This article by Dr Melissa Black, an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, was originally published in The Conversation on 2 June 2026.

Pride is primarily a social emotion. It is about position, confidence, and power. This is why, for the LGBTQIA+ community, collective pride is adopted as the primary emotion to fuel unity and belonging.

June is Pride Month, celebrated the world over by LGBTQIA+ individuals as a reclamation of strength. But there’s a much longer history to this emotion, which can be produced in a great variety of contexts.

The circumstances of “pride” change over time, and the way this emotion is felt is directly tied to the social, cultural and political reality of different eras, and different places.

Pride, like the diametrically opposed shame, cannot be locked down.

Tracing the history of this emotion can help us understand how it came to be the empowering concept it is today – even as certain groups try and hijack it for their own means.

Religious influence

In classic Judeo-Christian thinking, pride was originally one of “eight evil thoughts” identified by the Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus (345–399 CE), who characterised it as an overblown sense of self-importance.

Pride was also closely related to another of Ponticus’ “evil thoughts”: vainglory. This referred to an excessive, disordered craving of praise and recognition from others. Both pride and vainglory were considered vices.

Ponticus’ thoughts on these matters were widely influential, and made their way to the Western Church in the early 5th century. By the 6th century, Pope Gregory I formalised the eight evil thoughts into the seven deadly sins, with “pride” and “vainglory” bundled together.

Gregory I named the feeling of pride as the root cause of all sins. This is because the serpent found resonance in Eve’s pride and ambition – two emotions that tempted her to eat the forbidden fruit.

In the 14th century, the rising European English nobility – and an increasingly wealthy merchant class – began adapting chivalric codes.

So, despite condemnation in the church, pride became associated with slightly more positive, secular concepts of honour and glory in battle, and a strong sense of personal renown. This pride was considered more genuine, authentic and justified.

In English, however, the word was always tainted by its first meaning – no matter how impressive the justification.

A few centuries later, Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his famous Treaty of Human Nature of 1740, observed:

pride and humility, tho’ directly contrary, have yet the same object. This object is self.

Hume went further to claim the things that make us feel “proud” only matter insofar as others are aware of them. He argued the pleasurable feeling of pride came from the satisfaction of being respected and valued by others.

Pride in war, and in whiteness

In the long Western tradition, the feeling of pride is predicated on hierarchy, determining whom one should feel for, or against. This positions the emotion as politically significant.

In 1945, when Britain and the Allies declared peace, headlines flooded British and Australian newspapers decreeing “pride” for the nameless millions who had worked for six years without reward to protect the cause of democracy and freedom against an unjust and tyrannical dictator.

The Allies’ “pride” became the losing powers’ shame. German historian Ute Frevert explains that:

maintaining and restoring national honour was of vital importance to any state that claimed a powerful position within the European system, and the interests, principles and moral laws it stood for.

Honour and national pride were equivalent to power. So when these were threatened, war became justified.

In 2005, 5,000 mostly white Australians gathered at the Cronulla beach in Sydney to seemingly, “reclaim the beach from outsiders”.

The violence that ensued toward people who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent was claimed to be justified by the “pride” the white Australians ostensibly held for their country. They etched the words “100% Aussie Pride” into the shoreline – a visual display of how emotions can be employed as political weaponry.

Pride as an opposition to shame

Gay pride is celebrated in direct opposition to shame, an emotion that seeks cover and is often hidden from view. For generations, LGBTQIA+ individuals were forced to hide their identities out of social stigma and fear. “Pride” serves as a defiant, outward-facing emotion in the face of this systemic marginalisation.

As we celebrate another Pride Month, let’s remember the many ways in which this emotion has been politicised.

In the context of LGBTQIA+ communities, pride calls for belonging, tolerance, equality and acceptance.

Yet it continues to be hijacked by some in a bid to demarcate unjust boundaries, defining who belongs and who doesn’t.