I grew up in a family where the practice of going to confession was actively discouraged. At liturgy with my Greek grandma, the priest suggested during his homily that we should all avail ourselves of the opportunity to see him for confession. My grandma whispered in my ear, “We don’t do that.” I asked her what she meant. “We don’t tell our business to other people,” she said, “because they might gossip about us.”
Gossip is part of the air that Greeks breathe. It’s part and parcel of our cultural legacy. After my religious awakening in college and my decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, I started going to confession regularly. But it wasn’t until I heard Pope Francis call gossip a “diabolical cancer”—“the worst weed” that can grow in a community, because it leads to division and resentment—that I started including the sin of gossip on my list.
Harsh condemnations of gossip date back to the early Church, when some desert fathers recommended putting a stone in one’s mouth in order to learn to keep silent and avoid vain talk about others. St. John Climacus called gossip a leech “draining and wasting the blood of charity.” Even recent Greek Orthodox writers have issued warnings about the evils of gossip. Hieromonk Gregorios said gossip is a form of lying: by spreading negative information about other people, the gossiper implies knowing the full story, including the state of a person’s heart (which only God knows). Saint Paisios insisted that Christians ought to be like the bee who looks for the flowers—only speaking about the good that others do—and avoid being like the fly who wallows in filth, dwelling on others’ worst attributes.
Living in the information age has not exactly made this easy. The expansion of technology—mass and social media, exposure to sensational public spectacles, and constant surveillance—subtly encourages the impulse to play God: to see, know, judge, and disseminate as much information as we can access about others.
But we ought to exercise caution and avoid moralizing—both about gossip and Big Tech—in simplistic ways. The more I’ve reflected on my seemingly endless battle against the sin of gossiping, which is likely fueled by my addiction to my phone and social media, I’ve come to see how much this struggle is not so much a curse from the devil as it is a source of divine grace.
The first time rumors spread about a girl in my eighth-grade class losing her virginity, I greedily consumed to all the information I could get so I could tell everyone, piecing together all the details and using my imagination to embellish them a little more each time I recounted the tale. I even told my mom, who found the story to be so riveting that she gathered everyone in the living room to have me tell it to them. My family didn’t even know who the girl was. What enticed them was not finding out private information about this girl or judging her. It was the sensationalism of the way I told it.
There is a real craft, an artform to gossiping. One need only watch a YouTube compilation of the “hot topics” segment from Wendy Williams’s daytime talk show to see someone who has truly mastered the craft. Her audience doesn’t only crave information about the private lives of the stars—they crave the salacious and witty manner in which Williams presents it. (Williams once took up the challenge to give up gossiping, which lasted a whole ten seconds. Some have dared to conjecture that her current cognitive impairment is divine intervention to stop her from getting—in the words of Mariah Carey—“all up in [people’s] bidness.”)
Some argue that gossip can be a force for good. Gossip in the form of venting can easily spiral into a bashing session, in which you wallow—like the fly—in your resentment toward the person who pissed you off. But it can also open the door to a constructive conversation about how to deal with said person and arrive at some kind of resolution. And some more socially-conscious voices have argued that gossip can be a means for powerless, underprivileged people to warn, protect, and uplift each other in the face of unjust treatment by those in power.
When it comes to my own taste for gossip, it’s a bit more complicated. As time went on, I began feeling like Gretchen Wieners of Mean Girls fame: my head was full of secrets. Somehow, I just happened to know everything about everyone. Perhaps it was because my Aspergers made me pay attention to and remember little random details I observed and heard. Maybe I have an unhealthy appetite for knowing information about others that I’m not entitled to, and am thus guilty of the vain curiosity that drove Adam and Eve to disobey God. Or maybe it’s just because my family groomed me to notice and retain information about other people.
Most of the gossip I grew up around was harmless. Yet I can’t deny that plenty of the gossip I indulge in is malicious. Sometimes I’ve said things that are really mean, and have spread information about people that ended up hurting them afterwards. The more I’ve examined my own conscience, I’ve had to admit that there’s more than just playfulness or curiosity driving my itch to gossip about people. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to compensate for my embarrassingly deep-seated insecurities.
Like most other millennial narcissists, my entitlement complex is fairly massive. I’m embarrassingly insecure and desperate for approval. When people don’t do what I want, I take it as a grave injustice, an affront to my dignity. Rather than accept that I’m not entitled to everything I want—and pull a Matthew 18:15 by confronting people when they actually disrespect me—I allow the resentment to fester internally. The resentment eventually oozes out of me in the form of talking shit about them—usually not in the aforementioned constructive manner, but as a way of punishing them for their affront to me. It numbs my insecurity by letting me pretend that I’m more powerful than them.
