Monstrous Hypocrisy — Adi Kanda discusses fear, projection, and the hidden darkness driving our divisions
When I sat down with Adi Kanda on Created in the Image of God, we covered a lot of ground: fear, shadow work, projection, patterns, naming, healing, and the strange human tendency to condemn most fiercely in others what we least want to recognize in ourselves.
Her new book, Monster Most Feared, gave us the right frame.
Because the monster we fear most is often not the one outside us.
It is the one within us that we refuse to name.
That is a hard thing to say out loud in a culture built on accusation. We live in an age of exposure, outrage, and relentless moral commentary. Everyone seems ready to identify the darkness over there. Everyone has developed sharp instincts for the faults, blind spots, sins, hypocrisies, oppressions, and delusions of the other side.
But the central insight Adi kept returning to was this: what we deny gains power.
The shadow, as she described it, is the part of ourselves we do not want to face. The more we deny it, the more we feed it. The more we pretend we have risen above it, the more likely it is to run the show from underground. And the most common way it does that is through projection.
That is a spiritual word, but it names an ordinary human reality.
We accuse. We signal virtue. We divide. We denounce. We congratulate ourselves for being more enlightened, more compassionate, more awake, more moral, more just, more faithful, more humane than the people we oppose.
And all the while, the very habits we condemn may be operating within us in altered form.
At one point in the interview, I an original ironic aphorism that enacts the hypocrisy it exposes.
“We don’t other people the way other people other people.”
I was proud to have come up with a humorous way to express what I’ve been seeing all around me, but I submit that it’s no laughing matter.
It illustrates the type of hypocrisy almost no one can see while they are inside it.
We condemn exclusion while excluding. We condemn caricature while caricaturing. We condemn moral blindness while blinded by our own certainty. We condemn self-righteousness with astonishing self-righteousness.
That, to me, is monstrous hypocrisy.
Not because hypocrisy is new. It is ancient. But because in our time we proudly announce our hypocrisy. We revel in it. We virtue signal with it. it has become industrialized, technologized, systematized, and rewarded. The modern world gives us endless ways to perform moral clarity without ever submitting ourselves to moral scrutiny.
Adi’s language of shadow work offers one way of describing this. In my own vocabulary, I would say something similar in terms of discernment, hardness of heart, and the old human failure to distinguish between appearance and reality. We are often certain we are fighting the serpent while quietly feeding the dragon.
Wrong ideas, once believed and normalized, do not remain abstractions. They become habits. Then systems. Then identities. Then weapons. That is one reason discernment matters so much. The whisper, if left unchallenged, does not stay a whisper.
And yet the most dangerous whisper may be the one that tells us the problem is always somewhere else.
Adi put this in deeply personal terms. The denied part of the self becomes powerful precisely because it remains unexamined. It lives beneath the surface, shaping reactions, attachments, fears, and repeated patterns. That does not only happen in individuals. It happens in movements, institutions, churches, parties, nations, and civilizations.
A society can have a shadow too.
You can see it in the strange spectacle of people demanding compassion while stripping others of agency. You can see it when victimhood becomes not a condition to be healed but an identity to be maintained. You can see it when accountability is always for others and never for one’s own tribe. You can see it when people insist they are resisting domination while using every available lever of cultural power to shame, silence, and flatten dissent.
This is not a problem of one side only. That is the point.
The shadow is bipartisan. It is interreligious. It is ideological. It is universal. It is human.
And unless we begin there, we will never get very far.
One of the strongest parts of my exchange with Adi was the connection between fear and all of this distortion. Her closing line was one of those rare lines that is simple enough to remember and deep enough to keep unfolding:
Love is the air we breathe when we are not afraid.
I have been thinking about that ever since.
How much of what we call conviction is really fear? How much of what we call control is really fear? How much of what we call activism, certainty, tribal loyalty, ideological discipline, image management, or moral posturing is fear with a more flattering name?
Fear makes us clutch. Fear makes us harden. Fear makes us perform. Fear makes us project. Fear makes us seek safety in crowds, slogans, systems, and scapegoats. Fear makes us easier to manipulate and less able to discern.
