Basking in Reflected Glory
In my last post, When White Lies are Pink Flags, I covered a self-promoting tactic in which leaders advertise their own successes or accomplishments. I believe it is important to raise awareness about self-promoting tactics because time and time again I come across situations in which abuse survivors and concerned bystanders can point to narcissistic and self-promoting words and actions displayed by the more powerful destructive person. I’m not concerned with appropriate explanations of one’s success or connections (like in a job interview) but with the repeated and habitual use of one’s success or connections for personal gain at the expense of another’s well-being. This is why I’m grateful for talks like Diane Langberg’s Narcissism and The Systems it Breeds and books like Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church.
In this post, I explore a similar tendency for leaders to spotlight their connection to someone else’s status and prestige. In 1976, Robert Cialdini and Richard Borden published a study in which they give this behavior a name: BIRGing, or, Basking in Reflected Glory.
That is, people appear to feel that they can share in the glory of a successful other with whom they are in some way associated; one manifestation of this feeling is the public trumpeting of the association.
They conducted experimental studies that demonstrated the tendency of university students to wear school apparel the Monday after their football team won a big Saturday game, even though they themselves had nothing to do with the team’s success.
Here are three observations about BIRGing:
BIRGing is more prevalent when the person promoting the association knows or believes their audience views that connection positively. For instance, a university student is less likely to wear university apparel in the presence of those who are indifferent about athletics.
The connection affords the BIRGer a sense of prestige: it’s precisely because the audience doesn’t share the same connection that the BIRGer feels prestigious when trumpeting it.
The tendency to BIRG is greater when the BIRGer is experiencing failure and is attempting to repair a damaged image (or keep it from worsening) in the eyes of an audience. Our experience of or fear of failure can cause us to seek glory as way of avoiding shame.
Common examples of Basking in Reflected Glory include colleges and universities that display the accomplishments of their alumni as part of a fundraising campaign, leaders who casually mention the names of high-status people they interact with, and churches that bask in their connection to powerful politicians.
Perhaps the clearest example of a troubling pattern of BIRGing that I can offer from the evangelical world comes from the late Ravi Zacharias who sexually abused multiple women and used his power to silence them. In the 1970s, Ravi Zacharias was just starting out in public ministry and quickly grew in popularity. He was repeatedly promoted as “The Billy Graham of India.” Here’s just one of many advertisements:
An American evangelical audience familiar with and largely admiring of Billy Graham would be drawn to an emerging evangelist with such a connection.
By itself it might not stand out, but this single example of BIRGing was just one thread in a pattern of self-promotion revealed across the fabric of time. If you trace that pattern over the years, as Steve Baughman does in the video below, you discover more self-promoting red flags like inflating credentials and embellishing connections with prestigious institutes of higher learning.
BIRGing Leads to Polishing and Whitewashing
The more important that reflected glory is to the individual and the community, the more likely they are to talk up the source of that reflection in ways that exaggerate or fabricate their perceived positive attributes. I see this most clearly among staff and board members of organizations led by an egotistical leader who insists those around them bask in their reflected glory and stroke their ego. I call this polishing. Just as a surface shines brighter when polished, the BIRGers polish the leaders’ characteristics so that the leader shines brighter upon the followers. This is where any deceptive motives become more noticeable as BIRGers begin to redefine people and situations in order to give the appearance that things are better than they really are. As part of that effort, they may also whitewash the negative attributes of the source of the glory: conceal any weaknesses or negative attributes that may reflect shame instead of glory.
This then creates a transactional relational dynamic. The leader benefits from BIRGing but then also expects others to do the same. They enjoy, and perhaps even demand, the polishing of positive features and the whitewashing of negative features. The followers benefit from basking in the glory reflected by their leader while the leader benefits from the constant polishing and whitewashing. Together, they form a symbiotic relationship as they feed off a diet of glory and become celebrators of celebrity.
BIRGing, Polishing, and Whitewashing Contributes to the MUM and MAM Effects
As leadership engages in BIRGing behaviors, and as they polish the positive and whitewash the negative, followers (such as a church congregation), pick up the cues and begin to mirror those behaviors. They learn they must also BIRG, polish, and whitewash if they are to enjoy the benefits themselves or remain in good standing.
