In June we celebrated Pride Month — but isn’t pride a sin?

By Leandro Palacios, Director of Communications

When the Apostle Paul visited Athens, according to Acts 17, he became “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Although today we think of Athens as a place of philosophy and politics, the city was also intensely religious. It was connected to great religious festivals like the Eleusinian Mysteries, and divine images and cult objects were integrated into ordinary civic life. Walking through Athens, especially the Agora and sacred areas, Paul would have encountered statues of the city’s patron goddess Athena, as well as images of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus, the imperial cult, hero shrines, altars, processions, and other tangible expressions of devotion.

But idolatry is not only the worship of statues. Idolatry happens whenever we mistake a limited image for the fullness of the divine. When God is imagined too narrowly, creation is also imagined too narrowly. A male image of God can become a sacred hierarchy, where maleness is treated as closer to the divine and gender roles are defended as if they were created by God. Biological sex can be treated as a divine boundary on human expression, as if what we do, what we wear, and whom we love should be determined by the bodies we were born with.

Last weekend, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and many other cities around the world celebrated Pride. In this context, “pride” means “dignity”, not “hubris”. In fact, when we gather to celebrate human dignity, we are rejecting a type of idolatry rooted in hubris. This type of idolatry is based on an unfounded sense of certainty, the kind that, as the hymn says, limits “the truth of God to our poor reach of mind by notions of our day and sect, crude, partial, and confined.” 

Pride reminds us that God is not a man, not one gender, not one body, not one race, not one fixed image of holiness. The God who cannot be contained by human art, words, or imagination likewise cannot be confined by our inherited ideas of gender, sexuality, family, or love. Pride invites us to reject the inherited black-and-white boundaries our society and even the church have drawn around a creation that God made in a rainbow of colours. Pride is not just a party or a protest. Pride is not just for people who identify with the letters 2SLGBTQI+. Pride is the rejection of a type of idolatry that causes harm and division. Pride is a call to recognize and uphold the enduring principles that define our community: Worth of All Persons, Unity in Diversity, and Sacredness of Creation. Happy Pride!

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