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Pride goeth before destruction,

and an haughty spirit before a fall.

— Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)

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Protestants have never really emphasized the “Seven Deadly Sins,” perhaps in part owing to our historic adherence to sola scriptura and the lack of that particular list given all as one anywhere in the canon. Many extremes of a certain Protestant ethos are unavoidable in American culture given its heritage, and as the country drifts away from Christianity by the tides of secularism, the weak points of Protestantism are often the first to buckle. Enter the aforementioned mortal sins. Because the Holy Scripture never exactly lists them as such, many Americans seem to be lulled into ignoring that Scripture does in fact condemn every item in the category. Wrath, envy, and sometimes greed are perhaps the only ones that remain on the list for the average American today, and greed only when it applies to someone else. Gluttony, lust and sloth are often the order of the day, and our secular surrounding has dedicated the entire month of June exclusively to pride.

Now, it’s important to be careful what we mean by “pride.” Its range is actually quite broad. When a father is “proud” of his daughter for her good grades or a mother is “proud” of her son for hitting a game-winning homerun, the word presumably means something different than the biblical vice. While pride in one’s country, heritage or family can certainly become a matter of ego, it’s generally understood that there is a wholesome, dignified way to be proud of these things. Being proud of something external to oneself doesn’t have to be a matter of arrogance or conceit, but can simply mean that one treasures those things or those individuals. 

And here lies the key difference with the kind of pride displayed in myriad colorful flags and gaudy neoliberal logo swaps throughout June. The pride of Pride Month is exclusively intrinsic rather than extrinsic. It is a pride in oneself, not even one’s accomplishments or feats, but specifically pride in the bare view of one’s purportedly immutable identity. And, confoundingly, not those immutable aspects of one’s identity that come from without like nationality, which one might find distasteful, but only attributes like gender identity and sexuality that are all at once thought of as self-determined and also beyond one’s voluntary control, that come from the perceived transcendence within. 

This seems to me to be precisely the kind of pride the scriptures condemn, a pride founded in oneself. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul shows himself willing to boast on behalf of others, but not himself. In Jeremiah 9:24, the Lord says, “let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.” We might understand boasting as an expression of “pride” in the broad sense of our English term. When boasting expresses the value of something external to oneself, it has utility, but when it only serves to extol the brilliance of the boaster, it is not only not good, but evil. 

This is nonsense to the culture of self-care-turned-self-love we inhabit today. In a profound sense, self-love is an oxymoron. Christ shows us that the deepest expression of love is selflessness, not selfishness. Self-love is a godless attempt to remedy a real sense of a lack of love in one’s own life, a sense that can only truly be alleviated by the love of God. In this way, self-love and pride are not far apart. They both elevate the individual to the throne of godhood, insisting that the value and love and peace that are transmitted to man from God through Christ can actually just be conjured up within one’s own soul. We see this as well in the secularizing of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” I first learned from Andrew Wilson that it was Benjamin Franklin who reworded Jefferson’s, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” to, “self-evident.” Jefferson is leagues ahead of his colleague in the race to truth on this point. Human dignity and worth is not “self-evident,” but indeed sacred. There is no such thing as a human right that is not God-given.

It is this separation of rights, dignity and the nature of man from the nature of God that leads to depravity being labeled a human right. If rights come from God, they necessarily come attached with virtuous responsibilities. If they come from the “self-evident” facts of being human regardless of man’s origin, then they become completely relativized and untethered from any really transcendent meaning. For example, all people have a right to free speech because they have a responsibility to tell the truth in love. You have a right to freedom of religion because you have a responsibility to seek God. We have a right to bear arms because we have a responsibility to protect our homes, families and communities. There is a right to trial by jury because there is a responsibility to do justice. Obviously, our founding fathers had a specific view of what those rights and responsibilities look like, and I happen to agree strongly with many of the principles they handed down to us. 

I will not attempt to mount a defense of all of these political rights at once, though I do think they are generally well articulated in the Bill of Rights. My personal politics notwithstanding, it should be clear that these rights mean something entirely different when the complementary responsibilities are removed. The secular world grapples with the consequences of this untethering through criminalizing hate speech and restricting the means of self-defense, for example. In a godless culture full of hate and violence, this response, while misguided, is understandable. In post-Christian society, rights are self-evident, not sacred, so the only way to fill the gap where social responsibilities should go is, ironically, to begin clamping down on rights.