Based on my work and research on abuse in Christian environments, it seems one of the outcomes of this phenomenon is that it contributes to the MUM Effect among followers, bystanders, and leadership teams. People who might offer criticism or report misconduct fear doing so because they believe they will be seen as a threat and so they Minimize Unwanted Messages. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. This isn’t primarily because the person with concerns lacks assertiveness or courage, but because the leadership has cultivated an environment in which only favorable messages are received.
Former colleagues of Ravi Zacharias spoke of a “toxic loyalty culture” that characterized their work at RZIM and how concerns were downplayed in favor of a polished and whitewashed narrative.
The more important that reflected glory is to the leadership and the community, the more necessary it becomes to proactively neutralize threats to that reflected glory by creating spaces in which people Minimize Unwanted Messages. They develop intrinsic motivations for being careful about what they say while leaders and enablers become messaging gatekeepers: managing information in order to maintain the accepted definitions and descriptions.
The leader who accumulates illicit power through self-promotion tends to push away anyone who does not mirror their own view of themselves until they are only surrounded by those willing to reflect and bask in the glory of the leader - those willing to deliver the messages leadership wants to hear. This contributes to what I’m calling the MAM Effect in which people not only minimize unwanted messages but also Maximize Appealing Messages.
As these false praises and twisted messages fill the atmosphere, as appealing messages are maximized and unwanted messages are minimized, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to offer sincere expressions of truth. Dangerous blind spots develop as people are hesitant to speak criticism and BIRGers see any criticism as negative, disruptive, and disrespectful. The ever-growing emphasis on basking leaves little room for dissent as those who choose not to bask are easily spotted in a crowd of BIRGers and labeled as trouble-makers, contrarians, disloyal, divisive, selfish, crazy, over-sensitive, bitter, or insubordinate. For this reason, those within the leader’s inner circle (and there are almost always in-groups and out-groups in such cultures), tend to be those who are willing to deliver exclusively wanted messages while assisting in efforts to stamp out unwanted messages. Truth then becomes indiscernible in a room of human mirrors. If you are a dissenter in such a place, you will find the closer you get to the source of the toxicity, the more difficult it is to find those who will listen to truth, let alone recognize what is true. In the most toxic of places, the system responds by punishing those who deliver unwanted messages and rewarding those who deliver appealing messages.
As the number of followers and enablers who revel in the light of illicit power increases, so too grows the number of those sitting in their shadows. Blinded by visions of grandeur cast by a deceptive leader and enablers, they cannot (or will not) consider the shadows being cast by their toxic system, nor the suffering of those who sit in those shadows. Victims, who are the most profoundly impacted, become the most forgotten as the system learns to only center the powerful and the glorious. Leaders who become non-compliant or dissent are replaced by others who either endure the toxicity or are eager themselves to step into a sphere of corrupted glory. The system eventually becomes wholly toxic and abusive.
A Case Study: BIRGing and White Supremacy
Today is January 6, 2022, the one year anniversary of the attack on the US capitol. I find examples of BIRGing among white supremacists who bask in the reflected glory of the Confederacy. To illustrate this, I end with a story adapted from a case study written by Matthew Turner for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, a project of Swarthmore College, followed by descriptions of BIRGing observed by a writer from Italy who was visiting America at the time (before BIRGing had a name), and how we see similar BIRGing behaviors to this day among white supremacists.
On February 25, 1960, a group of 35 black students took seats in the lunchroom of the county courthouse. In response, the store-owners closed the lunch counter and a mob of pro-segregationists physically assaulted the students. Alabama Governor John Patterson ordered the university to expel any student participating in sit-ins.
On February 29, 1960, around 800 people attended a rally – addressed by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr – to plan another demonstration on the next day.
On March 1, 1960, over 1000 people marched from the Alabama State College campus to the state capital and back. After this march, the president of the university expelled 9 students identified as leaders and suspended 20 other students, under pressure from the governor’s office. As a result of this, students at the college voted to boycott classes and exams (although some news articles suggested that the exams were attended by most students).
On March 6, 1960, protesters began to gather at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy – a well-known member of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This protest was cited as having a significant increase in the number of white citizens participating with the students. A crowd of white citizens – those in support of segregation – surrounded the church, physically assaulting some members of the march and forcing them to flee into the church. It was reported that the city fire company brought two fire trucks to the scene and used the high-powered fire hoses on retreating protesters; soon after this, the police dispersed the crowds and ended the protest.
