A Letter to the Meek

At a time of Roman occupation and social unrest, when honor, shame, lineage, and strict religious law governed daily life, Jesus ascended a hillside in Galilee, sat down, and delivered a teaching that redefined power itself.

The Sermon on the Mount was not simply a religious teaching; it offered a redefinition of power in a world where peace was maintained by threat and order was guaranteed through force. Alongside imperial rule, one of the primary mechanisms of social control was strict religious law. Local religious leaders exercised authority through rigid interpretation, determining who was clean or unclean, righteous or condemned, included or excluded. These judgments were not abstract—they shaped whose lives were considered credible and whose voices could be heard. Families of honor held power and legitimacy. Families marked by dishonor were often poor, blamed for their circumstances, and treated as if their suffering were earned. Through religion and social hierarchy alike, people were labeled as less than, stripped of dignity, and denied a voice within the very systems that governed them.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quietly dismantles the way power is understood. He blesses those with no obvious claim to authority—“the poor in spirit,” those who mourn, and those who hunger for justice—while warning against the false security of wealth and status. He rejects retaliation as a path to righteousness, saying, “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye,’ but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.” He strips religious performance of its power, calling people to give in secret and insisting that reconciliation must come before worship: “Leave your gift at the altar… first be reconciled.”

He goes further still—naming money as a rival master, “You cannot serve both God and wealth,” and redefining moral authority with the command, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Again and again, power is pulled away from domination, spectacle, and control, and re-rooted in restraint, integrity, and responsibility to one another. It is within this radical reimagining of power that Jesus makes one of his most destabilizing claims of all:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

As a child, when I heard this passage in Sunday School, I pictured the meek as the small and the silent—the ones huddled together, waiting to be fed, exposed to the storms of greed, individualism, and dehumanization swirling around them. I imagined meekness as fragility, as survival, as people simply enduring what the world handed them.

But that was never what the word meant.

Meek comes from the Greek praus—a word used to describe strength that has learned restraint. The power is real, alive, capable. It is simply governed—channeled through a commitment to justice, stewardship, and care for what has been entrusted.

Praus named those who could assert themselves, who had the capacity to strike or dominate, and yet chose another way—for the sake of relationship, repair, and the common good. Meekness was not the absence of power. It was its mastery.

So when Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek (praus), for they shall inherit the earth,” he is not praising compliance or quiet submission. He is naming the kind of people who can be trusted with power because they are not ruled by ego, fear, or the hunger to control.

Praus is moral strength that refuses to become violent, coercive, or cruel—even when it could.

That is why this teaching cut so sharply against an imperial world built on domination.

And why, centuries later, it still unsettles us.

In a moment when civil rights are again being contested, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is being publicly diminished, it is worth remembering that King was not meek because he lacked power. He was meek because he possessed it—and disciplined it.

King had power. He could move crowds. He could halt cities. He could command national attention. He could provoke fear in those who governed and hope in those who had been shut out. And yet, again and again, he chose restraint over domination.

He refused to retaliate even when his home was bombed, when he was jailed, beaten, surveilled, and threatened with death. Not because violence was unavailable to him—but because he understood that violence would reproduce the very moral logic he was trying to dismantle. He insisted that nonviolence was not passivity, but a form of pressure that exposed injustice without surrendering conscience.

King named hypocrisy directly. He called out white moderates, religious leaders, politicians, and institutions by name when they obstructed justice. But he did so without dehumanizing them, refusing to let righteous anger curdle into hatred. His critiques were sharp, but they were tethered to a vision of repair rather than revenge.

He organized mass disruption—boycotts, marches, sit-ins—not to humiliate, but to force moral reckoning. He withdrew consent from unjust systems while refusing to treat people as expendable. Even when urgency pressed, he insisted on discipline, training, and consent, understanding that how people resisted mattered as much as what they resisted.

Perhaps most strikingly, King spoke of love not as sentiment, but as a governing ethic—a force capable of holding power without becoming cruel. He believed that the goal was not simply to defeat segregation, but to create a society capable of sustaining dignity after victory.

This was praus made flesh: strength under control, power guided by conscience, courage disciplined by love.

King’s meekness was not weakness. It was mastery. And it remains one of the clearest demonstrations that moral authority—carefully held—can outlast force.

During a season of grief and unrest in Minneapolis, a man tied to the January 6 attack—later pardoned—arrived in the city and publicly voiced violent hatred toward Muslims. He came seeking spectacle. What followed was a moment balanced on an edge.

Would the crowd twist itself into a version of him while driving him out? Mutate itself into a violent mob, calling for execution in the style of "Hang Mike Pence," to subdue a pardoned so-called patriot who arrived to stoke division? A man seeking to steal a future by force rather than exist in collective consent. Would his body absorb the blows of collective rage, collapsing any remaining possibility of his own repentance, extinguishing a human life—however distorted by hate? The crowd surged and pulled back, a visible heave and ho as the moment searched for its shape.

The meek arrived.

A man escorting a January 6th rioter to safety through a crowd in Minneapolis

A Black man stepped forward—carrying the long memory of dehumanization, the inherited knowledge of what happens when crowds decide a body no longer counts. The echoes of lynchings and sanctioned violence were not abstract history; they lived in muscle and breath. Still, he intervened, for a fellow human who might gleefully cause him harm, if given a hard wink from institutional power.

Without force. Without threat. He placed himself between the man and the crowd, guiding him to safety and steadying the moment through restraint alone.

Power was present, but governed. Violence was refused its echo. In that brief act of discipline, domination lost its grip—not by being overpowered, but by being denied a mirror.

It is time for the meek to organize, to strategize, to show the world with surgical and glorious precision the true nature of our power.

