"But understand this, that in the last days will come (set in) perilous times of great stress and trouble [hard to deal with and hard to bear]. For people will be lovers of self and [utterly] self-centered, lovers of money and aroused by an inordinate [greedy] desire for wealth, proud and arrogant and contemptuous boasters. They will be abusive (blasphemous, scoffing), disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy and profane. [They will be] without natural [human] affection (callous and inhuman), relentless (admitting of no truce or appeasement); [they will be] slanderers (false accusers, troublemakers), intemperate and loose in morals and conduct, uncontrolled and fierce, haters of good. [They will be] treacherous [betrayers], rash, [and] inflated with self-conceit. [They will be] lovers of sensual pleasures and vain amusements more than and rather than lovers of God. For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. Avoid [all] such people [turn away from them]. "(Emphasis added) 2 Timothy 3:1-5 (AMP)
The intro of this series barely scratched the surface of this devilish iceberg. Let me begin by reaffirming my thesis:
We’re all someplace on the spectrum of narcissism, aka self-centered, willful pride, aka original sin.
We can all fan and be fanned into the more extreme variety of narcissism by money, power, and influence, along with all manner of unchecked human desires. Narcissism amounts to idolatry; idolizing ourselves or someone else above God.
Narcissism is at the heart of our individual and God-sized global problems—all of them—and can only be remedied by realignment with God.
Please know this doesn't change the reality and accountability of the narc's often criminal abuses and the injuries they inflict on others. We just can't overcome this plague unless we understand the factors at work.
The ongoing Good News is God knows also about our human proclivities and offers a loving, liberating remedy. With God, there’s always hope.
I could camp out on the religious angle for a good 50,000 words, and maybe I will one day, but frankly, it’s more urgent than that, so we’ll see where God takes us. Actually, it’s quite simple: God is God, and we’re not.
It’s impossible to do the subject of religious narcissism justice in a blog or two, and I didn’t. At the moment, I don’t intend to cover every angle because so many other folks are doing an outstanding job, some cited again at the end of this piece.
Timothy’s prophetic words are uncannily accurate; the boldface conclusion eerily defines the religious narcissism infecting the modern church.
Still Licking our Wounds
Of all the experiences I’ve had on the wrong side of narcs, it may be the religious variety that hurt the most, maybe more than family wounds. I’ve encountered such folks in different roles and settings. I’ll refrain from disclosing details to protect the guilty.
As always, I hope that my experience will be helpful to others.
Narcs anywhere leave anyone doubtful, disillusioned, destabilized, injured, anxious, and angry. Religious narcs cut deeper because they hijack our safe place, God, damaging our perspective and the credibility of Christ in a hurting world. The disconnect between the spiritual façade and the evil alter-ego is especially cruel.
It’s taken time and intentional effort to forgive, heal and see what God is showing me…about you, about me, and about Him. I’m not alone.
Pew Research reports church membership continues to decline, and the deconstruction of evangelical faith is at an all-time high. A 2022 Barna study reports that 23 million people left Christianity and now consider themselves atheist, agnostics, spiritual. Jesus predicted it.
As an aside, deconstruction is not all about injuries sustained from religious hypocrites. I know it’s partly my exasperation at being able to fix myself or be “good enough” even by my measure. That’s the liberating heart of the gospel. We can’t.
There’s plenty of proof, some of which I’m covering here.
The problem isn’t us or them. It’s us and them.
Pull the Planks
While it’s easy to demonize religious narcs because the more extreme variety is indeed evil, we want to approach the topic with humility because there but for the grace of God go we. Or maybe we done gone. For real. After all, narcissism is just turbo-charged hypocrisy.
Let’s also face that narcs of any stripe can’t exist without symbiotic sidekicks, adoring fans, or oppressed minions like you and me. The truth will set us free. I’ll be unpacking that sobering reality of our unholy alliances more soon.
Please, please let's recall King David. It helps me so much to remember that our applauded Bible hero, is known as a man after God’s own heart. Dave went completely and criminally AWOL, apparently deep in denial. The key is he fully owned it when exposed…and suffered grave consequences, though fully restored to intimacy with God. His celebrated psalms grace many a mug and mousepad!
God does hold pastors and spiritual leaders to a higher standard because of their sacred trust and influence as shepherds to wandering sheep. Still, we all bear responsibility as accomplices to these systems and remain vulnerable to the same perils. Moreover, spiritual leaders are merely humans themselves.
Idolizing anyone or anything is a big part of the problem.
