The Splitting of the God Image

The decline of faith in Western civilization has removed one of the previously consistent pillars of meaning and comfort humanity has relied upon from its beginning. Many explanations have been postulated for this phenomenon, including economic factors, sociological changes, and scientific advances, among others. In this article, I suggest that a key factor in the increasing secularization of our society may involve the problem of evil in a world now dominated by science and technology. While theodicy, the reconciliation of an “all-good,” “omnipotent” deity with the existence of evil, has always been a challenge for believers, I aim to show how the need for theodicy can be a result of one’s God image being split along the same lines as one’s primary objects. I suggest that this split is increasingly hard to maintain in the context of our changing worldviews. My object relational analysis of the God image and its relation to the problem of evil will draw primarily on work by Freud, Ana-Maria Rizzuto, and Fairbairn. I propose that the segregation of the objectionable, evil elements of the human condition away from an all-good God, functioned as long as there were viable alternatives for these elements to be displaced onto. Now that this is increasingly not the case, a religion whose God image remains split becomes much less resilient to the realities of life, as compared to one whose God image is able to hold both the good and evil elements simultaneously.