Clergy Narcissism and the Psychology of Institutional Belonging

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

A title can begin as a description and eventually become part of the architecture of the self. The principal who has led the same school for twenty years may come to experience its accomplishments as part of her own biography. A university president can accumulate identity through commencement stages and donor dinners, aided by the peculiar academic alchemy through which a robe with sufficiently impressive sleeves can make almost anyone feel temporarily medieval. A pastor inhabits an even more intimate form of institutional identity because his office reaches into questions of moral meaning and belonging. Over time, a role that began as vocation or employment can become one of the structures through which a person understands her own significance.

Professional identity gives shape to a life. It organizes time and directs ambition while placing a person inside a community whose recognition may become deeply important. For someone with a narcissistic personality organization, that recognition can carry unusual psychological weight because status serves as more than an external achievement. It helps regulate the self.

Contemporary research on grandiose and vulnerable narcissism offers a useful framework for understanding this arrangement. Nikhila Mahadevan describes the two forms as different ways of managing status. Grandiose narcissism tends to pursue status openly, through confidence, dominance and the expectation of recognition. Vulnerable narcissism is more protective. It is especially sensitive to signs of diminished standing, criticism or social rejection (Mahadevan, 2024). In both cases, the person is highly attentive to where he stands in relation to other people.

Leadership can, therefore, do more than provide authority. It continually tells the leader how important he is, how much influence he carries, and how others respond to him. In a church, where authority can also carry spiritual and moral meaning, those signals may become especially powerful.

When Position Becomes Identity

Narcissism has a complicated relationship with leadership because the qualities that help a narcissistic person gain authority can also make that authority harmful. Confidence can make a person seem capable, while certainty can reassure a group seeking direction. Charisma can inspire trust quickly, especially when a leader presents himself as unusually insightful or decisive. Those qualities become dangerous when they are bound to a strong need for admiration or control. The leader who initially seemed confident may respond poorly when his judgment is questioned, while the decisiveness people once admired may harden into rigidity when others begin to challenge him.

A 2026 qualitative study in Pastoral Psychology shows how these qualities can coexist. Researchers interviewed members of Catholic religious orders specifically about their experiences serving under leaders they perceived as narcissistic. Participants described charisma and innovation alongside manipulation, demands for admiration and difficulty receiving feedback (Dúbravská & Halama, 2026). The combination helps explain why narcissistic leadership may be difficult to recognize early. The person who eventually wounds a community may first be the person who most impresses it.

The leader, however, is only one part of the relationship. A community also develops habits about the behavior it rewards, overlooks, or comes to accept. Research in evangelical churches offers some evidence that this context matters. David Dunaetz, Hannah Jung, and Stephen Lambert found that participants from larger churches showed greater tolerance for narcissistic pastoral behavior than participants from smaller churches (Dunaetz, Jung, & Lambert, 2018). Their study leaves the reason for that difference open, but the finding introduces an important point: narcissistic leadership develops through an interaction between a leader’s personality and a community’s response to it. Charisma can attract followers, while continued acceptance gives the leader room to experience his way of leading as successful.

Success then begins doing psychological work of its own. Invitations, influence, and deference repeatedly communicate that the leader occupies an important place in the community. What began as external recognition can gradually become evidence in the leader’s own understanding of himself. The more the institution organizes its life around his presence, the easier it becomes for position and identity to grow together. In religious leadership, that process carries an additional force because the authority being reflected back to the leader also bears sacred meaning.

The Sacred Self

Religious leadership adds something to narcissistic identity that secular authority can only partly supply: sacred meaning. A pastor may be admired for his intelligence or leadership ability, yet his authority reaches further because people also trust him with questions about conscience, suffering and God. His role therefore carries more than professional status. It can become a source of moral legitimacy.

Research on clergy narcissism helps explain how that authority interacts with personality. Hessel Zondag’s 2004 study of Dutch pastors identified four narcissistic styles and examined how they might appear within ministry, where a leader’s influence depends heavily on sustained personal relationships (Zondag, 2004). Chuck DeGroat develops this concern further in When Narcissism Comes to Church, drawing on pastoral and clinical experience to examine the ways narcissistic clergy can shape the communities around them (DeGroat, 2020). Together, their work shows why the church can become a particularly powerful setting for narcissistic leadership: the pastor’s personality is reinforced through a role already invested with trust and spiritual significance.

Diane Langberg’s work on power clarifies what is at stake. In Redeeming Power, she describes Christian authority as a form of stewardship, where the leader’s influence exists for the sake of those entrusted to his care (Langberg, 2020). That framework places a clear boundary around the office. The authority belongs to the role and to the responsibility attached to it, rather than to the personal importance of the leader.

