The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

The combination of religion with a narcissistic style is not hard to find. Yet, some forms of faith are bound up with humility, service, and genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking, certainty, and a sense of group superiority. Then people insinuate—or simply assert—that their beliefs, their culture, and their moral footing are better than those of outsiders. Confidence is mistaken for virtue; self-importance masquerades as conviction; and the group may come to reward precisely the traits it ought to distrust. Psychology has a name for the particular shape this can take. We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but researchers describe a second variety—the communal narcissist—who pursues the very same cravings for grandiosity, esteem, and entitlement through the communal and moral domain instead: not “I am the most brilliant person” but “I am the most caring, the most trustworthy, the most righteous.” Religion, with its rich vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an almost ideal stage.

Sanctimony is the close cousin of this: moral language used not primarily to discern right from wrong, but to signal superiority, enforce conformity, or punish dissent. In its mildest form it is mere performative piety; in harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. Here, too, there is a body of research. Philosophers and psychologists have lately analyzed a pattern they call moral grandstanding—the use of public moral talk to win admiration, status, or dominance. Its defining feature is instructive: grandstanding is identified not by the content of what is said, which may be entirely admirable, but by the motive behind it, which is the wish to be seen as moral. The words can be righteous while the engine is vanity. And the listener feels the difference—ordinary people come away feeling belittled, corrected, and morally diminished, less because a truth has been clarified than because someone wished to stand above them. It is worth noting that this research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—a useful reminder that none of this is the property of the religious.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, with exceptions, with shades of grey, or with the possibility that decent people might disagree in good faith. They are drawn to fixed rules, sharp boundaries, and a kind of moral bookkeeping. Psychologists call this disposition a high need for cognitive closure—a craving for firm answers and an aversion to the unsettled—and it travels closely with dogmatism and with the authoritarian temperament discussed in earlier chapters. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. In its clinical extreme this is a recognised condition, religious scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which the sufferer is tormented by the fear of sin. The relationship is telling, and it holds for the whole of this chapter: religiosity does not, by itself, manufacture these tendencies—a person does not become obsessive because they are devout—but where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language, structure, and social reward, supplying the very content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and communities shaped by this mentality can grow tense, cautious, and punitive—more anxious to avoid wrongness than to cultivate goodness.

To be clear, then, none of these are "religious" traits. They are human traits—communal narcissism, grandstanding, the need for closure—all of them found in the ordinary, largely secular population, surfacing wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. But religion can bless them with sacred language, allowing vanity to pass for conviction and control to pass for virtue. The irony is that the religious traditions condemn this temptation most fiercely from within. It was the conspicuously pious for whom the Gospels reserved their sharpest words—the Pharisee who prays, "God, I thank you that I am not like other men," and goes home less justified than the sinner beside him who could not lift his eyes. And the rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud, too, mocks the Pharisee who wears his good deeds for show, sparing only the one who serves out of love of God. (The caricature of the Pharisees is, in fairness, unjust to what was a serious movement of piety and the root of rabbinic Judaism—the failing was never uniquely theirs.)

At its best, religion labours to humble the ego and enlarge compassion. At its worst, it hands the ego a halo, and makes severity look holy.

 

References

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 854–878. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029629

— Introduces the “agency–communion” model of narcissism, distinguishing the familiar agentic narcissist (“I am the most intelligent”) from the communal narcissist, who pursues the same grandiosity, entitlement, and craving for esteem through the moral and communal domain (“I am the most helpful,” “the most trustworthy”). The precise mechanism by which vanity can wear the costume of virtue.

 

Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., James, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict. PLOS ONE, 14(10), e0223749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749

— A six-study empirical investigation of moral grandstanding (a concept introduced by the philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke), finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious.

 

Miller, C. H., & Hedges, D. W. (2008). Scrupulosity disorder: An overview and introductory analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22(6), 1042–1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.11.004

— A comprehensive review of scrupulosity—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by pathological guilt and obsessive doubt about sin, with compulsions of repetitive prayer, confession, and reassurance-seeking. Religiosity does not cause the disorder, but in a devout sufferer it supplies its content—an illustration of religion shaping a pre-existing disposition rather than creating it.

 

Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217.

— The philosophical paper that introduced the term “moral grandstanding”—the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion. Its central claim is that grandstanding is defined by motive, not content: the same righteous words may or may not be grandstanding, depending on whether they aim at moral truth or at the speaker’s own status.

 

Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049

— The paper introducing the Need for Closure Scale, which measures the dispositional craving for certainty and discomfort with ambiguity—expressed as a preference for order and predictability, decisiveness, and closed-mindedness. The construct is closely related to dogmatism and to the authoritarian personality, and predicts black-and-white thinking and intolerance of dissent.

 

A note on scriptural references (handled as primary sources rather than formal citations): the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in which the ostentatiously righteous man is the one who goes home unjustified, is Luke 18:9–14; the wider Gospel critique of performing piety “to be seen by others” runs through Matthew 6:1–6 and Matthew 23.

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