That is why courage matters more than rhetoric.
And the courage required here is not first the courage to denounce others. We have plenty of that. It is the courage to become responsible for one’s own soul. The courage to look at the pattern, the wound, the compulsion, the resentment, the repeated failure, the reflexive blame, the hidden vanity, the need to dominate, the need to be seen as good, and say: this too is in me.
That is where real freedom begins.
Adi spoke about the need to name what has been operating beneath awareness. I resonated with that. There is power in naming. There is power in bringing something into consciousness. I shared in the interview my own experience years ago of finally receiving a diagnosis that explained a mysterious illness. The diagnosis was frightening, but it was also clarifying. To name a thing is not always to solve it. But often it is the beginning of no longer being ruled by it in the same way.
The same is true spiritually and morally.
If I cannot name my fear, my fear will name me. If I cannot name my shadow, my shadow will script me. If I cannot name my hypocrisy, my hypocrisy will masquerade as virtue.
And this is where responsibility comes back into view.
One of the great errors of our time is the confusion of compassion with the removal of agency. To acknowledge suffering is good. To take suffering seriously is good. To understand how people are shaped by wounds, environments, systems, histories, and patterns is necessary. But if we stop there, we have not helped anyone. We have simply given sophisticated language to paralysis.
At scale, this becomes cultural poison.
A civilization cannot remain healthy if it teaches people that they are nothing more than the products of what has happened to them. At some point, dignity requires responsibility. At some point, healing requires choice. At some point, freedom requires that a person say: this fear will not rule me forever.
That, too, is part of what I heard in Adi’s work.
Not cheap positivity. Not denial. Not spiritualized vagueness. But a call to spiritual courage.
Look the dragon in the eye. Name the pattern. Refuse the lie. Choose differently. Breathe again.
That is where love becomes more than a slogan.
It becomes breathable.
And that may be the deepest challenge hidden inside Monster Most Feared. The “monster” is not merely evil out there, waiting to be denounced. The monster is also the hypocrisy that thrives wherever fear goes unnamed and unchallenged. It is the darkness that grows in denial. It is the righteousness that never submits to self-examination. It is the blindness that congratulates itself for seeing.
What I appreciated most about Adi was not that she used all the same categories I would use. She does not. Her vocabulary is her own. Her route into these questions is distinctively hers. But that is precisely why the conversation mattered to me.
Her openness and insight gave me a fresh angle on discernment.
Discernment is not only about spotting falsehood out there. It is also about detecting distortion in here. It is not only about identifying dangerous ideas in the culture. It is about seeing how fear, denial, projection, and unresolved shadow can distort our own perception before we ever open our mouths. It is not only about resisting deception from without. It is about refusing self-deception within.
That is harder work. Slower work. Holier work.
And in a time when everyone wants to be seen as the one who sees clearly, that may be the work we need most.
Adi Kanda’s Monster Most Feared points toward that work. So did our conversation. In a divided age, it is tempting to go hunting monsters in the dark. But perhaps the first task is to ask which darkness in ourselves we still do not want to name.
Because the monster we cannot see is often the one doing the most damage.
And discernment begins there.
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, the conversation continues in two directions that connect naturally with the questions Adi raised about fear, love, discernment, and the deeper work of spiritual maturity.
On Sunday, October 18 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Stephanie Rousselle—Bible teacher, author, and host of the Gospel Spice podcast—about moving beyond a duty-driven faith and discovering deeper joy and delight in our relationship with God. From engaging scripture with fresh eyes to satisfying the soul’s deeper longing for God, it promises to be a rich conversation.
Then on Tuesday, October 20 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by David Gushee—Christian ethicist, author, and distinguished university professor at Mercer University—to explore how Christian faith speaks to some of the most challenging moral and social questions of our time, and what it means to bring conviction and compassion into public life. From Christian ethics and moral responsibility to navigating faith, society, and the difficult questions facing the church today, this should be a timely and important exchange.
