Pharisee Energy and Nigerian Christians

Back in the early days of my blogging journey, I developed a bit of a reputation for tearing people to shreds.

If a pastor said something ridiculous, I would write about it. If a theologian promoted harmful ideas, I would call it out. If I thought someone was manipulating people with fear, arrogance, or bad theology, I had absolutely no problem naming names publicly.

And to be honest, part of me enjoyed it.

There is something strangely intoxicating about believing you are one of the people who “sees clearly.” The one cutting through the nonsense while everybody else blindly applauds it. Every article felt righteous. Necessary. Prophetic, even.

One afternoon, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from a guy I used to do youth ministry with years ago. I had not heard his voice in probably a decade, back when we were both young, passionate, and convinced we were going to change the world for God.

But life had taken him to some hard places.

Somewhere between our youth ministry days and that phone call, there had been addiction issues, breakdowns, hospital stays, long stretches where things clearly were not okay. The confident, energetic guy I remembered from church camps and late-night McDonald’s runs sounded tired now.

As we talked, his words drifted slightly together at times. I could not tell whether he was exhausted, medicated, drunk, high, or some mixture of all four.

Somehow, he had stumbled across my blog.

“I’ve been reading your stuff,” he said.

Then he laughed softly and said something I have never forgotten.

“You’re a really good writer, GSW… but I don’t think this calling people out thing is good for you.”

I remember feeling strangely exposed, because deep down, I already knew there were moments when my writing had stopped being about truth and started being about superiority. I liked feeling like one of the enlightened ones, the guy who could see through everybody else’s hypocrisy, the guy brave enough to say what needed to be said.

After I hung up the phone, I sat there for a while thinking about what he had said.

Then I was reminded of a story Jesus once told.

The Prayer That Gave Him Away

Jesus tells the story of two men who go to the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee. A respected religious man. Disciplined. Morally serious. The kind of person most people in society would have admired. He stands confidently and begins listing all the things that make him righteous. He fasts regularly. He tithes faithfully. He is not corrupt or immoral.

Then he says this:

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”

From that point on, his prayer is no longer really about God at all. It becomes a performance of comparison. A spiritual measuring tape. His entire sense of righteousness depends on distancing himself from the failures of others.

Meanwhile, standing further away is a tax collector.

In Jesus’ world, tax collectors were viewed as traitors and cheats. Nobody listening to this parable would have expected him to become the sympathetic character. He does not make excuses for himself. He does not compare himself to anyone else. He barely even looks up.

He admits he is broken and sinful and simply asks for mercy.

And then Jesus completely flips the moral expectations of the crowd. The tax collector, not the Pharisee, goes home justified before God. This would have undoubtedly shocked the people listening.

The Problem With This Parable

What makes this parable so difficult is that almost nobody thinks they are the Pharisee.

I have heard this story preached countless times over the years, yet I cannot remember ever hearing someone respond by saying, “Wow. I think Jesus was describing me.” Most of us instinctively place ourselves beside the tax collector. We see ourselves as the humble one, the honest one, the self-aware one standing before God while other people remain trapped in arrogance and self-righteousness.

The Pharisee is always somebody else.

He is the legalistic Christian, the hypocritical pastor, the arrogant progressive, the smug atheist, the fundamentalist, the activist obsessed with moral purity, or the person constantly looking down on everybody around them. We all have our own version of “those people.”

Which is where the irony of the parable becomes almost painful.

The moment we become overly confident that we can clearly identify who the Pharisees are, we often begin adopting the exact posture Jesus was critiquing.

“God, thank you that I am not like those judgmental Christians.”

“God, thank you that I am more enlightened than those conservatives.”

“God, thank you that I am not as blind, toxic, ignorant, or hypocritical as those people over there.”

The language changes, but the spirit underneath it remains remarkably similar. That is why I think the only way to truly recognize the Pharisee within ourselves is to adopt the posture of tax collector. The tax collector does not stand there comparing himself to everybody else in the temple. He stands there aware that he may not see himself clearly and aware of his own need for mercy.

Which creates a strange tension at the heart of the parable. The only people capable of recognizing their own self-righteousness are usually the people least convinced of their own moral superiority.

