The term pride figures prominently in the discourse surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation, not least in the gay pride parades and other celebrations which take place each June in cities throughout the world. The term also has a place in the Catholic theological tradition as the worst of the seven deadly sins— the sin responsible for the fall of the angel Lucifer.

It would be convenient for all sorts of polemics if these terms were used the same way in both contexts, but the fact that this obvious connection has so seldom been explored in conversations about the relationship between Christianity and LGBT identity suggests that people on both sides of this divide sense that their definitions of the term do not quite correspond. However, the definitions are related, and an understanding of the differing vocabularies surrounding the word illuminates what each side sees as important.

Pride and the LGBT Movement

The way LGBT people understand pride has changed over the last several decades as their cause has entered the cultural mainstream, but one of the most visible expressions of LGBT identity— the gay pride parade— is still best understood through its original context. Gay pride parades originated with the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, which began with a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood.

The gay community in Greenwich Village was full of castoffs and misfits, people who could not participate in the mainstream economy or in the ideal of suburban family life. Their only opportunity to live in the way that they wanted and to find others to understand them was to live in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, but even there, the police made their lives difficult. By 1966, over 100 men a week were arrested as part of a coordinated police effort that included regular raids on gay bars as well as entrapment by undercover officers.

Mainstream society had swept them under the rug, then the police stomped all over them to drive home the point. The riots and the gay pride parades that the riots inspired were the gay community’s way of asserting itself. The understanding of pride in the LGBT community was initially formed as a reaction against social rejection, and it still retains some connotations of that original meaning, but at its most basic level, LGBT pride today is public self-acceptance.

To be a proud is to be comfortable with a label, whether that label happens to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual, etc. This is contrasted with the experience of shame or repression—of being afraid that other people will discover one’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The penalties of being open about one’s sexuality are not as extreme or certain as they once were, even where people are generally accepting of homosexuality, openness might still make people think about or treat you differently.

Aquinas on Pride, Humility, and Pusillanimity

Thomas Aquinas, following in the Aristotelian tradition, understands moral virtue as lying between two opposing vices. In Question 162 in the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas defines pride as an “immoderate desire of one’s own excellence” and explains that the virtue that corresponds with pride is humility, and that the opposite vice is pusillanimity. Pride means wanting to see yourself as better than you actually are, positioning yourself over and above other people, desiring things of which you are not worthy or wanting to be exempt from rules which apply to everyone else.

On the other side of the spectrum is pusillanimity, which literally means “small-spirited-ness.” Aquinas notes that pusillanimity is more directly opposed to the virtue of magnanimity and the vice of vainglory, which relate to the pursuit of great things, but suggests that if we understand pusillanimity as “the mind's attachment to things beneath what is appropriate to a human being,” it is opposed more directly to the virtue of humility and the vice of pride. If pride is thinking too much of your own dignity, pusillanimity is thinking too little of it. In this context, pusillanimity means shrinking away from and not desiring those things that we actually deserve and ought to desire. It means seeing ourselves as not as good or worthy as we actually are.

If pride is having desires as if you are better than you are, and pusillanimity is having desires as if you not as worthy as you are, humility must mean having desires in line with an accurate sense of your own dignity. Humility is deeply tied knowing your standing in God’s eyes. It means knowing that, even with all your flaws and failings, God loves you, and it means wanting to accept that love rather than rejecting it either because we think we don’t need it or because we think we’re not worthy of it. To put it yet another way, humility means deeply understanding the truth about yourself and your situation such that it affects what sort of things or treatment you want, and so it is only in the context of this humility that we can perceive and choose the good.

LGBT Pride and Christian Humility

All of these definitions are incomplete, but sufficient to begin a comparison. The first connection is between shame and pusillanimity. Shame, in this context, is the fear that if the people around you knew your secret, they would think less of you or treat you worse. Shame is socially enforced, so it’s possible in certain social contexts to be ashamed of something clearly good—for example, being Catholic or pro-life. Also, shame isn’t an inherently bad thing: sometimes the recognition that an action would change other people’s opinion of us can help us recognize that the action is wrong.

But shame isn’t always about a fear of losing our reputation. It may be a fear of rejection or even the result of an experience of rejection, and each of these is more likely than the last to plant the seeds of a deeper fear in a person’s mind and heart—the fear that other people are justified in not loving them, or even that God does not love them. Not all shame leads to pusillanimity, but these more insidious varieties of shame have been a common element in the stories of many LGBT people such that the Stonewall riots and subsequent LGBT movement can be charitably understood as being, if only partially, a correction to the pusillanimous acceptance of social rejection and police harassment.

In a more modern context and on an individual level, the act of “coming out” can be a way of moving away from pusillanimity and toward humility. To the extent that coming out means recognizing that your sexuality doesn’t fundamentally change your relationship with God as compared with anyone else, humility corresponds with the definition of pride as self-acceptance. You acknowledge it to yourself, and that means you can integrate that knowledge into your understanding of your personal vocation. But apart from the desire to combat pusillanimity, which may lead a person to disclose their sexual identity in order to allow loved ones to reassure them that their sexual identity does not render them unworthy of love and respect, humility does not necessitate that you share this piece of self-understanding with anyone else, other than maybe a confessor or spiritual director.

There are those who argue that being open about one’s sexual identity, coming out, or attaching an LGBT label to oneself is wrong; in their view, it makes one aspect of a person’s identity too central. Aquinas’ insights into pride gives limited validation to this argument. Acknowledging one’s sexual identity, whether publicly or privately, can be a catalyst for genuine humility. However, there is a point at which LGBT pride clearly constitutes what Aquinas would call sinful pride.

One’s sexual identity may become an excuse to ignore the moral (as opposed to merely cultural) norms that apply to everyone else, and it is at this point that this one element of a person’s identity has become too centrally important. Sexual identity does not make a person more worthy of attention and adoration, nor does it grant an excuse to neglect one’s duties to family or community. To believe that being LGBT exempts you from the rules that apply to everyone else is as clearly prideful as it would be pusillanimous to accept mistreatment because you think your sexuality, social class, race, or religion means you deserve it.

Most of the time, we associate the discussion of spectrums with the LGBT movement—they can talk at length about gender or attraction as a spectrum in contrast to the traditional gender binary. But on this topic, the LGBT movement has fallen into a binary contrast of pride against shame, while the Catholic tradition has imagined a broader spectrum of possibilities for both vices and virtues. The continual conflict between these camps has obscured the potential for Catholic moral philosophy to help make sense of the LGBT experience and for the LGBT experience to lead to fruitful discussions of elements of the Catholic tradition other than chastity.