Critical Caveats
So, as we level our fingers and shake our fists, I invite you to proceed with the following cautions:
The Good News is God loves the world, including narcs, and doesn’t want anyone choosing (yes, choosing) to miss His heavenly party. If we repent, we’re forgiven and can be healed. Of course, that’s a mighty big “If” for self-deified egos who resist essential humbling.
Narcs cannot exist without “supply” who are essentially idolizing the narc above God. As shrewdly asked in Twelve Step programs, “What’s our part?” How do we “permit, contribute to, or cause” the narc’s behavior? Unless we own our part, we remain both victims and accomplices. More later.
Finally, we’re all selfish to some degree and subject to the material and spiritual forces that shape narcs, original sin, if you will. Matthew 7 says, “Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”
Ouch! At each intersection, I encourage us to examine our hypocrisy and the idolatrous heart it may betray. That’s where God was leading me with my troubling encounters.
The truth will set us free, but first, it may **ss us off.
The same rotten root bears the same rotten fruit.
Religious narcissism is nothing new. Later we’ll look at ancient examples with the same formula that afflicts us today. The contemporary condition is more common than ever in churches, ministries, cults, and the world at large, and…gulp, our individual lives…for all the same reasons it’s epidemic elsewhere.
Narcs of all degrees are nourished by the predictable factors I already covered in the intro—love of money, power, and influence—magnified by a post-Christian, social media-driven society that rewards facades. Couple all that with a distorted understanding of biblical holiness, godly love, and what constitutes “a good Christian,” and you have a truly toxic combo that’s a breeding ground for spiritual narcissism and garden-variety hypocrisy.
Throw in the woo-woo spiritual component we’ll explore later, and “ta-dah!” you have what we’re seeing today: Churches that have little to do with authentic Christ-centered faith.
Reliant on supply, religious narcs, like pedophiles, can be predators and seek places and vulnerable people where their need for admiration and control can be satisfied. Church is fertile ground.
Narcissism can and does lurk in any setting, but it may be the most evil, offensive, seductive, and destructive in religious environments where narcs seek to rival God.
Variants of Idolatry
Religious leaders and systems weaponize scripture, abusing their power for control, adoration, greed, self-aggrandizement, labor, financial, and sexual exploitation, all of which are the antithesis of Christian spirituality.
The other end of the spectrum is those who liberally edit scripture because God’s guidelines for living are terribly inconvenient, antiquated, or just plain dull. This Christian community becomes a celebrated free-for-all “as long as it’s loving.”
Both extremes place the leader above God and are self-perpetuating. Being rewarded by worldly success and affirmation drives people deeper into hiding their sin, and that, folks, is hypocrisy.
Regardless of degrees, all variants boil down to self-centered pride or ego, the narc’s epicenter defect, and the same sin that made Lucifer mutiny and Eve eat the fruit. We all have it!
What’s worse, it can take us out while we slumber, a frog in water, oblivious or willfully denying the effects until it’s too late.
From a stone tablet standpoint, this violates commandments 1 and 2, making something or someone—including ourselves—god.
Ruh-roh.
Here are two oversimplified archetypes, loosely LAW and LIBERTY: different sides of the same coin with plenty of overlap.
You can easily see how the prediction in 2 Timothy rings terribly true.
Archetype 1: Judgy, sour & superior
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” Matthew 23:27-28 (ESV)
Friend to sinners, Jesus harshly condemned the Pharisees and Sadducees, the elitist super-hypocrites of his day, calling them “whitewashed tombs.” That’s an apt metaphor for narcs, who are often shiny and self-righteous on the outside but dead inside.
The heart of this archetype is legalism, the presumptuous pretense that moral rule-following and good works apart from faith earn God’s love, mercy, and saving grace.
It wears a variety of disguises:
Holier than Thou
Today, we often refer to this cringy, self-righteous, self-blind hypocrisy to describe a particular stripe of judgy, pious Christians who build platforms on condemning one sin over another, seldom granting a teaspoon of the mercy and grace we all enjoy in Christ.
Our human aversion is legitimate; spiritual pride is offensive to us because it’s offensive to God. Hypocrisy enraged Jesus. The issue wasn’t their sin but lying about it.
Gulp.
The Great Equalizer leveled the playing field, unambiguously stating there’s God’s perfect standard, and then there’s the rest of us.
