Article

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

14 August 2023

7 min read

Pride: self-obsessed isolation

In the sixth of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Jonathan Aitken identifies Pride as egotism with a capital E and the cause of his own royal flush of crises.

Jonathan Aitken

The Revd Jonathan Aitken has had one of the most high profile and colourful careers in British public life

The sin of pride takes us into a sea of puzzles. Its choppy waters of contradictions and cross-cultural currents can be difficult to navigate. Is pride the worst sin as learned Christian moralists have sternly proclaimed from Augustine to Aquinas and C.S. Lewis? Or should we applaud many popular forms of 21st century pride?

Pride drives parents to encourage their children; students to strive for better results, football fans to cheer on their team and soldiers to die for their country. Black Pride and Gay Pride have made millions of previously ostracised people more understood and more accepted, rolling back yesterday’s tides of bigotry and prejudice.

How can the apparently “good” pride in these modern categories be squared with the condemnation from ancient Greek philosophers and Christian teachers down the ages that hubris or individual pride are not just bad sins but the personification of evil?

“These are deep waters, Watson!” as Sherlock Holmes might have said to his assistant. But they become easier to fathom if the most toxic element in bad pride is diagnosed. It is egotism with a capital E, perhaps better identified as rampant self-centredness.

Many walks of life tempt us towards self-centredness, but some professions seem to attract more egotists than others. In this article I will concentrate on those who make their chosen careers in the arena of public life – particularly politics.

I now describe my downward spiral of this crash as a descent involving defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy, and jail.

I can write about this notorious minefield of pride with some inside knowledge because this was where I spent decades of my life “climbing towards the top of the greasy pole” as Disraeli described political ambition.

It was where I had a spectacular fall from grace, plummeting from rising Cabinet Minister to imprisoned convict. I now describe my downward spiral of this crash as a descent involving defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy, and jail. The ingredients in this royal flush of crises were caused by pride.

Without recognising the fault line in my personal and political character (a common failing in many prideful people) I was climbing well on Disraeli’s greasy pole in the 1990s.

I was in my fifth term as an elected Member of Parliament. I had held two portfolios as a Minister of the Crown. One was Minister of State for Defence and the other was the powerful Cabinet post of Chief Secretary for the Treasury. To make my head swell further I was quite frequently being tipped to be the next leader of the Conservative Party and as a potential successor to Prime Minister John Major.

The political graveyards are littered with the long-forgotten corpses of ex-future Prime Ministers. So, these transitory labels should have made a wise man humble.

In fact, it did quite the reverse. A combination of what Shakespeare in Hamlet calls ‘the insolence of office’ and in Macbeth ‘vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’, gave me a surfeit of hubris. Pride is the deadliest of sins, and I was bursting with it. Politically I began to believe that I could walk on water. I took myself far too seriously, especially when I was made the target of a campaign by the Guardian.

It does not matter now what the Guardian said in their attacks, because all feelings of resentment about them have long since left me. Suffice it to say that, in a long series of articles, they made a number of allegations against me, some of which were true, some of which were untrue, and all of which were given a strongly negative spin. In the face of this campaign I was full of prideful anger and went for the journalists’ jugular. I initiated a lawsuit for defamation and announced my libel action in a ferocious television speech which contained the peroration,

‘I will cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism with the simple sword of truth’.

These were recklessly insensitive words of pride which came back to haunt me.

Where was I as a Christian when I was riding high as a politician?

To put it simply, I called myself a Christian without actually being one. I was strong on the externals. I went to church regularly; I supported Christian causes and was a church warden at St. Margaret’s Westminster – the Parliamentary church. However, I do not think I had understood the simple truth that being a Christian has little to do with external appearances and everything to do with an internal commitment to Christ’s teachings.

I probably bore a disturbing resemblance to the Pharisee in the Bible’s story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector who go up to the temple to pray. Even if I did not boast about my external piety quite as loudly as the Pharisee did, the humility of the Tax Collector was far removed from me. I was certainly not saying ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’, nor was I doing the will of the Father, especially when it came back to the libel case. In order to win it, I did something that was against the will of the Father: I told a lie.