A psychologically healthy pastor can live inside that distinction. He may carry significant influence while still understanding that the office is larger than he is. Narcissistic organization can erode that separation. Sacred authority begins to feel like evidence of personal worth, and the pastor may experience his role as confirmation of the kind of person he believes himself to be. The loss of influence or position can then unsettle an identity that has grown around the office itself.

The Problem of Other Minds

Most people engage in some form of impression management. We prepare for interviews, choose photographs carefully and hope the annual report catches us looking thoughtful instead of like someone who has just remembered an overdue dental appointment. Such efforts usually reflect an ordinary desire to be understood favorably. They become more psychologically important when a person depends heavily on other people’s perceptions to sustain a particular understanding of himself.

Wade Mullen’s research helps explain how the management of perception can operate when reputation comes under threat. His doctoral work examined the impression-management strategies used by evangelical organizations after events that endangered their public image, and he later developed those ideas for a broader readership in Something’s Not Right (Mullen, 2018; Mullen, 2020). Mullen shows how attention can be guided away from troubling conduct and toward a preferred account of what happened, who bears responsibility and how the audience should understand the people involved.

For a narcissistic leader, shaping that account can become especially important because institutional recognition has already become part of the way he understands himself. A critic can then become more than someone who disagrees with him. The critic may become the explanation for why other people have begun seeing him differently. Questions about the leader’s conduct can gradually give way to questions about the critic’s motives, allowing the leader to locate the disruption outside the relationship he most wants to preserve: his relationship with the institution itself.

Consider a university president whose faculty members report a pattern of intimidation. How he responds tells us a great deal about the way he understands himself and his place within the institution. For the sake of argument, let’s say he blames the professor who complained or the newspaper that publicized the allegations. In his view, the complaint caused the damage, rather than his own behavior. If no one had raised the issue, the university would still see him as the leader he believes himself to be. That explanation allows him to focus on the people who exposed the behavior rather than on the behavior itself.

The complaint, however, does something he cannot fully control: it gives other people a reason to look more closely. Colleagues begin comparing experiences. Some remember interactions they dismissed at the time, while others reconsider incidents that once seemed isolated. Trustees hear the criticism and the president’s response. People who knew him primarily through his public role begin comparing that image with accounts from those who worked more closely with him. Gradually, the original complaint becomes only one part of a much larger picture because other people are now forming judgments from information and experiences of their own.

By the time the university reaches a conclusion, the professor or newspaper may have started the conversation, but neither determines where it ends. The institution has gathered enough information to decide what the conduct means. The president can challenge the criticism and defend his behavior, yet he cannot make other people return to the interpretation of him they held before the controversy began.

Why the Outsider Matters

The university example helps us see why an outside antagonist can become psychologically useful to a narcissistic leader whose conduct has come under scrutiny. If he decides that the professor who complained or the journalist who publicized the allegations caused his loss of standing, he can direct his anger toward them while preserving his attachment to the university. Emotionally, that allows him to keep thinking of the institution as the place where he belongs and where his importance was properly recognized. It also preserves a practical hope of return. If the outsider can be blamed for the rupture, then a different understanding of what happened might someday restore the leader’s former place within the community.

That possibility begins to weaken when the institution forms judgments of its own. Faculty members may learn what happened and decide that the reported behavior matters. Trustees may hear the leader’s response and remain concerned. Colleagues may reconsider their own experiences in light of what has become public. The original complaint is now only one part of the information available to the community, and people are reaching conclusions that belong to them.

This is where the loss reaches beyond reputation. Reputation concerns how other people see us. Belonging concerns the place we hold among them. For a narcissistic leader whose identity has grown around institutional recognition, the difference can be profound. As long as he believes the community has misunderstood him because of an outsider, he can still imagine being restored to his former place. Once the community has considered the situation for itself, he faces something much harder to control: other people are free to decide what they think of his conduct and what place they believe he should occupy among them.

Sam Vaknin’s concept of the “pathological narcissistic space” helps explain why that loss can feel so destabilizing. He uses the term for an environment in which a narcissistic person receives recurring admiration and authority that help sustain his sense of significance. Professions such as teaching and clergy can create especially fertile versions of that space because the role itself places the leader among people who look to him for guidance (Vaknin, “Narcissists: Their Professions, Jobs, and Vocations”). Over time, the institution can become part of the psychological structure through which the leader experiences his own importance.

