by Brenton L. Delp
Modern political tribalism is not merely a failure of civility. It is not simply that Americans have become rude, impatient, misinformed, or trapped inside media bubbles. These are symptoms of a deeper psychological and spiritual problem. Political identity has increasingly become a vessel of ultimate meaning. It no longer functions only as an opinion about policy or government. It becomes a symbolic image of the good. Once this happens, political opposition becomes charged with religious intensity. The opponent is no longer merely wrong. He becomes a threat to the good itself.
This is where Jung’s psychology becomes indispensable. Jung’s notion of the shadow helps explain why groups so easily locate darkness outside themselves. The shadow is not simply evil. It is the rejected, unrecognized, inferior, feared, or morally troubling side of the personality. What the ego cannot bear to know about itself, it tends to see elsewhere. The same process occurs collectively. A group that identifies itself with justice, freedom, truth, tradition, equality, democracy, or righteousness will have difficulty recognizing its own aggression, blindness, resentment, cruelty, or will to power. These disowned qualities are then projected onto the opposing group.
But the shadow alone does not explain the intensity of modern politics. For that, Jung’s idea of the numinous is equally necessary. The numinous is not merely an idea. It is an overwhelming psychic power. It grips, fascinates, commands, and possesses. When a political ideal becomes numinous, it is no longer experienced as one finite good among others. It becomes sacred. Criticism becomes blasphemy. Compromise becomes betrayal. Doubt becomes weakness. The political symbol becomes inflated with the energy once carried by religious forms.
The deeper structure is the logic of the absolute. The absolute, by definition, is not one value among many. It is the highest good, the supreme measure, the final truth. Once consciousness identifies its own position with the absolute good, a dangerous conclusion follows almost automatically. If my ultimate is wholly good, and if my allegiance to it places me on the side of the good, then those who stand outside it must be wrong. If they persist, they become corrupt. If they resist, they become enemies. If the conflict intensifies, they become evil.
This logic has a long history in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each tradition, in different ways, organized consciousness around an ultimate divine reality. Covenant, law, revelation, incarnation, church, ummah, prophecy, salvation, judgment, and obedience all belong to worlds in which ultimate meaning is not optional. The danger is not that these traditions distinguished good from evil. Human life cannot avoid such distinctions. The danger appears when the human subject identifies himself too completely with the good and projects evil entirely outside himself.
Yet the Christian tradition also contains a powerful interruption of this demonizing tendency. Jesus does not teach his followers to erase the difference between good and evil. But he does teach them not to reduce the enemy to evil. “Love your enemies” is not sentimental moral advice. It is a radical spiritual discipline against projection. It prevents the enemy from becoming merely the carrier of one’s shadow. The neighbor may be wrong. The enemy may be dangerous. But he remains human. He remains within the field of love, prayer, forgiveness, and moral responsibility.
Paul develops a similar interruption in another key. When he writes that the struggle is “not against flesh and blood,” he refuses to let the human opponent become the final object of hatred. His language remains theological and apocalyptic, but psychologically the movement is profound. The true struggle is not simply against persons. It is against powers, principalities, and forces that exceed the individual. In Jungian terms, one might say that human beings can become possessed by collective powers, archetypal energies, ideological spirits, and unconscious forces. But this means that the neighbor must not be demonized as the simple embodiment of evil.
World War II requires a further correction. Any serious reflection on shadow, projection, and political demonization must pass through the death camps. The Holocaust introduced back into modern consciousness acts that could not be adequately described as error, ignorance, pathology, or historical misunderstanding. There are moments when moral language must recover its full force. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, the Einsatzgruppen massacres, the starvation policies, the medical experiments, and the bureaucratic organization of murder confront consciousness with human actions that can only be called evil.
This means that the refusal to demonize cannot mean the refusal to judge. Jesus’ command to love the enemy does not abolish moral discernment. Paul’s insistence that the struggle is not merely “against flesh and blood” does not excuse human responsibility. Jung’s warning against projection does not imply that evil is only a projection. The point is more difficult. Evil must be named where it appears, but the human being must not use the naming of evil as an escape from shadow-consciousness.
The death camps alter the problem of the absolute. For a brief and terrible moment in modern history, good and evil did become nearly absolutized. The world was forced to confront a regime whose actions revealed not merely another political position, but a systematic assault upon the human itself. In such a situation, Jesus’ teaching applies differently. To love one’s enemy cannot mean sentimental refusal to resist him. It cannot mean passivity before murder. It cannot mean placing victim and perpetrator on the same moral plane. Love of enemy, in the shadow of the camps, must mean something different. The reality of evil, on this level, is the moral question that has haunted western civilization since.
