We will see it everywhere. It will be pervasive. The rainbow’s ever-increasing colors will be inescapable. We will see it in the news. We’ll see it at Target. We’ll see it in Walmart. We’ll see it in our public parks and at our schools. We’ll see it in our theaters. We’ll see it on T-shirts, umbrellas, bumper stickers, and even at our churches.
Pride, pride, pride! This is the singular message that silences all others. Say it with me and say it over and over again: “We are loud and are proud!” If you refuse to do so, you’re a bigot.
In case you’ve forgotten, up until about five minutes ago, in the course of human history, pride was listed as one of the seven deadly sins. But that is no longer the case. Rather than being considered sacrilege, pride is now sanctified. Pride has become America’s ultimate virtue. Pride is now our nation’s summum bonum. Pride is our highest good. Not courage. Not chivalry. Not modesty, maternity, sacrifice, chastity, family or fatherhood. Not confession or repentance, but pride. Pride is our trump card against all other hands.
It’s almost as if we are listening to Michael Douglas paraphrasing his infamous speech in the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” whereby his character, Gordon Gekko, elevated another of the seven deadly sins, greed, to a virtue.
Can you hear him? “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that pride, for lack of a better word, is good. Pride is right. Pride works. Pride clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Pride in all its forms has marked the upward surge of mankind, and pride, you mark my words, will save the United States of America.”
Nearly 100 years ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote that if he had “only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against pride.” Pride, he said, “is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices.”
He went on: “It is amazing to me that [we] really have so very little to say about the cause and cure of a moral condition that poisons nearly every family and every circle of friends. There is hardly [anyone] who has anything to say about it that is half so illuminating as the literal exactitude of the old maxim of the priest: that pride is from hell.”
Chaucer once said, “The root of all these seven [deadly] sins is pride: the general root of all harms.” Augustine added that pride is “inordinately enamored with its own power [and] despises the more just dominion of a higher authority.” St. James added that “God opposes the proud,” and Solomon said, “Pride goes before destruction. … God detests all the proud.”
C.S. Lewis tied it all together in his book “Perelandra.”
“Pride,” he said, “leads to every other vice. Pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride ultimately leads all who embrace it to declare, ‘I am it. I am the universe. I am your God.’”
Any nation that devotes an entire month to glorifying pride is one teetering on the edge of disaster. We now stand divided rather than united because of our arrogance, our hubris, our defiance, our pride. As Pogo stated in 1970, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
As you watch the daily news — news of antisemitism and racial disdain, news of colleges collapsing under the weight of their ideological nihilism, news of our borders being invaded because we no longer have borders, news of lawfare under the guise of law, news of men pretending to be women and women pretending not to care — remember that this is not a time to be proud of who we are but to be humiliated by what we have become.
In 1863, when America was on the verge of collapse, as many fear we are today, Abraham Lincoln didn’t call for a day of “pride,” but rather one of “national humiliation.” After pleading with Americans to repent of their cultural, personal and collective sins, he concluded: “Let us then rest humbly in the hope … that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high and answered with … the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”
“Humiliation for our divided and suffering country.” Amen, President Lincoln. Amen.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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