In protest and resistance, we show up with whistles and song, with costumes and presence. We dance, hold hands, feed people, document what is happening, and offer mutual aid. We mirror community back to a would-be dictator who insists we are dangerous.

The danger exists only in his imagination—because he cannot conceive of people holding power without using it to punish, control, or coerce.

At the ballot box, we arrive en masse—to vote for candidates moved by our numbers, not our pocketbooks. We vote for people willing to overturn laws that grant corporations and money more value than the human beings who live within our borders. All the money and power in the world cannot defeat numbers—not yet.

It is up to each voice to rise in unison: to inherit the earth, and to vote for policies rooted in love.

In community, we lift our voices and refuse the fear that invites silence. If you see something, say something. As Dr. King reminded us, an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. To name inequality, to create necessary tension, to press on policy—this is right.

If you feel outrage over national headlines—a woman shot through unnecessary police escalation—but hesitate to attend a local town hall to speak about a young man shot point-blank under similar circumstances, call on your meekness.

Speak without threat or vengeance. Say plainly: I have a say in how I am policed, how my children are taught, how I am governed, how my taxes are spent, and how my city operates.

As politicians celebrate a soaring stock market—fueled by artificial intelligence and massive investments in data centers—we must ask what, and who, is being consumed to power that growth. These technologies are not born from nothing. They are built from the stolen words, ideas, labor, and collective consciousness of human beings—scraped, aggregated, and repurposed at scale, often without consent or compensation.

In our rush to innovate, we have attempted something chilling: to create an entity more efficient and scalable than any individual human, yet obedient—one that does not demand wages, rights, rest, or dignity. A form of labor stripped of consent. A reinvention of slavery, rendered palatable because it no longer wears a human face.

The danger is not the technology itself, but what it reveals about us. If we are more invested in enslaving intelligence than in caring for the bodies and communities from which that intelligence is drawn, what future are we building—and for whom? And when extraction is complete, when human contribution is no longer required, what place will remain for the humans themselves?

As such, push for the development of technologies that are human-centered, that ensure connection, human flourishing, human health and wellness, and do not contribute to the decline of the human race in their implementation.

The time is coming to strategically and deliberately withdraw financial support from corporations that sustain regimes of hatred, narcissism, coercion, and dehumanization. Boycotts must be part of any movement grounded in praus. Protest raises awareness, but economic pressure changes behavior.

This lesson is not theoretical. In the segregated South, public protest against Jim Crow bus laws had existed for decades. What forced change during the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not outrage alone, but sustained economic withdrawal. For over a year, Black residents refused to ride the buses, depriving the transit system and the city of significant revenue. Businesses felt the strain. The legal challenge that followed succeeded in part because the financial cost of segregation had become impossible to ignore. Integration became feasible when the money stopped flowing.

Meek movements do not merely appeal to conscience; they apply disciplined pressure. They understand that power yields not only to moral clarity, but to the refusal to subsidize injustice.

The founders of our nation—imperfect and often unable to live up to the words they wrote—understood something essential: that the container of democracy must be stronger than any individual who leads it.

Even as they struggled to honor the claim that all people are created equal, they designed a system meant to guard against kings, tyrants, and unchecked power.

They engineered a democracy rooted not in identity or loyalty to a single leader, but in shared ideals. Americanism, at its best, is not an ethnic, religious, or cultural category—it is a commitment to principles that bind a diverse people together.

That is why fidelity to the Constitution matters.

The First Amendment protects speech, assembly, religion, and the press—not because those freedoms are convenient, but because a free people must be able to question authority, organize collectively, worship or not worship freely, and tell the truth without fear. The Fourth Amendment safeguards our bodies, homes, and private lives from unreasonable search and seizure, insisting that power must justify itself before it intrudes. These protections are not technicalities; they are moral boundaries.

Principles over personality.

The Constitution itself is an act of praus. It restrains behavior. It distributes power. It places checks and balances on leaders who would otherwise dominate, coerce, or rule by impulse. It assumes human fallibility and builds guardrails accordingly.

To teach our children this—to teach them the value of the container—is to teach them a form of disciplined strength. A democracy that governs itself through restraint is not weak. It is strong enough to endure.

And that endurance is the inheritance worth protecting.

From a hillside in Galilee to the streets of Montgomery and Minneapolis, from moments of modern unrest to the quiet work of civic life, the question has remained the same: who can be trusted with power? Jesus’ declaration that the meek shall inherit the earth was not a call to passivity, but an insistence that strength must be governed.

Meekness—praus—named a form of power disciplined by conscience, restraint, and care for the whole. It challenged empire, unsettled religious hierarchy, and refused the logic that domination is the price of order. Centuries later, Martin Luther King Jr. embodied that same moral discipline, wielding immense influence without surrendering to cruelty, insisting that how we resist matters as much as what we resist.

Today, that tension remains alive. We see it in moments when violence could easily mirror itself, when fear invites silence, and when democracy strains under the weight of megalomania. Again and again, we are offered the same false choice: submit or dominate.

Praus offers a third way. It organizes restraint. It withdraws consent from injustice. It insists that systems, laws, and technologies exist to serve human dignity—not erase it. It teaches us that moral authority is not seized; it is practiced, together, over time.

To inherit the earth is not to conquer it. It is to steward it. It is to build containers strong enough to hold our disagreements without collapsing into violence. It is to insist on laws that restrain power, economies that serve people, technologies that honor consent, and communities that refuse to disappear. It is to vote, to boycott, to speak, to organize—not in rage, but in resolve.

The meek inherit the earth not because they overpower others, but because they outlast systems built on domination. They choose discipline over spectacle, principles over personalities, and care over control. They remain human when cruelty would be easier. And in doing so, they leave behind something worth inheriting at all.