When we advertise our righteousness, it becomes self-righteousness

Three weeks before Lent begins each year, the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14). For Orthodox Christians, this parable, in which a Pharisee confidently reports on his virtues and a tax collector humbly asks God for mercy, tees off a pre-Lenten season focused on humility and repentance.

The Pharisee in the story doesn’t pray to God in supplicating fashion so much as he announces his own righteousness: “God, I thank you that I’m not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” The Pharisee claims moral high ground while demonstrating his disgust with others—a pairing that directly targets Jesus’ audience. According to Luke, Jesus told the parable to some people “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”

The Pharisee’s stance is related to a phenomenon in our own day called “virtue signaling.” It’s a mostly pejorative term applied to those eager to advertise their own righteousness. In a bid for praise, often disguised beneath expressions of indignation and moral outrage, signalers indicate just how kind and decent they are. Social media fosters this particular form of vanity because broadcasting personal virtue is right at home on such platforms. But more generally, smug posturing doesn’t need Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to thrive. We can notice the human tendency to burnish personal reputation just by reading a 2,000-year-old parable, or observing political candidates boasting to their base, or reflecting on our own daily desire to be viewed favorably by others.