Part of the difficulty in overcoming these basically different understandings of rights is in their different assumptions about human nature. As I’ve said, there is a curious interplay in the popular secular view between two different fates: the determinism of the material and of the self. Many non-religious westerners are suspended between these impossibly simultaneous views that humanity is just a side effect of the cosmic game of particle pinball, which renders everything meaningless, and that meaning is something constructed by consciousness. 

Basically, the view is, depending on the circumstance, that we are who we choose to be and also we are born the way that we are with no agency. One asserts that meaning is not real and the other that it is, one that it is transcendent and the other that it is internal.

In my opinion, the result is nothing more than pure god complex. The tension in holding these two views generates an infinite elevation of the self, it drags the transcendent nature of God down to the human psyche. Homosexuality in the West today is not viewed primarily as an act, but as an attribute. This can be said of sexuality in general, really. Consider the labels of “aromantic” and “asexual,” which attempt to define an attribute in the negative rather than a behavior. I’ve seen a rather counterintuitive suggestion to this effect from proponents of such labels that “asexual” does not actually entail some kind of celibacy. These attributes are strikingly treated like a theologian might treat the characteristics of God, all at once immutable and within the will and power of the one they describe. When attributed to mere mortal men, this paradox represents a view of the self that is incongruent with reality.

Many have argued that pride is the fundamental sin, and I’m inclined to agree. Dante put traitors at the lowest circle of hell, but I don’t think Satan’s basic crime was specifically betrayal so much as treason. It was his pride that unfolded itself in the form of his betrayal. Dante’s view makes a great deal of sense for being written in early medieval christendom, and perhaps the difference in our view on the primordial sin is why Dante and I would differ in our view of the papacy. Secular culture in the modern West probably puts tyranny at the lowest circle with hubris hardly receiving a (dis)honorable mention for the spot.

As I’ve already stated, pride is many things, but I think that the essence of sinful pride is not knowing one’s place. Pride is basically to act in discordance with one’s position in the Great Chain. Satan sinned by desiring to be God, and we have all done the same in some form another. The pride of deviant sexuality is just one of these forms. Secular individualism is blind to this sin because it has worked so tirelessly to flatten out hierarchies and dissolve the bonds of collectives. You cannot act according to your place if you do not know your place, and you cannot know your place if you do not know that there is a structure in which you have a place. You must belong to something of a structured group in order to have a role. Individualistic self-determinism makes purpose something to be molded solitarily, which renders sinful pride something of an impossibility, an incomprehensible non-entity. 

Again, pride is many things, but as an arrogant rejection of assigned place, its opposite is obviously humility, and perhaps a little less obviously worship.

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. — Mark 12:28-31 (ESV)

Worship orients the worshiper in relation to God, specifically under Him in the Chain. Worship can be done through singing praise, but this is not the exclusive channel of worship. We bow because worship is not just a posture of body but also of heart, mind and soul. And the second commandment is seen in service. Serving others orients the servant in relation to humanity, which is also under but in a different sense. The true camaraderie of humanity is to treat every individual as more valuable than oneself. This speaks to the profound dignity given by God that complements this humility (Romans 8:14-17), just as responsibilities complement rights. This dignity, as a marker of proper place, is equally incomprehensible to the secular culture of hedonistic individualism.

All of this is antithetical to the wicked spirit of Pride Month. Pride is the ultimate disorientation. When sense of self is detached from anything external, let alone anything transcendent, it becomes undefinable. How could identity be defined if it has no point of contrast? How can anything be defined without an extrinsic point of reference? This ontological freefall is seen in force in the now infamous expression, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman.” The transgenderism arm of the Pride brigade undermines the substance of meaning itself with such logically vapid non-definitions. Since God is the logos, the origin of logic, then logic must be sacrificed on the altar to self in order to maintain the god complex. Pride is an engine that runs on irrationality.

So, I invite you to devote the month not to pride, but to worship and service. Let it be a month that emphasizes humility. I encourage you to worship meditatively, to serve others intentionally, and to carefully consider exactly what it means to be human, to be made in the image of God. In a culture that wishes to stake its insular identities within themselves, the faithful of Christ can contemplate identity by its reference to God. When we base our identity in Christ rather than in ourselves, we are moved to bowing rather than pride. Introspection becomes a stepping stone to glorifying the Almighty rather than the self. So, have a happy and blessed month of dignity and humility, that you might have a blessed life full of worship and self-sacrifice.

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. — 1 John 2:15-17 (KJV)