Religious leadership intensifies the process because the institution may carry both professional and spiritual meaning. A pastor’s colleagues may also be the people who once affirmed his calling and trusted his judgment. Their recognition can therefore help confirm a deeply held understanding of who he is. When that same community begins to interpret him differently, the loss reaches into an identity the institution itself once helped build.

When the Church Makes Up Its Own Mind

The 2026 Pastoral Psychology study helps us understand why this stage can be especially difficult for a narcissistic leader. Members of Catholic religious orders described leaders who struggled with criticism and reacted poorly when their authority was challenged (Dúbravská & Halama, 2026). That response fits the status-based understanding of narcissism we have already seen. When a leader depends heavily on admiration and standing to support his sense of self, criticism tells him that people may be changing their minds about who he is.

Inside a church, that change may happen gradually. People who once deferred to the leader begin asking harder questions. Colleagues become less willing to defend decisions they previously accepted. Responsibilities pass into other hands, and relationships begin reorganizing around a future that depends less on his presence. The church does not need to make a dramatic declaration for the leader’s position within it to change. Its members simply begin responding to him differently.

Vaknin’s concept of the pathological narcissistic space helps explain why those changes may carry such force. If the church has long provided admiration, deference and repeated confirmation of the leader’s importance, then it has also helped support the way he experiences himself (Vaknin, 2015). The same people who once looked to him for direction may now question his judgment or look elsewhere for leadership. A familiar source of self-confirmation has changed.

Eventually the leader confronts a distinction that matters enormously: criticism and judgment are different things. Criticism gives him something to answer. He can explain what happened, challenge an allegation, or try to persuade the person criticizing him. Judgment comes later, after people have heard those explanations and decided for themselves what they think. The leader may continue making his case, while the community retains the authority to decide how it understands his conduct and what place it wants him to occupy in its life.

From Grief to Grievance

The leader now has to make sense of a real loss. Grief requires him to recognize that his relationship with the institution has changed and to learn to live with that change, even if he still believes some part of what happened was unfair.

Grievance works differently. It keeps the loss of his place within the institution under dispute. As long as the leader continues arguing about why he lost his standing, the possibility of getting that standing back remains open. The argument becomes a way of returning again and again to the loss.

Research on narcissism and grudge holding helps explain why that return can become persistent. Jingyuan Li and her colleagues found that vulnerable narcissistic traits were associated with more persistent grudges among participants who also scored high in narcissistic grandiosity. In their second study, rumination about the offense helped explain that pattern (Li et al., 2025). The studies concerned interpersonal transgressions rather than clergy or institutional loss, so their application here should remain narrow. They show that, under certain narcissistic conditions, repeatedly thinking about a perceived wrong can help keep the emotional response to it alive.

That finding helps explain why one disputed part of a controversy can absorb so much attention. A person may return repeatedly to a point he believes has been wrongly decided, especially when correcting it seems likely to change how the larger controversy is understood.

The problem is that a community may have reached its judgment from information well beyond that disputed point. A congregation might conclude that a particular criticism was overstated while still having concerns about the pastor’s leadership. People can also agree about what happened and reach different conclusions about what the behavior means. Correcting one part of the story therefore does not require the community to reverse its larger judgment.

For a narcissistic leader, that may be especially difficult to accept. The people whose admiration once helped confirm his identity can know the same facts he knows and still reach a different conclusion about him. Grievance can keep the argument going, but it cannot require the community to change the judgment it has reached.

The Institution Has a Self Too

So far, this essay has focused on the leader. The church itself also has something at stake when concerns arise about a person it has trusted with authority.

Every institution develops an understanding of itself, and a successful leader can become part of that understanding. A congregation may take pride in a pastor whose ministry has brought growth or influence. His success can become evidence that the church chose well when it trusted him. The longer that relationship continues, the harder it may become to examine the leader without also examining the institution that supported him.

Serious concerns therefore raise questions about more than the leader’s conduct. The church may have to consider how much authority it gave him and why troubling behavior was tolerated. Practices that once seemed acceptable may look different after people begin comparing experiences. Examining the pastor can require the institution to reconsider some of its own decisions.

Wade Mullen’s research helps explain what can happen to the story at that point. His work on impression management examines how evangelical organizations respond when an event threatens their public image. An institution may emphasize certain facts or frame responsibility in ways that protect the way others see it (Mullen, 2018; Mullen, 2020).

Diane Langberg asks a different question. Her work focuses on the use of power within Christian communities and asks whom institutional responses actually protect when harm has occurred (Langberg, 2020). A church may believe it is defending its ministry while using its authority in ways that preserve the powerful person at the center of the crisis.

