When Popular Advice About Men Substitutes Cultural Instincts for Discipleship, What Does It Look Like?

Consider a post I saw on Facebook: “Passivity is not harmless—it’s costly. If you don’t step up and lead, something else will step in and take over. Most men don’t fail because they’re aggressive. They fail because they’re passive. They delay. They avoid. They wait. Waiting to lead. Waiting to speak. Waiting to act…”

First, the post has the feel of real conviction. It sounds like a call to faithfulness, but that isn’t necessarily what it’s doing because it isn’t calling people to discipleship but to a notion of masculinity. The claim that men fail more often because they are passive is stated as fact without evidence when it is not obviously true.

The framing also eliminates discernment. The Bible commends restraint, waiting, and inaction at various points. David refuses to act against Saul when he could easily have killed him (1 Sam 24:1-22). He is kept from violence against Nabal (25:1-42). The narrative treats his restraint as a demonstration of his faith in and reverence for the Lord, not as weakness or passivity. Jesus, in the garden, does not resist arrest and stops his disciples from seeking to protect him (Lk 22:47-53). Suggesting that passivity is the predominant male failure is unfounded and unbiblical.

Is passivity a problem at certain points? Certainly. As theologian Jürgen Moltmann suggests, “Temptation then consists not so much in the titanic desire to be as God, but in weakness, timidity, weariness, not wanting to be what God requires of us.” Notice, though, that the temptation Moltmann describes is ordered not to a cultural notion of passivity, but to God’s requirements. That is a drastically different way of understanding “passivity” than seems to be advanced in the Facebook quote above. The underlying issue is not passivity defined culturally, but an unwillingness to do what God requires whether that means moving forward quickly or waiting patiently.

Cultural substitution operates through the cultivation of unreflective common sense. If it seems true, we should accept it. The problem is that we aren’t right. We have misdirected desires that skew our perception. As such, we need discipleship to retrain our senses so that we look with eyes that see and listen with ears that hear. The sort of advice offered in the post may seem innocuous, but I don’t believe it is. It promotes a standard apart from discipleship and, in doing so, recalibrates the way men think about what it looks like to be men. By extension, it changes the way men think about being human. Accepting this sort of statement requires us to adopt all sorts of prior assumptions about failure and success, aggression and passivity, responsibility to lead, etc. We always have to accept certain assumptions, but the goal of discipleship is to have those assumptions shaped theologically so that we increasingly live in the presence of God rather than assuming his absence.