The Internet Rewards Pharisee Energy

One of the reasons this parable feels so painfully relevant today is because we now live inside systems that actively reward the very posture Jesus was critiquing.

Social media runs on visibility, outrage, tribal loyalty, and moral performance. The voices that gain the most traction are often not the most thoughtful, compassionate, or self-aware voices. More often, they are the people who can most effectively signal to their audience that they are one of the “good ones” while the people on the other side are ignorant, dangerous, toxic, or morally corrupt.

In many ways, the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable would have thrived online.

His prayer is not really a prayer at all. It is a performance of identity through comparison. His sense of goodness is built partly on who he is not. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”

That spirit translates frighteningly well to internet culture.

We constantly communicate our righteousness through the people we condemn, the opinions we mock, the screenshots we share, and the tribes we distance ourselves from. Every online community has its own approved villains and its own language for signalling moral superiority. Religious people do it. Progressives do it. Conservatives do it. Atheists do it. Deconstruction spaces do it. Activists do it. Writers do it.

I have done it too.

The frightening thing is that this posture often feels like courage, conviction, or discernment while we are inside it. It feels like “standing for truth.” It feels like clarity. It feels justified because sometimes the problems we are confronting really are serious and harmful.

But Jesus’ parable forces a deeper question beneath all of that: What kind of person are we becoming while we fight what we believe is wrong?

Because it is entirely possible to oppose hypocrisy while becoming consumed by contempt ourselves.

Mercy Is Harder Than Superiority

I think one of the reasons it is so easy to slip into this mindset is because feeling superior to other people can feel strangely comforting. As long as the problem is always “those people,” I do not have to look too closely at myself. I can focus on the ignorance of fundamentalists, the arrogance of progressives, the hypocrisy of pastors, the stupidity of people online, or the blindness of whatever tribe frustrates me most this week.

And to be fair, sometimes people really are arrogant. Sometimes they really are harmful. Jesus is not asking us to pretend otherwise.

But the tax collector in the parable does something the Pharisee cannot do.

He stops comparing.

He is not standing in the temple mentally ranking himself against everybody else. He is not building his identity around being better than the person beside him. He is simply honest about himself.

I think that is much harder than we realise.

It is much easier to spend our energy diagnosing everybody else’s pride than noticing the quieter ways pride shows up in us. The ego is sneaky like that. It can attach itself to almost anything, including compassion, justice, intelligence, spirituality, deconstruction, or “having the right theology.”

Looking back now, I do not think my old friend was telling me to stop caring about truth or stop challenging harmful ideas altogether. I think he sensed that some of my writing had started carrying a kind of contempt that was slowly doing something to me.

That is the part of Jesus’ parable that still unsettles me.

The Pharisee probably walked into the temple feeling completely justified. He likely believed he was one of the spiritually healthy ones. Meanwhile, the man who could barely lift his eyes to heaven was the one who actually left changed.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Honestly, I do not think the point of this parable is that we should never challenge bad ideas, harmful behaviour, or toxic religion. Jesus certainly did. Silence is not the same thing as humility.

But I do think this story invites us to hold our convictions with a little more self-awareness.

Because the line between discernment and superiority is thinner than most of us realise.

It is possible to be right about a lot of things and still slowly become consumed by contempt. It is possible to fight hypocrisy while becoming harsh, cynical, and emotionally closed off ourselves. It is possible to spend so much time identifying the Pharisees around us that we never notice the Pharisee quietly growing within us.

That is why I still think about that phone call sometimes.

An old friend whose life looked messy from the outside somehow managed to show me something I could not yet fully see in myself. In that moment, he sounded far more like the tax collector in Jesus’ story than I did.

Go figure.

Maybe that is part of the wisdom of this parable. The people closest to humility are usually not the ones loudly announcing how humble, enlightened, or self-aware they are. They are the people who still know they are capable of blindness too.

And perhaps that is where spiritual maturity really begins. Not in believing we have finally escaped pride, hypocrisy, or self-righteousness, but in remaining humble enough to recognise how easily they can still take root in us.