Weaponizing Scripture
Among other things, religious narcissists weaponize scripture and employ fear to control people under the guise of holy submission and godly obedience, meanwhile hiding or blind to their sin. Like the Pharisees, they can be authorities. Their sins may be the distortion of the very virtues they claim to uphold with fervor.
The BITE Model of authoritarian control elegantly describes the features of such systems.
For example, they may insist on and reward holy submission to God, all the while driven by a sense of self-deifying spiritual superiority. They may invoke female subjugation when they’re really misogynistic, sexually confused, or profoundly insecure. They may penalize or punish non-compliance on the pretense of godly discipline when, in fact, they lust for sadistic domination. The list of such examples goes on and on. Check church history or your local news station for evidence.
Here’s where we could learn a thing or twelve from Twelve Step programs, which have a streamlined, Christ-inspired system to address this propensity when employed as directed. That’s another chapter.
Sin Scoring
Another way this shows up is by righteous indignation about one set of sins—or degree of sin—while routinely overlooking the obvious, more widely destructive ones filling their pews—gossip or gluttony to start. Though this kind of garden-variety hypocrisy afflicts most of us, religious narcissism quickly becomes next-level evil.
Recall the crowds condemning the woman caught in adultery, bracing for a punitive stoning. Jesus silenced her uppity accusers by challenging them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7). Momentarily sobered, they dropped their rocks and walked away but were soon at it again, Christ in their crosshairs.
Note: Jesus sent the woman on her way without condemnation but said, “Sin no more.”
It’s nearly impossible not to be self-righteous if we score sins according to our self-serving system, taking credit for the ways we think we're better than the next guy. I like to cite the example of my relative thinness and fitness. Yes, it reflects the virtue of self-control, but it’s born of vanity, which is a sin. On the other hand, I was very heavy earlier in my life because I overate when I quit drinking because I was stuffing overwhelming feelings rather than bringing them to God. I traded gluttony for drunkenness, both sins, and both a form of idolatry.
Only God can rightly judge any sin because only God can see our hearts and know the life-shaping factors contributing to our conduct. This doesn’t nullify God’s standard or the peril of going off-road, but it invites humility and sober judgment about the dangers we’re all subject to.
When we start to think that our sin is better than another’s, we undermine Christ and worship ourselves. It’s really that simple.
An upcoming series piece, Sin Scandal, will highlight a shocking discovery I made in my desperate hunt for healing.
Hairshirts & Hustles
A closely related variant of Archetype 1 is what I’ll call hairshirt Christianity, characterized by excesses of self-denial, OCD religious practices, and well-publicized sacrificial charitable service and giving. We may associate these practices with Catholic Saints, but they’re alive and well in all churches.
I celebrate and employ practices like fasting or service but have seen how my motives were sometimes tainted by self-punishment, a desire to earn God’s love or favor, or simple bragging: “Look how good I am!”
I’m reminded that Jesus said that if we trumpet our good deeds, we’re just like the hypocrites, and any human applause is all we’re getting. We won’t get a single trophy in heaven. (Mt.6:1-4).
What if I did all my good deeds in secret? Would I be doing them all?
We can attempt to hustle God with generosity, service, or ritualistic disciplines. Many churches advance this notion: Give to get or perform penitence to offset sins we’re unwilling to abandon. Think of the philandering husband who buys his brokenhearted wife diamonds while he continues to philander. Nope.
That’s not giving, goodness, or repentance; it’s bartering for what we want or trying to buy off God.
I love how Tim Keller, noted NYC pastor and theologist who passed away last year, puts it,
“To truly become Christians, we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.”
All this ritualistic faith can become a form of superstition or deal-making at odds with genuine Christ dependence. It's also exhausting and alienating.
Many might rather hop on the Hell-bound bus C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce rather than admit persistent failings.
If any of this strikes a nerve from any angle, take heart! There is a solution!
To be continued...
Next, we’ll look at Archetype 2: Love-n-Liberty.
HEALING RESOURCES:
Here are just a few of the resources I used to help me grow through this process.
They offer crossover benefits for recovery from narcissistic abuse, codependency, empaths, CPTSD, and even narcs themselves if they have moments of clarity or conviction. Most have YouTube channels, many offer coaching, and some have Facebook pages and websites with additional resources. I encourage you to explore further to find voices and experiences that most closely align with yours.
The Language of Letting Go (book)
The Empath's Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People (book)
Spiritual Healing Prayer & Deliverance:
I'll be sharing more on this topic later, but for those of you who are attuned to this kind of powerful help, here are two excellent resources:
Comments