The Christian Shadow: Introduction

One of the ideas that I’ve found most revolutionary, helpful — and troubling over the past decade of my exploring different ideas is the idea of the psychological Shadow. Coming originally from Carl Jung’s reflections on human psychology, the shadow is all about the parts of us we’d prefer to ignore. As I’ve previously summarized it:

As we go through life, we make decisions, conscious or unconscious, about what is ‘us’ and what is ‘not us’. The problem comes when, through messages from our culture or families of origin, or because we don’t have the resources to manage them on our own, we push away things that are a part of us as being ‘not us’. In doing this, those things are still in fact a part of us, but we cannot see them — they are part of our ‘Shadow’. And this makes them dangerous. If we leave our Shadow unexamined and un-dealt-with, it ends up making itself known in dysfunctional ways. Take for example something like anger. Every single human being gets angry from time to time. But if we are taught that anger is a ‘bad’ emotion or aren’t taught healthy ways of expressing it, we can try to disown it and thereby push it into Shadow. And when it’s in Shadow it can come out either through a complete inability to deal with situations that require anger — for example, when we experience or witness injustice — or to dangerous, uncontrolled outbursts of anger that seem to have a life of their own and not be ‘us’.

The idea behind shadow work, then, is to actively recognize, accept, and own every part of us. Failure to do so, according to the theory — and I think it checks out — leaves us unable to deal with it. In a classic text, which has become so formative for me that I’ve quoted it a couple times already here on this blog, Jung addresses a Western official who, responding to the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust, said that he had “no imagination for evil.” Jung commented:

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present — and one should therefore do well to possess some ‘imagination for evil,’ for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil. Harmlessness and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil into the ‘other’. (The Undiscovered Self, 53 (CW par. 572))*

As the ancient Roman writer Terence put it more succinctly two thousand years ago, “I am human and … nothing human is alien to me.”

Jung had an interesting and much-debated relationship with Christianity. Raised in the still-publicly Christian culture of pre-War Europe by a staid Calvinist pastor father and a more esoteric-leaning mother, Christian ideas, images, and archetypes pervaded his dreams, reflections, and professional writing. He had an abiding love for the figure of Christ, and offered some of the most interesting theological ideas of his time and place. And yet Jung was very critical of Christianity and was repelled by much of what he saw of it in his society. Within this push and pull, it has been argued that Jung came to see himself as something of a psychotherapist to Christianity itself, urging it to move into a healthier and more mature place (see Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity).

I certainly don’t think Jung was right in all of his ideas about Christianity, but it’s hard not to agree with him that our tradition has a pretty dark shadow that keeps coming out. As a student of history, it’s shocking to see just how rarely the public face of Christianity in the world has been anything remotely Christlike. And if we look around us today, we see the loudest and largest “Christian” voices promoting purity culture, ritualism, reliance on heritage and identity, and a grasping after political power — all things that were completely anathema to Jesus. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And so we come to the point of this post and to my first series of 2025. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to think through some of these ideas more. First, what did Jung really have to say about Christianity, and is it justified? Second, to look at some essential aspects of traditional, orthodox Christianity and see how they might play with Jung’s theories. And third, to look at some of the major stories in our Scriptures and see where their shadow just might be. All this is close to my heart. The more I look around and see what continues to be said and done ‘in the name of Jesus’ and of faith, the more I see that we have a lot of work to do.

* See the bibliography for the series for full information.