All About Narcissism (#309)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I sat down with Chuck DeGroat, known for his work on narcissism in church contexts, for a wide-ranging conversation about the intersection of narcissistic patterns and religious communities. Chuck shared insights from his clinical experience about how narcissism often emerges as a trauma response and explained the crucial distinction between narcissistic tendencies and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. We explored how narcissistic leadership patterns can manifest across the theological spectrum, from conservative to progressive spaces, and how congregations adopt collective defensive postures that both attract and reinforce narcissistic leadership styles. Using Mars Hill Church as a case study, we examined how an "at war with culture" mentality can drive church growth while simultaneously undermining empathy and authentic community engagement. The conversation concluded with a rich exploration of psychological and theological integration, drawing parallels between Internal Family Systems therapy and how different religious traditions handle internal contradictions. This discussion proved so fruitful that we've planned a follow-up episode focusing specifically on spiritual harm and abuse, which will be available to Patreon subscribers. Chucks Website | Chuckdegroat.net Episodes Mentioned: Episode #187 with Molly Lacroix | Un-Shaming Each Part of Ourselves Highlights: 11:20 Narcissism in Church Communities 24:33 Theological Connections Between Empathy and Narcissism 32:34 Narcissism and Church Dynamics 43:30 Spiritual Abuse and Community Dynamics 50:35 Integration and Multiplicity in Spirituality ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Edited by Josh Gilbert (joshgilbertmedia.com -- he is accepting more work!) Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everybody to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity
0:08.6	and the modern world very seriously. My name's Dan Koch. I'm a licensed therapist and a post-evangelical
0:16.1	liberal Christian. And, you know, an atheist sort of anti-apologist might make the case that the fact that
0:24.9	it's taken this long to get Chuck de Groat onto you have permission is evidence that no one,
0:31.5	God is not in control. There is no loving, controlling force in the universe because otherwise
0:37.3	you would have been here earlier,
0:38.6	Chuck. I don't know what the hell I've been doing, but I'm glad to have you. I don't know
0:42.8	what the hell I've been doing too, but here we are. Yeah, I've been excited to connect with you.
0:48.0	I don't know if we scheduled something and had to move it or if I just was overly zealous,
0:52.1	but years ago I prepped all these questions based on
0:55.1	kind of thumbing through your book when narcissism comes to church. You're the narcissism at church
1:00.5	guy and I'm one of the spiritual abuse guys and certainly one of the like psychology and
1:08.9	faith deconstruction guys. And why have we not done this? It's it's bonkers,
1:14.4	but but we're here. And let's start with this very simple question. What is a narcissism?
1:21.0	Dan, you don't know what narcissism is yet. You've been observing this stuff. You're a therapist.
1:26.4	He probably sat with some some of these folks.
1:29.7	I sit with myself every day and I got a little bit of it, but we're going to get to the difference
1:34.2	between the personality disorder and the more garden variety. But for the listeners, I'm not asking
1:39.6	you for myself here. This is how podcasts work. So we can go in some different directions with this,
1:45.2	right? Because there's a classic definition from the DSM, which is our psychology Bible in a sense
1:51.7	that talks about things like grandiosity, you know, that inflated ego that you often see in
1:58.4	narcissism, a sense of entitlement, that folks who are narcissistic have a sense
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