What is pride?

I am frequently challenged to explain the difference between pride and shame.

Because of our collective roots in Christianity, many of us are familiar with the phrase “pride came before the fall”. Sadly, that is not biblical. Biblically we see it was shame motivating eating the apple not pride and it’s shame driving all our poor decisions today. So what is pride and. how is shame involved?

We have spent eons interpreting “the fall” and “original sin” as being primarily a result of pride. As such, the church is well versed in seeing pride as the greatest enemy of humanity.  Pride has even been labeled number one of the “seven deadly sins”. There’s little surprise that the church spends so much time trying to help us deal with it. Shame can then be twisted into becoming your ally in fighting pride and other social “ills”.

How does shame fit in?

I did a radio interview with a conservative Christian radio station in Indiana. The person interviewing me challenged me that the world actually needed MORE shame. He suggested that with more shame, there would be fewer young girls out there getting pregnant. Yes, that was his actual example. He never mentioned the young men getting the young girls pregnant.

I pointed out from Genesis that God put all things “good” in the garden and he had specifically excluded putting shame there (Genesis 2:25). If God had thought shame would be helpful in corralling our behavior, I suspect God would have put it there to begin with.

As we’ve discussed, shame is never your ally. Shame never leads to an “improvement” in behavior.

So, with a cultural background (largely Christian) of understanding shame as helpful to achieving “good” behavior (as the church defines “good”) and pride as harmful to our mortal souls, you can see why it’s quite a challenge to suggest shame is actually the root of all evil and not pride! It’s equally difficult to explain that pride didn’t come before the fall, but shame.

The lightning parallel

I will try to draw a parallel between lightning and pride.  Pride, like lightning, can do a lot of damage. This is likely true of all the seven deadly sins. I don’t need the bible to tell me that as I’ve seen enough of it in my own life.  While lightning does the damage, it has a hidden source that generates this destructive force.  Hidden in the atmosphere is a buildup of static electricity that no one can see which soon enough must erupt in violent damaging force. 

Shame is the hidden “static” in our psychology – our emotional “atmosphere” – that generates pride and other destructive forces such as perfectionism, legalism and timidity.  My goal is to unmask this hidden driver so we can diffuse it before our pride, anger, ego, or whatever form our lightning is taking today can cause any more destruction.

Pride is real. Shame is the source.

I am not trying to dismiss pride or its potentially destructive nature. Like lightning, it is destructive! I’m trying to say that shame is the source of pride. Internal shame causes people to have to have the external expression of pride (or other destructive vices) to cover up an actual internalized self-hatred which is shame.  Shame (which has never been considered a sin in any religion that I know of), is the source of a wide array of behaviors. These behaviors can hurt our relationships with ourselves and each other.

Ironically, it’s very difficult to deal with pride or anger or perfectionism without getting at the root of these behaviors. Until we can see that these things are drive by this static in our psyche, we won’t be able to deal with the lightning bolts coming from our being. Until we get at the root we can’t see, we won’t be able to control the weed we do see.

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