While these events were unfolding, an Italian writer named Italo Calvino was visiting America at the invitation of The Ford Foundation. He happened to visit Montgomery, Alabama as part of a tour led by high-society white hosts. In a diary entry from March 6, 1960, Calvino writes:
This is a day that I will never forget as long as I live. I have seen what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of a society’s fundamental rules. I was present at one of the first episodes of mass struggle by the Southern blacks: and it ended in defeat. I don’t know if you are aware that after decades of total immobility black protests began right here, in the worst segregationist State in the country: some were even successful, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister, advocate of non-violent protest. That is why I came here to Montgomery, the day before yesterday, but I did not expect to find myself right in the middle of these crucial days of struggle.
He tells not just of the brutality of the government and the police, but also of the racist bystanders watching with enjoyment:
At every insult or witticism made by a white, the other whites, men and women, burst out laughing, sometimes with almost hysterical insistence, but sometimes also just like that, affably, and these people, as far as I am concerned, are the most awful, this all-out racism combined with affability.
One of his high-society hosts picks him up and drives him to his next destination, chatting with him with along the way as if he shares in her racism. He writes:
After the Capitol, I have ten minutes of peace to calm down after all the emotion, then a high-society lady comes to collect me and shows me, as we drive along, their factory of gherkins in vinegar, and hints vaguely at the day’s ‘troubles’ caused by that agitator Luther King. This famous Southern aristocracy gives me the impression of being uniquely stupid in its continual harking back to the glories of the Confederacy; this Confederate patriotism which survives intact after a century, as though they were talking of things from their youth, in the tone of someone who is confident you share their emotions, is something which is more unbearable than ridiculous.
Notice the racist BIRGing — the “harking back to the glories of the Confederacy.” And how Calvino finds it ridiculous that this Confederate patriotism still survives after a century. Tragic events of recent years, like the insurrection of January 6, 2021, serve as reminders that racist BIRGing still survives.
Slaveholders from the past are still memorialized and their biographies are polished and whitewashed. For example, we believe a man named George Wimberley enslaved my wife’s ancestors, Asa and Mourning, on a plantation in North Carolina. He is memorialized in this way:
His manners were easy, natural, blending a quiet dignity with a genial humor, which invited friendship and secured respect and confidence. In his relations to his neighbors he was kind and gentle, and with every one just and generous. Himself, free from guile or suspicion of the motives of others in whom he confided, he enjoyed, in the same measure, their confidence and esteem. An acquaintance of fifty years does not recall a single unkind or ungenerous expression coming from him. He gave to the cultivation of his hands and the treatment of those who were related to him by service, intelligent attention, exercised fine judgment and was content with the yield of his harvests – uncomplaining of those incidents which, in different measure, come to all men.
His online memorial acknowledges that he and his wife owned a “sufficient number of slaves” but proceeds to claim that they are “more appropriately described as those related to him by service.” It is this polishing and whitewashing that enables the twisted narratives that mark BIRGing cultures.
Similarly, a friend recently shared a 2011 study that examined the role of tour guides at plantations in the South and how they shape the perceptions tourists form of the slaveholders and the enslaved. They write:
Tourism plantations across the South often ignore or marginalize the story of slavery while valorizing the accomplishments and possessions of the planter class, thus carrying out a ‘symbolic annihilation’ of the history and identify of enslaved Africans and African-Americans (Eachstedt and Small, 2002: 105).
What is needed?
Whenever BIRGing takes root in any culture, deception branches out, and harm to others is the fruit it produces. It is critical that the full truth is told and embraced even if that truth reflects failure and shame. Cultures marked by an unhealthy preoccupation with basking in reflected glory tend to cut themselves off from anything that might reflect shame, and in the end, cut themselves off from truth, ensuring only one version of their story is told: the story of their glory.
In order to allow for truth-telling, leaders must focus less on managing the ratio of positive to negative messages and more on creating environments in which people feel safe to discover and say what is true. There is a place for considering how truth is delivered, but teachings from threatened powerful church leaders about the need for unity, gentleness, believing the best, forgiveness, and the like, often has less to do with virtue and more to do with minimizing unwanted messages and maximizing appealing messages.
As safety allows for more of the full truth to emerge, real change requires the moral courage of those who are in positions of influence and authority. Leaders who have perhaps grown accustomed to BIRGing, polishing, and whitewashing need to join those who have suffered in the shadows, stand with them, help them move out from the shadows, and then refuse to bask any longer in an illegitimate and toxic glory.