be gentle in the real sense, to possess power and wield it with wisdom, to stand firm without being cruel, to engage the world with strength under control. The very quality that should have made Christianity formidable in every era - a disciplined, purposeful force that could confront injustice without becoming unjust - was reinterpreted, through the slow drift of a single English word, as a mandate for withdrawal. And the church withdrew. From the political arena. From the public schools. From the great moral debates of the twentieth century. It withdrew not because Christ told it to, but because it chose to.

With the Christian church in decline, the Christian world soon followed. Today we find the West in the midst of mass societal suicide. As Muslims flood into Europe at the invitation of European leaders and the rest of the world is invited to march across America’s southern border by America’s own politicians, the West is committing suicide at a frenetic pace. The momentum of this trajectory is so powerful, so widely embraced by the media, and so well funded by Western elite that it is hard to imagine it reversing. The timidity of the Western church became the timidity of the Western world. Today the West is dying because the Christian church, the foundation of the West, has died.

Can Mice Become Men?

Momentum is a peculiar thing; the more it builds the harder it is to stop. This is true in both Newtonian mechanics and in cultural evolution. Over the centuries, as the Christian church retreated further and further from relevance, it attracted leaders who were by nature timid, passive and subservient. They in turn steered the church further toward weakness and irrelevance, which in turn attracted more of their kind, which in turn...

At some point, a momentum this powerful and this long in the making becomes impossible to turn around. Given the condition the church finds itself in today, perhaps it would be best to let the entire rotten carcass collapse of its own corruption, stupidity, cowardice, and hypocrisy. Then, from the ashes, build something new, powerful and true to the teachings of Christ.

Blessed Are The Gentle

The message that the Greek and Hebrew originally communicated to their Christian audiences was that gentleness is not the absence of force but the disciplined, purposeful mastery of it. The wild horse that stands calm. The afflicted who refuse to become what afflicted them. The leader who could destroy but who chose to build.

Recovering this meaning is not merely a matter of philological housekeeping. It is a matter of restoring to the Christian faith one of its most essential and powerful teachings - a teaching that, properly understood, calls believers not to retreat from the world but to engage it with a strength that is all the more formidable for being governed by conscience, by compassion, and by an unwavering commitment to what is right. The Beatitude was never a blessing on the meek. It was a promise to the strong who chose to follow God’s wisdom. It is time for Christians to rediscover this message and put it into practice.

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