This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Last week, many people commented on a group of American generals and admirals for what they did not do. They were gathered at Quantico, Virgina, for live-televised speeches by the president and the secretary of defense. The military leaders did not cheer and shout as if at a political rally, nor did they boo and jeer. They stood and listened with discipline and dignity. Many people who watched this event, regardless of political viewpoint, were struck by this. And yet in no other generation would Americans consider this remarkable. The spirit of the age was highlighted here by the strangeness of the exception to it.
These generals and admirals included Republicans, Democrats, and independents. The striking thing about their demeanor is that their posture would have been exactly the same in every imaginable circumstance. If, in some alternate reality, a President Bernie Sanders had addressed them about how he would use the military to deal with the billionaires, they would have looked no different than they did that day.
What these military leaders demonstrated is a quality we all intuitively recognize but find hard to put into words. Indeed, this characteristic might be best described by what some older English versions of the Bible translated as grave. The reason we hardly ever use that word now is probably because it feels like it should mean “dour” or “harsh.” The word is closer, though, to what we mean when we say someone has gravity.
This characteristic is one that the apostle Paul commanded for church leaders—that they be “sober-minded” (1 Tim. 3:2, ESV throughout) and “dignified” (v. 8). The recognition of our need for this quality in leadership is not unique to Christianity. When someone thinks, for instance, of George Washington, this trait is one of the first that comes to mind. He was a serious man.
What does this gravity mean, and why do we need it?
One aspect of its meaning is clarity. To say a person is “sober-minded” conveys this. The mind is clear. To press the metaphor a little further, think of what comes to mind with the word drunk. Inhibitions are lowered. Judgment is skewed. If, while sitting on a plane to take off, you hear your pilot through the intercom with slurred voice, announcing, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!” you will likely react differently than you would if you overheard someone in the seat across the aisle saying the exact same thing in the exact same way. On a flight, you understand the stakes are high. You want someone whose judgment is unclouded.
The opposite of this kind of clarity is not ignorance, really, but silliness. In addition to telling Timothy to appoint only “sober-minded” leaders, Paul warned him to avoid those who were “desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1:7), and he also cautioned Timothy to avoid “irreverent, silly myths” (4:7).
Gravity also means maturity. This trait is inseparable from clarity because both are related to wisdom. Sometimes new readers of the Bible are thrown by what they believe is a contradiction between the repeated commands to be childlike and commands to have maturity. But this is no contradiction at all. One assumes the other. Wisdom begins, the Scriptures say, with “the fear of the Lord” (Prov. 1:7)—that is, genuine wisdom starts with a sense of dependence, a recognition of what we do not know.
Solomon received wisdom because he first confessed, “I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in” (1 Kings 3:7). Wisdom includes, the Scriptures tell us, the discernment to know the difference between good and evil (Heb. 5:14). But when Adam and Eve attempted to grasp this knowledge on their own, apart from childlike dependence on their Father, the result was not wisdom but folly.
The New Testament pairs two statements about the young boy Jesus: He was with his parents and submissive to them (Luke 2:51), and he “increased in wisdom and in stature, in favor with God and man” (v. 52). He embraced both childlikeness and maturity. Indeed, the Bible says this process was essential to our salvation: In his human nature, Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8).
A final aspect of this gravity is something harder to convey. It’s what we might call a sense of responsibility. The person takes seriously what’s at stake. This facet is bound up with the other two. The “LOL nothing matters” mentality of trolling—on social media or in the pulpit or in public office—is about much more than the person who does such things. Immaturity is selfishness.
Solomon recognized the stakes and knew they were not about him. He was to lead other people, and part of what they needed was more than his years or experience could give him (1 Kings 3:8–9). The writer of Hebrews lambasted the immaturity of his readers, those who should have matured from “milk” to “meat,” because living off milk imperils their own integrity (Heb. 5:14) and also because “by this time you ought to be teachers” (v. 12).
Many times over the past several years, I have heard people—believers and unbelievers—wonder when “the grownups” are going to show up to save us. Sometimes the “us” they are talking about is the country; sometimes it’s the American church. The problem with this is similar to what the late Willie Morris, my fellow Mississippian, described as the rebuke he received from his supervisor at the University of Oxford while defending his thesis in history. “My next-to-last sentence said, ‘Just how close the people of England came to revolution in 1832 is a question that we shall leave with the historians,’” he wrote. “I read this to my tutor, and from his vantage point in an easy chair two feet north of the floor he interrupted: ‘But Morris, we are the historians.’”
No grownups are coming to save us. We are the grownups. When our leaders—in the church and out—are unserious people, people we don’t even expect to bear the weighty authority of trust, we are not playing a game. People are counting on us. Lots of them haven’t been born yet.
We’ve all become numb to this unserious, trivializing age. And many of us have fallen to entertaining ourselves with the clownishness of it all. But think about the people who shaped you, who most turned your life around when you needed it. Were they winking and nodding their way through lies or bluster? Were they gullibly falling for untruths? I imagine they had a clarity, a maturity, a responsibility that gave them weightiness. They were serious people. They were sober-minded. They were grave. We are defying gravity. But sometimes what feels like flying is just falling, except for that sudden stop at the end.
Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
