I admit there’s a side of me that swells with patriotic fervor at the feats of American ingenuity. Take the engineering marvel of the Artemis II mission, or the stunning power and surgical precision of our military on display in recent months.
But I also shudder at the speeches of American leaders who boast of our military prowess, sometimes even invoking God’s name over rhetoric that rivals the self-assurance of ancient empires. That kind of hubris makes me think of the architects who declared the Titanic unsinkable.
Dare we test Almighty God? Have we put our trust in the strength of the military or the impressiveness of modern-day chariots? The apostle Peter tells us that God opposes the proud. Have we reckoned with the fact of that divine opposition?
I’m convinced we don’t take pride seriously as a sin—either in ourselves or in others. We live in a world overflowing with self-promotion, where arrogance is reframed as swagger and narcissism passes for self-confidence. We have lifted up leaders whose egos are so massive we no longer flinch at their self-aggrandizement. Boasting marks our culture today. It’s now normal.
Sin Behind So Many Sins
In evangelical circles, we tend to focus on sins that are easily spotted and categorized. Pride—because it’s harder to nail down, because it takes so many forms, because it stands behind so many other sins—often gets a pass.
No matter how entertaining we may find the braggadocious, pride remains a spiritual parasite. It attaches itself to greatness because that’s where it can do maximum damage, pushing us like Icarus toward the sun. Pascal called it “a strange monster, and a very plain aberration”—the signal that humans have fallen from their exalted perch and are clawing their way back.
The Psalms speak of this sin more than many of the ones we obsess over. Arrogance crowds out God (Ps. 10:4). The Lord rescues the humble and brings down the haughty (18:27). The psalmist prays for God to cut off “the tongue that speaks boastfully” (12:3). Wickedness is flattering ourselves in our own eyes (36:2). The Lord cannot endure “a proud look and an arrogant heart” (101:5). A holy and majestic God delights to notice the humble, and he takes note of the proud to repay and rebuke them (138:6; 119:21).
In Proverbs, arrogant eyes head the list of seven things God finds detestable (Prov. 6:16–17). Lady Wisdom herself hates arrogant pride (8:13). Pride precedes disgrace and cuts us off from wisdom (11:2). The form pride most commonly takes is casual self-assurance, boasting about tomorrow’s plans with no reference to God as sovereign (27:1–2). But the Lord says he will tear down the house of the proud (15:25). “Pride comes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall” (16:18).
The mother of our Lord praised God for bringing down the mighty and lifting up the lowly (Luke 1:46–55). And Jesus extended this legacy in his parables, his table conversations, and his woes to the Pharisees. “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of others,” he said, “but God knows your hearts. For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight” (16:15).
Augustine Knew the Monster Firsthand
We often remember the church father Augustine for his preconversion life of sexual sin—his illicit lover and his famous prayer (“Grant me chastity, but not yet”). But the more I read Confessions, the more I notice how pride runs just as deep and just as long, and arguably does more damage.
Augustine describes his younger self as ambitious, obnoxious, always looking to be the center of attention, convinced that when he didn’t understand something, the fault must lie with the teacher or the text. “I was a top student in the school of rhetoric,” he wrote, “and I was glad and proud and blown up with arrogance.” He was proud of his pride.
After his conversion, Augustine saw the monster for what it was. “‘Pride is the beginning of sin.’ And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? This is undue exaltation—when the soul abandons him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”
Seen in this light, pride is a living lie, a self-constructed unreality that imprisons the soul. It turns us inward, folding the soul over onto itself until we shrivel into near-nothingness. “To exist in himself, that is, to be his own satisfaction after abandoning God,” Augustine wrote, is “not quite to become a nonentity, but to approximate to that.”
Worship yourself, and you become less than yourself. Worship God, and you become more than yourself.
Contagion We Celebrate
Unchecked pride in the leaders we elect and exalt will lead to disaster, because leaders shape the souls of their followers. When Scripture condemns a king for how he “made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 15:30, ESV), it doesn’t mean the king forced the people to transgress God’s law. It means the king’s sin spread like a virus and ravaged the people.
It’s more like a contagion than coercion. And that’s because character flows downhill. Pride at the highest levels becomes an avalanche that buries everyone below. When we champion the proud and boastful, we aren’t merely minimizing “personal flaws.” We’re merrily heading toward the destruction that Jesus promises will be the destination of every proud heart.
I’ve focused here on our leaders, and that’s understandable. But it’s pride that would have us point the finger everywhere but into our hearts. It’s possible to take pride in how we oppose pride. It’s the sin most skilled at disguising itself as virtue, most capable of hiding in the folds of our righteousness. We’ve all inhaled more of its pollution than we’d like to admit.
We are a proud people in a proud age, and we don’t fully know how proud we are. Peter’s word is the only fitting response: “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” Lord, have mercy.
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