There is a strong tendency these days in popular culture, especially American culture, to call people evil – evil this, evil that – and this is occurring even within Church circles (a related phenomenon is the ‘demonization of the other’). Such parlance, however, is not only harmful and linguistically wrong. It is ontologically incorrect. In other words, it is a lie.
No human person can be validly called evil as no one is evil. There is no such thing as an “evil human being” or an “evil person,” despite the ever-increasing proliferation of this kind of language, at times unwittingly by those who should know better, but deliberately and malevolently by pharasaical demagogues within the Church itself. No one is evil. Not even those, in many people’s minds, who might be considered the worst persons ever to walk this earth (e.g., serial murderers, pedophiles, and so on) are evil. This because the image of the Triune God resides untarnished in every single human person.
It is the likeness that gets fractured by human actions and sin, not the image. Never, the image. Thus, to call a person or group of people “evil” is to manifest wild ignorance about both the ontological reality of humankind (and one’s own ontology) and to extend that very definition to God Himself.
