We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but psychologists have described a second variety: communal narcissism. The cravings are the same. They are simply pursued through morality and community instead. Rather than "I am the most brilliant person," the thought is "I am the most caring, the most trustworthy." Religion, with its vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an ideal stage.
Sanctimony is the close cousin of communal narcissism: moral language used to signal superiority or to punish dissent. Its mildest form is performative piety. The harsher forms use morality as a weapon. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke gave the pattern a name, moral grandstanding, meaning public moral talk used to win admiration or status. It is the motive that makes something grandstanding, and the words themselves may be admirable. The listener usually feels the difference: the sense of being talked down to, of having been made the audience for someone else's virtue. The idea has since been tested, across six studies: the disposition is real, it is associated with narcissism, and it predicts conflict. And the research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—so none of this is the property of the religious.
I'm fortunate not to have met many such narcissists as a child. But maybe the religious culture I grew up in presented the problem in a subtler, quieter, more "Canadian" form: no overt boasting, no putting other faiths down, but the slight pause, the raised eyebrow, the frown of disapproval at whatever was felt to be inferior—people, ideas, other styles of faith.
A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are 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 and a kind of moral bookkeeping. Social 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 the chapter on religious abuse. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor one's own conduct, to confess, to sort every act into clean and sinful.
In some people the rule-minded style is lifelong: obsessive-compulsive personality, marked by perfectionism, rigidity, and preoccupation with rules and order. A different condition, religious scrupulosity, is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in which the sufferer is tormented by fear of sin. The two are often conflated; they are not the same, and neither is caused by religion. A person does not become obsessive because they are devout. But where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language and social reward, and supplies the content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and whole communities shaped by this mentality can end up living under a kind of permanent moral audit, watched and judged in everything they do. The family I described in the chapter on religious abuse lived something close to this—between episodes of frank abuse, the baseline state was obsessive judgment supervised by the rigidly narcissistic father.
In my clinical experience traits do not come in packages. Narcissism and obsessiveness are dimensions we all sit on, shifting over a lifetime. What has struck me most is how they can be confined to a single corner of a person's life: I have known people who are sincere and generous in ordinary life, and who turn contemptuous—sometimes shockingly so—the moment the subject is religion, or the people outside it. One might expect the religious frame to draw out a person's best. Often I have seen the opposite: the best traits shine everywhere else, and the narcissistic or obsessive ones appear inside the sphere where they should be least at home.
I want to add a caution, because this chapter hands out clinical words and they are easily misused. Narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis, made by a clinician who has assessed a particular individual over time, and not a stronger grade of the trait. It is not a label to be applied from across a room, or from a pew, or to a person whose politics or piety one finds insufferable. The same goes for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a genuine illness and a source of real suffering, not a synonym for being rigid or fussy.
None of these traits, then, are religious traits. They are human traits, found throughout the ordinary population, and they surface wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. Religion can bless them with sacred language, and the nonspecific goods that make religious life healing are the same goods a communal narcissist harvests: the community, the moral vocabulary, the attentive audience. But religion does not create the traits, and it is not the only institution that rewards them.
The religious traditions themselves saw the danger, and they condemned it from within. The Gospels reserve their harshest words for the conspicuously pious. The rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud sorts the Pharisees into seven types, mocking the one who wears his good deeds for show and the one bent double in advertised humility, and then falling to argument over whether the one who serves out of love belongs on such a list at all. (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.)
There is a New Testament parable about exactly this. Two men go up to the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, who stands and thanks God that he is not like other men—not greedy, not dishonest, not like the tax collector over there—and lists his fasting and his tithing. The other is the tax collector, who will not so much as raise his eyes, and beats his breast, and says only: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. It is the second man, Jesus says, who goes home justified. The story has lasted two thousand years because it is uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable because the Pharisee has done nothing wrong. Everything he says is true. He really does fast; he really does tithe; he really is more upright than the tax collector. His conduct is not the problem. The problem is the use he makes of it—the audience he is playing to, and the man he needs standing beneath him. That is the whole pattern, described before anyone thought to measure it.
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 person") 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 person"). Across several studies the authors show that communal narcissists rated themselves highly on warmth and morality while observers who knew them rated them lower.
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, finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened interpersonal and political conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious. It supplies empirical support for a concept originally advanced on philosophical grounds.
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. The authors are clear that religiosity does not cause the disorder, though in a devout sufferer it supplies the content on which the obsessions fix. The distinction matters clinically, since treatment must address the illness without attacking the faith.
Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075
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 rather than 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. The authors argue that the practice degrades public moral discourse even when the positions expressed are correct.
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. It has since become one of the standard measures in the psychology of belief.
A note on scriptural and rabbinic references, handled as primary sources rather than formal citations: the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector 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. The rabbinic satire of the seven types of Pharisee, and the dispute over whether the Pharisee "from love" and the Pharisee "from fear" belong on the list at all, is at Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 22b.
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