Life & Wisdom Quote by Matthew Fox

Fox is trying to repossess the supernatural without buying into a childish cosmology. By calling evil "the shadow of angel", he flips the usual script: darkness isn’t an alien force invading a basically innocent world, it’s the negative imprint cast by the very capacities we romanticize as “angelic” - belonging, protection, guidance, even zeal for healing. The provocation is in the pairing. If there are “angels of light,” then the shadow versions are not horns-and-pitchforks villains but distorted guardians: impulses that promise safety and order while quietly demanding scapegoats.

The line “we have names for them: racism, sexism, homophobia” drags the language of demons out of the haunted house and into the civic sphere. Fox is addressing readers who would rather treat prejudice as either purely personal (“bad people”) or purely abstract (“systems”), and he refuses both comforts. Calling them “demons” preserves the felt reality of how these forces possess institutions and imaginations, how they spread, how they outlive individual intentions. Then he undercuts the easy exorcism: “but they’re not out there.” The subtext is accountability. If the demon isn’t external, you can’t defeat it with condemnation alone; you have to examine the desires that feed it - the craving to be superior, the hunger for certainty, the fear of difference.

Contextually, this sits in Fox’s broader project as a spiritually minded writer who often challenges conventional religious categories. He’s building a bridge for people alienated by literalist religion but still drawn to moral language with teeth: a way to talk about structural harm as spiritually urgent, not merely impolite.