But there is also another mode of gossiping—one that’s less impassioned, requires less effort and serves a more mundane function—that risks being even more diabolical. Unlike the aforementioned forms of theatricality or maliciousness—this kind is gossip as mere filler, background noise used to numb boredom, a lack of passion for life and substance in a conversation.
I once asked my grandma why we gossip so much. She said that we weren’t gossiping, we were just making conversation. Gossip was a way to pass the time together. We didn’t give much thought to it; it was second nature. More often than not, it was done for sport. This form of gossip can be incredibly pernicious. When you’re engaging in malicious gossip, you can at least know you’re sinning and feel bad about it at some point. But this blasé kind of gossip requires no engagement of the heart or the mind. It’s most common among those who are accustomed to looking not up at the cosmos or into the eyes of the other, but down at the ground. Gossip of this sort fulfills the same function as other forms of algorithmically-regulated background noise like streaming services, AI, doomscrolling: it’s slop that distracts from the existential dread.
This apathetic, low-labor intensive form of gossip has followed in the direction of celebrity gossip: innovations in technology and media have moved us past the sensationalism of the paparazzi era, when tabloid photographers put their—and celebrities’—lives on the line in order to snap a shot that would get people around the world talking. Gone are the days of the paparazzi harassing Britney and Paris as they stumbled out of the club, and chasing Lady Di down the tunnel to her ultimate demise. The dawn of social media—where celebrities can determine which images of themselves get projected out into the ether—has taken the edge off the sensationalism of celebrity gossip. The sheer overload of information we’re barraged with has made it so that even the most scandalous image or story is quickly forgotten in a matter of days—or hours—as newer, more sensational stories make their way into the news cycle.
When the media that disseminates information about people’s lives assumes god-like proportions of omniscience and omnipotence, the thrill of “playing god” and gossiping loses its edge. Asking your friend if they saw Cardi B’s latest Instagram story performs that same space-filling function as commenting on the weather—indeed, information about the private lives of celebrities has become as pervasively unavoidable—and mundane—as the weather itself. Perhaps the greatest mark of the falling off of a friendship is when the two people cease sharing juicy, impassioned gossip with each other, and when they resort to DMing each other cringe stories of people they follow. (Lately, I’ve been indulging in DMing friends politically-charged posts by our mutuals, deriding them as libtards…and conservatards. My new low has been DMing our mutuals’ thirstraps and bodyshaming them...)
From the artful, to the malicious, to the lazy varieties, I’ve employed various tactics to conquer my pet vice of gossip. I’ve done that thing when you start saying “Did you hear about…wait no, nevermind.” I’ve tried highlighting a person’s most positive attributes after talking shit about them (“He’s such an asshole…but you know, when you think about it he’s actually kinda smart…”)—simultaneously being the fly and the bee. In an attempt to adhere to the Golden Rule, I’ve tried conjuring up memories of how I felt after being told that people were gossiping about me, hoping that would keep me inflicting the same pain upon others. I’ve tried looking at the log in my own eye before talking about someone else’s log, probing my conscience for the ways that I’ve perpetrated the same crime as the person I’m tempted to gossip about. I’ve tried—as much as it goes against my millennial temperament—to get a little more confrontational and tell people how I feel to their face rather than being fake nice venting my emotions behind their back. And I’ve even asked people forgiveness for what I’ve said about them after the fact.
But much like my addiction to doomscrolling, I’ve come around to accepting that gossiping is a vice I’ll never fully kick. Neither denying the sinfulness of my habit nor moralizing about it have been useful. Rather, the most helpful advice I received was from a priest to whom I was (yet again) confessing the sin of gossip, who recommended that I focus my energy not on avoiding the sin, but on looking at God Himself. When tempted to look at people’s faults and talk about them with others, when hurt or scandalized by people’s actions, even when I’m bored and feel the need to fill the empty space—direct my attention toward Him. Even if I’ve already started indulging in the act of gossiping, shift the focus of the conversation back to Him. Offer everything to Him—your resentment, your scandal, your insecurity, your boredom. Trust that he can transform and elevate all of these things. For it is only in this dialogue, in this humble act of offering, that the empty vacuum that gossip tries to fill can be filled with something of true beauty and substance.
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Thanks for your honesty, Stephen. Appreciate your willingness to be upfront about your personal experience (and family history!) of gossiping. Usually I’m not into self-deprecation but I found your approach refreshingly clear-eyed. That priest’s advice sounds pretty solid and I hope it turns out to be true and helpful🙂
There’s advice nick bilton was given about hit pieces that’s especially apt here: you should never write them until someone writes them about you.
Nothing will gossip nor condemnation of others like making a grievous error and losing your friends, your reputation, and your community in the process.