In an October 1989 General Conference address titled Beware of Pride, Ezra Taft Benson delivered a warning that feels more relevant today than when it was first given.
“Pride is the universal sin, the great vice.”
— Ezra Taft Benson
Most people hear that word and think of arrogance. Vanity. Someone who thinks too highly of themselves. But Benson defined it differently. He described pride not as self-importance but as enmity: hostility toward others, the constant need to elevate ourselves by diminishing someone else.
That definition changes everything.
Pride is no longer just about ego. It becomes comparison. Resentment. The obsession with being right rather than seeking what is right.
“Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right.”
—Ezra Taft Benson
Those words strike at something most of us recognize the moment we hear them. Not because they are unfamiliar, but because they describe something we see every single day.
We live in a culture that rewards outrage, vanity, self-promotion, and tribal loyalty. Social media thrives on comparison and humiliation. Politics increasingly feels less like a contest of ideas and more like a machine built to destroy people. Public discourse has drifted away from asking “Is this right?” and toward asking “Did my side win?”
And perhaps the most dangerous part of pride is that it is easiest to see in everyone else and hardest to recognize in ourselves.
Benson warned that civilizations rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. More often, they decay slowly from within. Pride blinds people. It hardens them. It replaces humility with self-importance and the willingness to be corrected with the need to be justified.
The proud are easily offended. They struggle to receive correction. They seek validation from the world around them. They fear the judgment of their peers more than the judgment of truth.
If we are honest, every one of us recognizes some part of that in ourselves.
Those of us who have served in uniform understand something about tribalism that often gets misread.
Tribalism isn’t inherently a flaw. At its best, it is a foundation. It is loyalty to your unit, your people, your community. It is how soldiers bring each other home. It is how families hold together through hard times and how communities survive when everything around them is uncertain. That kind of tribalism is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to be honored.
But there is another form. And it is worth naming clearly.
It is the tribalism that does not unite people around shared values but instead defines itself entirely by who it excludes. It does not ask “what do we stand for?” It asks “who are we against?” It measures loyalty not by what you are willing to sacrifice but by how willing you are to destroy the people outside the circle.
That form of tribalism is not loyalty. It is pride with a flag wrapped around it.
And politics has become very good at producing it.
Modern politics has become, in many ways, a machine fueled by pride. Public humiliation is celebrated. Anger is monetized. People are rewarded for destroying opponents rather than persuading neighbors. Even movements built on genuine principle can be quietly poisoned when winning becomes more important than being right.
But there is a particular form of pride worth naming because it is the hardest to confront.
It is the pride that wraps itself in religious authority.
It uses the language of faith not as a source of personal conviction but as a political instrument. It identifies enemies — people who vote differently, govern differently, or simply refuse to pass someone else’s test of acceptability — and frames them as threats to God himself. It does not persuade. It accuses. It does not seek truth. It seeks victory, and then calls that victory righteousness.
That kind of pride is especially difficult to challenge, because any challenge to it can be reframed as a challenge to faith itself.
But it is not faith. It is pride wearing faith’s clothing.
And it causes real damage, not just to the people it targets but to the very religious communities it claims to represent. When faith becomes a tool for winning elections, something inside it gets hollowed out. People begin to wonder whether any of it was ever really about God, or whether God was simply useful.
That corruption is not new. It has appeared in every era of American political life. It has appeared in Idaho’s own history, when religious identity was used to exclude entire communities from civic participation — not because those people lacked character or integrity, but because they failed someone else’s definition of acceptable.
The targets change. The mechanism never does.
Real religious freedom, the kind worth defending, cannot function as a gatekeeping tool. It does not sort people into the acceptable and the unacceptable based on whether they share a particular set of beliefs. It does not hand political power to those who pass a religious test and deny it to those who don’t.
It means that people of every faith, and people of no faith, can participate fully and equally in public life. It means that government does not become the instrument of any church. It means that a person’s conscience is their own — sacred, private, and answerable to God alone, not to whoever is running the most well-funded political operation in the valley.
That is not a new idea. It is a foundational one. And it is currently under pressure from people who are entirely sincere in believing they are doing what is right.
Sincerity is not the same as humility. It is not the same as truth.
Benson’s warning was never directed only at the wicked. It was directed at everyone — especially at those who had convinced themselves that their righteousness placed them beyond the need for correction.
He offered an antidote. Not a complicated one.
“We can choose to be humble.”
—Ezra Taft Benson
Not compelled. Not forced. Chosen.
Humility is not weakness. It is the ability to place truth above ego. To admit fault. To learn. To hold conviction without using it as a weapon against the people around you.
In a world that rewards self-exaltation and punishes vulnerability, that kind of humility has become almost countercultural.
Maybe that is exactly why the warning matters now more than ever.
Civilizations rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. More often, they decay slowly, quietly, from within. Pride erodes families, communities, churches, friendships, and nations. It convinces people they no longer need correction, no longer need forgiveness, no longer need one another.
The choice Benson described — to be humble, to place what is right above who is right — may matter more to the future of this state and this country than any election, any institution, or any political movement ever will.
That choice belongs to each of us.