This is where Jung becomes indispensable again. The camps do not refute the shadow; they reveal its historical actuality. They show what happens when a people, a state, an ideology, and a bureaucracy become possessed by projected evil. The victim is made into vermin, disease, parasite, corruption, enemy of the people, enemy of history, enemy of purity. Once this projection hardens into collective doctrine, murder can present itself as cleansing, obedience, necessity, or duty.
The lesson of World War II, then, is not that we must never speak of evil. It is that we must speak of evil with fear and trembling, knowing that the capacity for evil does not belong only to monsters. It belongs to human beings under possession, abstraction, obedience, resentment, ideology, and fear. The death camps force us to preserve moral absolutes while also deepening psychological humility. Evil is real. But the moment we imagine it exists only outside ourselves, we have already begun to prepare the conditions for its return.
This is precisely what modern politics forgets. Secular consciousness often imagines that it has left religious absolutism behind. But the absolute has not disappeared. It has migrated. It now appears as History, Progress, Nation, Freedom, Equality, Science, Identity, Democracy, Revolution, Tradition, or Justice. These may be real and necessary values. But when any of them becomes absolute, they begin to generate a shadow. Those outside the sacred image become enemies of the good.
This is why political debate so easily becomes apocalyptic. Each side believes it is defending civilization from catastrophe. Each side experiences the other not simply as mistaken, but as morally diseased. The progressive may imagine himself as standing wholly with compassion, justice, and liberation, while projecting cruelty, ignorance, and hatred onto the conservative. The conservative may imagine himself as standing wholly with order, freedom, and tradition, while projecting decadence, tyranny, and betrayal onto the progressive. Each may see something real in the other. But because perception is fused with projection, the opponent becomes mythic, exaggerated, and dehumanized.
Jung’s warning is that whatever is not made conscious returns as fate. A society that cannot recognize its own shadow will require enemies to carry it. A political movement that cannot admit its own capacity for evil will discover evil everywhere else. A citizen who cannot bear inward contradiction will seek purity in tribal belonging. The tribe offers relief from self-knowledge. It says: we are good; they are the problem.
But Jesus and Paul offer another possibility. They do not ask us to abandon moral judgment. They ask us to refuse demonization. The enemy is not to be loved because he is harmless, or because good and evil are illusions, or because all positions are equal. The enemy is to be loved because no human being may be reduced to the shadow he carries for us. Paul’s “not against flesh and blood” preserves the same insight in symbolic form: the person before me is not identical with the power moving through him.
This is where Jung deepens the religious insight psychologically. The real task is not simply to defeat the enemy but to withdraw the projection. The question is not only, What is wrong with them? It is also, What have we placed upon them? What darkness in ourselves have we refused to know? What evil becomes possible precisely because we are convinced of our goodness?
The shadow does not begin when we distinguish good from evil. It begins when we become convinced that we ourselves stand entirely on the side of the good. Every image of the absolute carries this temptation. Once I identify myself with the highest good, the opponent ceases to be a neighbor. He becomes an obstacle to salvation, justice, freedom, truth, or history itself. At that moment, politics becomes possessed.
The recovery of political sanity therefore requires more than better arguments. It requires shadow-consciousness. It requires the religious discipline of not demonizing the neighbor and the psychological discipline of recognizing projection. It requires the capacity to hold conviction without idolatry, moral seriousness without moral inflation, and opposition without hatred.
A democracy cannot survive where citizens see one another only as embodiments of evil. Nor can the soul develop where the shadow is always located outside the self. The task is not to abandon the good. The task is to stop imagining that we possess it absolutely. The task is not to stop opposing what must be opposed. The task is to oppose without surrendering the neighbor to the devil.
This is the difficult wisdom at the intersection of Jesus, Paul, and Jung. The enemy may remain an enemy. The wrong may remain wrong. The political struggle may remain necessary. But the human being must not be made into the absolute opposite of the good. For when that happens, the shadow has already triumphed.
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Notes
- C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, especially the chapters on the ego, shadow, and the self.
- C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, especially Jung’s warnings concerning mass-mindedness, ideology, and the weakened modern individual.
- Matthew 5:44; Luke 23:34; Romans 12:14–21; Ephesians 6:12.
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