Pride is the First and Worst of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’

Recently, I discussed pride with a friend. She explained that whenever one of her young children does something good, she is tempted to say, “That’s terrific! I’m so proud of you!” But since she knows that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, she hesitates. We agreed a better thing to say would be, “That’s terrific! I’m so grateful to God for you!”

In our modern culture, we are inundated with people who declare how proud they are. In every case, pride is presented as a very good thing. For example, I remember back in my high school days, during football season many people in town put bumper stickers on their cars proclaiming: “Morgan Huskies Have Pride!”

For the first time in forever, our team was really good. During my senior year we went undefeated and won the league championship. So, someone in town printed up hundreds of bumper stickers and we all announced to the world (or at least to a small shoreline town) that we had pride.

However, is pride really a good thing? According to Church theologians, pride is not good at all. In fact, pride is not just one of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s the first and worst of them all. Many of the other sins on the list have pride as their root. (By the way, if you’re not sure, here are the Big Seven: pride, anger, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and sloth. Hmm, they kind of describe the American way of life these days, don’t they?)

What exactly is pride? Well, no one has ever discussed this concept better than C.S. Lewis. In his wonderful little book, Mere Christianity, there is a chapter titled, “The Great Sin.” Here’s what Lewis wrote: “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed and drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” Lewis tells us that pride is competitive by its very nature. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others….It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”

 So, to return to the “pride” bumper stickers, if football players are happy when they work hard and score a touchdown, it’s not really so bad to congratulate each other for a job well done. But if they score a touchdown and then immediately start taunting and mocking their opponents in an attempt to humiliate them, you can be sure sinful pride is at work. I can’t remember exactly how we behaved a half-century ago, but if we had taunted our opponents, our head coach would’ve made us run about 15 miles worth of laps at the next practice. It was a different era back then. Just watch any ballgame on TV nowadays. A guy will hit a solo home run in the 8th inning, when his team is behind 9 to 2, and he’ll strut around the bases pounding his chest and screaming to the crowd, “Look at me!!”

As Lewis stated, pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. He also explained why prideful people can’t stand the idea that there really is a God: “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that — and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison — you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God.”

We would be wise to learn from Lewis’ undeniable conclusion: “It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”

Pride is not a good thing. It puts us at odds with our fellow man, and more importantly, it puts us at odds with our Creator. Instead of declaring that we are proud of something (a child’s achievement, job promotion, scoring a touchdown, etc.), we really should say that we are grateful to God for that particular blessing.

I mean, really, why embrace an attitude that, as Lewis said, caused the devil to become the devil?