Chuck DeGroat moves the inquiry further back. His work on narcissism in churches examines the culture that can allow unhealthy leadership to become established long before a public crisis develops (DeGroat, 2020). A congregation that repeatedly rewards charisma or gives a successful pastor unusual freedom may gradually teach everyone involved that his way of leading works. By the time serious concerns emerge, the pattern has already been reinforced for years.

The church and the leader can therefore strengthen each other’s confidence. The institution’s trust confirms the leader’s importance, while his success reassures the institution that its trust was justified. When evidence forces a reevaluation, the leader faces questions about who he is, and the church faces questions about what it accepted.

A healthy church can survive those questions because its purpose is larger than the reputation of the person leading it. It can acknowledge a pastor’s real contributions while examining the harm that occurred. It can also change the practices that allowed unhealthy leadership to continue. In doing so, the church demonstrates that its identity does not depend on preserving a flattering story about any one person.

When the Calling Survives the Role

Christian theology offers an answer to the psychological problem this essay has been tracing. Christian identity begins in belonging to Christ. Vocation grows from that identity and directs a person toward service. A pastoral office expresses a calling, while the pastor’s worth comes from a relationship the office never created.

That order allows a calling to survive the loss of a particular role. A pastor can leave a pulpit and continue loving God. A teacher who leaves the classroom may find herself teaching in a coffee shop when someone sits down with a serious question. The setting changes while the desire to serve remains.

Narcissistic identity can reverse that order. Institutional recognition begins to function as evidence of worth, and the office becomes part of the proof that the leader is important. Losing the position then raises a question much larger than what he will do next. He may begin asking who he is if the people who once affirmed him no longer see him in the same way.

This is where grief becomes especially important. Grief assumes a self that survives the loss. A pastor can mourn a ministry that shaped decades of his life because he still exists apart from the title he lost. His life with God continues beyond the office, and he still has relationships and opportunities to serve that belong to the rest of his life. The loss may be profound, but it becomes something he can gradually incorporate into that larger life.

The narcissistic crisis described throughout this essay is harder because the role has been carrying part of the person’s identity. When institutional recognition disappears, the leader loses one of the principal ways he has understood his significance. The struggle to recover the role can then become a struggle to recover the self that seemed to exist securely inside it.

Christian vocation offers another way to understand that loss. A calling rooted in service can change form without losing its meaning. The pastor may no longer hold the office that once organized his life, yet he can still know whom he serves and why. The title can disappear while the calling continues.

If This Feels Familiar

Readers who recognize spiritual abuse or coercive leadership in their own religious communities may find the resources of GRACE, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, useful. GRACE provides educational materials for understanding abuse in Christian settings and offers guidance for trauma-informed responses.

Author’s Note

This essay examines psychological and institutional patterns described in the cited scholarship. Its examples are illustrative and do not describe any particular individual or event.

Related: How Narcissism Works, a five-part series examining introjects, splitting, triangulation, smear campaigns, and gaslighting through the fictional relationship of Daniel and Lena.

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Sources and Further Reading

DeGroat, Chuck. When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Dúbravská, Sofia, and Peter Halama. “‘I Felt I Wasn’t Worthy of Anything, Not Even of Life’: A Qualitative Study of Experiences of Catholic Religious Order Members Under Narcissistic Leadership.” Pastoral Psychology, 2026.

Dunaetz, David R., Hannah L. Jung, and Stephen S. Lambert. “Do Larger Churches Tolerate Pastoral Narcissism More Than Smaller Churches?” Great Commission Research Journal 10, no. 1 (2018): 69–89.

Langberg, Diane. Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church. Brazos Press, 2020.

Li, Jingyuan, C. Ward Struthers, Dmytro O. Rebrov, Ariel Shoikhedbrod, and Joshua R. Guilfoyle. “The Association Between Victims’ Vulnerable and Grandiose Narcissism and Grudge Holding.” The Journal of Social Psychology 165, no. 1 (2025): 21–36.

Mahadevan, Nikhila. “Conceptualizing Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism as Alternative Status-Seeking Strategies: Insights from Hierometer Theory.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2024.

Mullen, Wade. Impression Management Strategies Used by Evangelical Organizations in the Wake of an Image-Threatening Event. Doctoral dissertation, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, 2018.

Mullen, Wade. Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse and Freeing Yourself from Its Power. Tyndale Momentum, 2020.

Vaknin, Sam. Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. 10th revised edition. Narcissus Publications, 2015.

Vaknin, Sam. “Narcissists: Their Professions, Jobs, and Vocations.” Vaknin Talks.

Zondag, Hessel J. “Just Like Others: Narcissism Among Pastors.” Pastoral Psychology 52, no. 5 (2004): 423–437.