Scapegoats

The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims

Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Jennifer Garcia Bashaw

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506469379
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Scapegoats are innocent victims who have experienced blame and violence at the hands of society. René Girard proposes that the Gospels present Jesus as a scapegoat whose innocent death exposes how humans have always created scapegoats. This revelation should have cured societal scapegoating, yet those who claim to live by the Gospels have missed that message. They continue to scapegoat and remain blind to the suffering of scapegoats in modern life.

Christians today tend to read the New Testament as victors, not as victims. The teachings and actions of Jesus thus lose much of their subversive significance. The Gospels become one harmonized story about individual salvation rather than distinct representations of Jesus's revolutionary work on behalf of victims. Scapegoats revisits the Gospel narratives with the understanding that they tell scapegoats' stories, and that through those stories the kingdom of God is revealed. Bashaw goes beyond Girard's arguments to show that Jesus's whole public ministry (not only his death) combats the marginalization of victims. These scapegoat stories work together to illuminate an essential truth of the Gospels--that Jesus modeled a reality in which victims become survivors and the marginalized become central to the kingdom.

Chapter 1

Scapegoats and Scapegoating

Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.

—René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Introduction

The primary perspective through which we will view Jesus’s life and ministry in this book is that of victims, or scapegoats. This perspective is not foreign to the biblical text. Many of its stories are told from the perspective of victims. However, the concept of a scapegoat has more complexity and nuance than the typical Bible reader might realize. For this reason, I will begin this book with a brief introduction to the scapegoating process and the role scapegoats play in society. I will make use of studies from anthropologists and sociologists, but the figure whose work provides the central backdrop is René Girard, a French literary critic and social science theorist. His theory will help us better understand scapegoats in religious contexts and open our eyes to the pervasive nature of scapegoating in our world.

Scapegoats have existed since the earliest civilizations began to form. Ancient societies practiced ritual scapegoating, symbolically transferring the sin and blame of a community onto a person or an animal in order to absolve themselves of guilt and to perpetuate peace among their citizens. The term scapegoat originates from the ancient Hebrew practice mentioned in Leviticus 16. There, we read about the priest Aaron casting lots over two goats on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One goat was set apart for Yahweh, to be a sin offering, and the other goat was designated as azazel, “the goat that departs.” Aaron would lay his hands on the second goat and symbolically transfer the sins of the community to this scapegoat before sending it away into the wilderness.1 Israel did not use human victims as scapegoats, but the person who led the goat into the wilderness would sometimes bear the stigma associated with the literal scapegoat. In other ancient societies, humans did serve as scapegoats, and these victims were exiled or killed for the good of the community. Human scapegoats tended to be people who were dispensable, such as criminals, people with physical deformities, outsiders, or anyone who exhibited noticeable differences from the rest of their tribe.

Modern societies use scapegoats as well, but where the ancient practices involved the ritual of driving out or killing scapegoats, contemporary practices of scapegoating have expanded, appearing in new and different ways.2 Scapegoating today manifests itself in discrimination of all sorts—social, racial and ethnic, political, and religious. René Girard notes that “scapegoats multiply wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identity—communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on.” But understanding that multiplication requires digging down its roots. “All discourses on exclusion, discrimination, racism, etc.,” Girard argues, “will remain superficial as long as they don’t address the religious foundations of the problems that besiege our society.”3

For Girard, we have not moved beyond the ancient practices of ritual scapegoating—we have just become better at hiding them. Explicit forms of scapegoating (which ended in the killing of the scapegoat) have become more implicit, more insidious, and easier to ignore. How did this gradual evolution occur? Sociologist Tom Douglas argues that as societies developed, so did the function of scapegoating. When homogenous, religious communities gave way to larger, more diverse societies, religious atonement rituals no longer stood at the heart of the scapegoating process. The communal nature of scapegoating behavior moved from society as a whole to distinct societal segments. The transference of blame or responsibility continued to serve as a main motivation behind the creation of scapegoats, but individual (or small group) self-preservation rather than community preservation became its driving force. Douglas identifies four reasons that people or groups scapegoat others: “extreme dislike, fear, ignorance, and the displacement of blame from powerful originators to those perceived to be much weaker.”4

Scapegoating no longer functions as a communal act meant to please the gods, but it still operates because of fear. Instead of dreading destruction from capricious divine powers, people who scapegoat today fear losses—the loss of political, economic, or social power or the loss of tradition or a way of life. Some even use scapegoating in a strategic way. Much of the public scapegoating that occurs in the contemporary world stems from a fear of exposure; a person or group fears the destruction of their public image, and so they deflect blame in order to protect their own reputation or image.5 Although this modern scapegoating does not often end in death, it still causes suffering for its victims. Modern scapegoating, Douglas argues, “tends to produce a self-perpetuating process, since driving the scapegoat out is not a final solution which culminates in the victim’s death. Modern victims remain in existence, and sometimes fight against the personal injustice they suffered.”6

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The silver lining of modern scapegoating, then, is that its victims can hold out hope for a future without scapegoating. Those who fight on behalf of victims can interrupt the process and expose scapegoaters and their work.