It did not seem at that time a terribly important lie, at least in relation to the lies I was accusing others of telling about me. It was a lie about who paid a £900 hotel bill of mine at the Ritz Hotel in Paris while I had been a government minister. I told this lie. I told it on oath in my evidence in court. To my eternal shame, I even got my wife and daughter to back me up with witness statements supporting my lie. But then my opponents ambushed me in the middle of the trial with clear documentary evidence that I had told a lie on oath. My credibility as a witness was shattered.

I had to withdraw the libel case. And within twenty-four hours my whole life was shattered. The rising Cabinet Minister had impaled himself on his own sword of truth with explosive and apocalyptic consequences.

I was prosecuted for perjury, pleaded guilty at my trial in the Old Bailey and by June 1999 I was in a prison van heading for HMP Belmarsh to serve an 18-month prison sentence.

Having proved the truth of the old saying “Pride comes before a fall” I had plenty of time to reflect on how it happened, how it could have been avoided, and how I might prevent this deadly sin from resurfacing in my life.

Compliance has replaced conscience as the arbiter of what is right or wrong.

One key discovery was that pride had turned me into a self-obsessed loner. Despite an outward carapace of gregariousness and friendliness, I confided in hardly anyone and made myself accountable to no-one. Graham Tomlin hit this nail on the head in his 2007 book The Seven Deadly Sins: And How To Overcome Them when he wrote:

“Pride is the most isolating of sins………..the ultimate end of pride is loneliness”.

Once one has recognised and acted upon this wisdom, the chances of recognising and defeating the sin of pride, when it tempts you, are infinitely higher.

I used to believe in an old line of verse by Rudyard Kipling:

“Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone”.

Now I think differently. Conquering one’s ego is no easy task. But if you make a determined effort to confide in and make yourself accountable to carefully selected friends, family members, colleagues or prayer partners you will build, with their help, strong defences to the sin of pride.

A Christian faith can be a powerful bulwark in strengthening these defences. I had never heard of, let alone participated in prayer groups, or had a prayer partner or found a spiritual director until after my fall from grace.

God has moved in his mysterious ways to bring these friends and protectors into my life to such good effect that I am now a contented priest and prison chaplain. Yet pride can still lurk as a dangerous enemy even among practising Christians. Pastoral ministry and preaching have their pride traps but accountability and self-awareness can help to avoid them.

If I ever receive a compliment on a sermon, I promptly recall the following story about John Newton the author of Amazing Grace.

One day when he had been preaching in his home church of St Mary Woolnoth, in the City of London, an exuberant member of the congregation fell at his feet as he came down the pulpit steps and gushed:

“What a brilliant sermon Mr Newton! What a great sermon!”

John Newton responded:

“Thank you sir!

The Devil himself told me that a few moments ago”.

The Devil, as he surveys the 21st century landscape of what used to be called the Seven Deadly Sins, must be rather pleased. These days serious sinning is often equated with minor rule breaking. If you can get away with it, you will not be seen by contemporary society as a sinner. Compliance has replaced conscience as the arbiter of what is right or wrong.

Yet pride remains stubbornly out there on its own as a different and deeper category of sin.

Don’t worry about the distinction between “good” and “bad” pride. They are easy to separate because the former are non-egotistical while the latter are toxically absorbed with the self. The French language helpfully has two different words - fiertè and orgueil to make the division clear.

Orgueil or self-centred, self-absorbed pride is what C.S. Lewis rightly identified as “the great sin……….the upmost evil……….the complete anti-God state of mind”

Perhaps it takes a poacher who has been caught in this sin to recognise the magnitude of its destructiveness on all other relationship and on one’s personal character and soul. Turning gamekeeper in order to defeat pride means spiritual discipline, accountability and prayer. Even so, the struggle against pride will always continue.

Essay

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”