on the virtue of pride

“I’m proud of you, Elijah.”

I was young, maybe 8 or 9. My mom and I were in her van in the parking lot of the Evangelical Free church that had a large part in forming me from elementary school until I moved to college. I don’t remember why she said this—I’m fairly certain it wasn’t anything major—but my response sticks out:

“Isn’t it sinful to be proud?”

Maybe those words were shuffled around, but I clearly remember that I almost immediately connected pride to sin.

At the time this didn’t weigh on me heavily, I don’t think. I was a good church boy and I knew conservative Christian theology better than most my age, and I was simply making an observation. Ironically, I think I felt a small bump of pride in my own ability to make such an observation.

“You’re right, it is,” was the reply. “But I still am.”

I’m far from that 8-or-9-year-old boy, but I still hear his voice. I’ve heard his voice more and more over the past year since I came out as queer on Facebook last summer. I’ve heard it in gay bars, in queer burlesque shows, in loving moments with my partner, in response to laughter and love house beats and rainbows:

“Isn’t it sinful to be proud?”

June is Pride Month, and this year’s Pride follows a year where I’ve been pulled in opposite directions: yes, towards feeling proud of how fair I’ve come in loving who I am, but also towards shame.

This tug of war is how I ended up crying by Lake Michigan in a blue wig yesterday afternoon. I was at the Milwaukee Pridefest, having done my best to stand out to fit into this colorful crowd I wanted to desperately to belong to.

Despite my efforts at fitting in, I didn’t feel like I belonged. Instead of belonging, I felt shame. Shame that said that the blue wig and eyeliner couldn’t cover up that the person underneath of them wasn’t worthy of being there.

This has become all too common. I feel like I came out too late and am now an unwelcome, uninvited guest to the big queer party. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, like they’re all in on something I’ve missed out on something.

And I know that just as my blue wig was in part a superficial effort to mimic deeply felt belonging, this logic of lateness is a superficial manifestation of deeply felt shame and otherness.

Sometimes it’s felt like it would be easier to retreat back to Evangelicalism, faking an “ex-gay” conversion to straightness or celibacy, because I know that world. And sometimes I feel the god of my past murmuring in my soul that this life I’ve chosen really is a life of sin like I had been taught.

And shame sticks. Shame can’t be absolved by a change in behavior, like guilt. Shame is about more than action. It’s about identity.

I wasn’t taught shame by the “clobber passages,” the few verses in the Bible that specifically mention and condemn some type of same-sex sexual behavior. I was taught shame by a theology that told me that these sins were a direct outpouring of my natural state of worthlessness. I was taught shame when I was told that the root of all sins is pride. On the other end of pride is shame, I was told, and this is where I was told holiness begins.

But sinful pride isn’t the opposite of shame. It’s the opposite of humility. A better word for this now is arrogance.

Pride, as we use it now, is feeling secure in the fact that we are loved. Secure in the fact that we were created with beauty. Secure in the fact that we are a part of a community that has existed in every culture in every nation in every time period, a community that refuses to disappear in a world that tries to make it so.

Rather than arrogance, this makes me feel humility. I’m humbled knowing of the fighters who have gone before me, of the lovers who are around me, of this massive legacy I’m blessed to be a small part of.

My coming out last August was preceded a couple of months before by the Pulse nightclub shooting. I saw the death of people in this community I was secretly a part of, and I knew I needed to claim my belonging.

The past year I've learned at claiming my belonging is not a one-time action but a long-time process. And now I’m at a place where I'm finally working on breaking apart the god of shame that haunts my happiness and letting myself be loved by the God of Pride. Not a pride that tells me I’m more important than anyone else, but the Pride that tells me I’m just as important as everyone else. I’m letting myself be loved by the God who said through Jesus: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

I’m looking for a Pride that acts as a precursor to external presentations like blue wigs instead of a mimicry of pride that’s expected to follow these presentations. Instead of a pride that comes from fitting in, I am looking for a Pride that comes from a feeling of belonging.

“Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted,” writes Brené Brown in her 2010 book The Gifts of Imperfection. “Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

The Pride I’m celebrating this month is clumsy and not yet fully formed. It’s still bound up in shame. In our celebrations of Pride, do we have room for this shame we still carry? Do we have space to shine a light on it and counter it with love? Do we have space to speak belonging to people who may not fit in?

The Pride I’m celebrating this month is being born out of a current struggle.

Maybe that’s what makes it worthy of a parade.