As the process of scapegoating has evolved, it has also found different expressions. Scapegoating can be a one-on-one phenomenon, in which one person blames another for something he or she or someone else did. This form of scapegoating is often found among children, who blame a sibling or a friend for something they did to avoid the shame of disappointing their parents and the punishment that might follow a misdeed. Sometimes scapegoating takes a group-on-one form, in which a group of people singles out and blames one person for a problem. One example is when the members of a sports team blame a player who made a mistake for the loss of a match, though other aspects of the play also affected the outcome. Another example is when someone alleges an assault but is then scapegoated by members of the community for “causing trouble” or “ruining” the life of the attacker.

Scapegoating also occurs in a one-on-group manner, when one person blames a group for a problem they did not cause: wars, deaths, financial losses of one kind or another, and other personal struggles. This form of scapegoating often finds a basis in racial, ethnic, religious, class, or anti-immigrant biases. Social psychologists argue that personal prejudice motivates many contemporary forms of scapegoating. Their “scapegoat theory of prejudice” maintains that people who experience frustration that cannot be expressed will often vent that frustration upon groups or individuals who are visible but powerless in society and often disliked.7

Scapegoating can also be group-on-group. It occurs when one group blames another for problems that the groups collectively experience, which might be economic or political in nature. This form of scapegoating often occurs across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. Jeffery Victor observes that “rapid change in a society results in widespread dislocation in people’s lives, and the resulting frustration, fear, and anger cause a great many people to seek scapegoats. These scapegoats are, in turn, ‘invented’ by moral crusaders to bear the blame for threats to a society’s past way of life and basic moral values.”8

In his study of early modern witch hunts, G. F. Jensen emphasizes that societies blame scapegoats as “an intentional diversionary tactic or as a cathartic displacement of anger and frustration.”9 This kind of scapegoating occurred in the treatment of Muslims in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. The tendency to blame all Muslim people for the actions of a group of radicals has resulted in legal discrimination, social stigmatizing, and violence against Muslims in America.10 More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to rising rates of vitriol and violence against Asian Americans. High-ranking politicians lay the blame for American deaths from Covid not on the processes and problems within our own country but on the alleged involvement of the Chinese government. Media outlets and powerful individuals further encouraged scapegoating with their racist language about the “Kung Flu.”

Although the reasons for scapegoating and the methods of scapegoating have varied over the centuries, the characteristics common to scapegoats have remained constant. Scapegoats are always people who are different from those in the center of society. Sometimes a scapegoat’s difference is visible, such as a physical defect or illness, or a deviation in appearance, like red hair or smaller stature. Other times, a person or group may be scapegoated because they participate in a lifestyle or a custom that causes them to stand out. People from minority religions, minority sexual groups, or minority ethnic groups often find themselves scapegoated by the majority culture. Members of a dominant group exaggerate a scapegoat’s difference in order to keep themselves out of a position of marginalization. Tom Douglas calls this the “rational survival strategy.” Most modern forms of scapegoating employ this process, one that focuses less on propitiation (carrying away the sins as the goat in the wilderness) and more on substitution (deflecting blame in order to ensure their safety and position in society).11 As long as there are people who are in a marginalized position or who are perceived as different, there will always be someone to cast blame upon. Many of us today participate in the scapegoating process without knowing it, because we consciously or unconsciously keep minority groups among us in a position of oppression, all with the purpose of protecting ourselves or our own.

René Girard and the Scapegoat Mechanism

Many scholars in a variety of academic fields have written about the practice of scapegoating in the human experience, but few have made a more significant contribution to the concept of the scapegoat than René Girard. Girard’s theory of sacred violence, developed over the course of several decades, has captured the imaginations of philosophers, sociologists, and scholars in biblical and religious studies.12 The intriguing bottom-line conclusion of Girard’s research is that Christianity should be the cure for human violence and scapegoating. While humanity tends to succumb to a cycle of sacred violence, in which we create and destroy scapegoats to keep societal peace, the Christian Bible—the Gospels in particular—presents Jesus as the conclusion to the cycle of violence, the innocent victim who reveals the violent nature of humanity.

Girard’s theory begins with a simple observation: imitation is the foundation of human behavior. Philosophers and scientists alike, from Plato and Heraclitus to Freud and Foucault, have recognized the reality of imitation, or mimesis, in human behavior.13 Girard’s unique contribution to mimetic theory is his emphasis on human desire as mimetic, that humans not only imitate other people’s behaviors—they imitate the desires of others. And mimetic desire leads to all sorts of human conflict.14

Girard theorizes that mimetic desire not only fuels human cultural interaction but also drives society to widespread violence. Girard investigates ancient cultures and their myths—humanity’s earliest literature—to support his view that the problem of mimetic desire is present from the beginning of civilization. What Girard finds in his study of ethnology confirms his suspicion: imitation has always led to conflict. He sees this in contemporary settings (children playing in a room full of toys who all gravitate toward one toy because one child first desires it), and he unearths it in early tribal cultures from every continent (men fighting over the same women, food, weapons, and land).15 When two people desire the same person or object, there is conflict, and v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Scapegoats and Scapegoating
• Part I. Scapegoating Women
• Part II. Scapegoating the Poor and Infirm
• Part III. Scapegoating the Outsider
• Index