In times of disorder and confusion, it is easy to feel helpless. Americans are in such a moment now. Recent acts of violence, like the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the attack at Annunciation Catholic Church school, have crystallized the feeling of unease about the social forces dis-integrating our society. We feel powerless to counteract all these changes and struggle to understand their causes.

René Girard, the French Catholic philosopher and historian who died in 2015, warned that an environment like this has within it the seeds of violence. When troubles with no clear cause and no clear solution befall a society, he argued in his book The Scapegoat, communities and groups within society naturally look for someone upon whom blame can be laid. Girard wrote that this blame leads to violence, which in turn generates more violence in the manner of a meme spreading through society. In his thinking, Christ himself—the story of the Gospels—is the antidote to this pattern of destruction.

To take one of Girard’s examples, during the Black Plague of the 14th century, European communities lacked scientific explanations, but they felt the need to identify causes for their suffering and to respond in a way that would restore order. In such cases, Girard wrote, humans are prone to what he refers to as “magical thinking,” which seeks a source for mysterious troubles in the moral failings of our neighbors. In selecting objects of blame, we choose persons or classes of persons on the other side of a clear social boundary; we need to reassure ourselves that we do not belong to the blameworthy class. During the plague, European communities began to accept a mythology whereby Jews were responsible for the pandemic (perhaps, it was thought, by poisoning the drinking water), and so Jews became victims of mob violence.

We can see similar behavior closer to our own time and place. “Why Is the Negro Lynched?,” a pamphlet written in 1895 by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, suggested a similar phenomenon at work in mob violence against Black Americans. Using Girard’s theory, we can deduce that the frequently repeated accusation of sexual assault leveled against Black men was, in fact, a cover for the process of scapegoating African Americans for all of the South’s troubles.  

We can look back on such instances of senseless violence and think we know better today. Here is the tricky part, though, as Girard described it: “Persecutors always believe in the excellence of their cause, but in reality they hate without a cause. The absence of cause in the accusation is never seen by the persecutors” [emphasis added].

Those who engaged in the violence of the past that we now decry did not think of themselves as victimizers. They thought of themselves as the vanguard of justice, vanquishing society’s wicked foes. As Girard wrote, “persecutors [have]…a sincere belief in the culpability of their victim.” Indeed, persecutors often believe themselves to be victims.

In criminal justice, properly pursued, a legitimate authority grants a fair trial to the accused, and, if found guilty, the criminal pays the penalty prescribed by law. But what Girard describes is when persons or parties act with pre-emptive violence against individuals or classes understood to be political enemies. Such violence always has something of the scapegoat about it, since it is interested not in the deliberative process of determining actual guilt for crimes committed, but in doing violence to those whom we already deem to be our enemies. Such aggression may be state-sponsored or conducted by private citizens, but it always has some of this character of lawless violence.

Girard believed that this pattern occurs over and over again throughout human history: In the face of difficult and complex challenges to a society, we seek simple stories and easy solutions. This can mean identifying a class of people to blame and acting on the idea that we can solve our problems by persecuting them. 

Cycles of retaliation 

This does not always manifest on the scale of the Holocaust or in the manner of the lynch mob. In many cases, it is enough to be a civilian or a bystander to become a scapegoat. During “the Troubles” in Ireland, British troops gunned down unarmed civilians and the Irish Republican Army retaliated with bombings that also killed innocent civilians. Here we do not have the pure scapegoating of the Holocaust, but we have the sacrifice of innocent victims who “have it coming” as members of the opposed class. Girard thought these cycles of retaliation operated by means of mimesis, or copying: They do it to us, so we ought to do it to them.

In order to justify the path of violence, on scales great and small, we make sweeping generalizations about whole populations of people, thereby flattening the complexity of human actors, human motivations and human deeds. The people we target might be called conservatives, liberals, Christians, unbelievers, Muslims or almost anything you can imagine. Such a simplification is necessary if we are to identify our enemies, and equally necessary if we are to dehumanize and crush them.

But, again, when we are caught up in this process, it is not visible to us. As Girard writes, “It is a prison whose walls cannot be seen,” or “a blindness that believes its own perceptiveness.” 

How, then, can we know whether we ourselves are caught up in the pattern of mimetic violence?

For Girard, the only answer is the Gospel itself, for in the Gospel we see the scapegoat narrative turned upside down. We observe, step by step, as the crowd lays its own sin and guilt, its anxiety and blame, upon the innocent lamb who it collectively murders. But this scandalous other, Jesus Christ, is revealed to be none other than the Son of God. He is not the conquering military figure who will crush the Romans; he is instead the meek lamb who is led to the slaughter, and by giving up his life, saves all people. There is a reason that the church has us, as a congregation, say, on Good Friday: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” This reminds us that we, like the crowds of Jerusalem, are prone to committing this same injustice.

In the Gospel, God identifies himself with the victim. In identifying in this way, and not with the crowd, Christ unmasks the scapegoat story as an enchanting lie. It is the lie that the one the crowd has identified as its enemy is no longer worthy of life, and that, by destroying him, all will be well again.

In telling us this story, Girard thinks it important that the Holy Spirit and the devil are given names taken from courts of judgment. Satan means “the accuser,” and Paraclete means “the advocate.” Christians may protect themselves from becoming persecutors by taking on the spirit of the advocate and not of the accuser. When we hear whole classes of people accused and blamed for our problems, our response must be that of the advocate, who is generous, merciful and understanding. At the same time, the devil is diabolos, which means the “backbiter” or “he who tears apart.” 

The lie of the diabolos tells us that we must destroy them before they ruin us. And when two competing groups both think this, Girard thought, there are only two ways the cycle can end: through uniting against a common enemy, thus creating new victims, or through acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

How can a Christian become immune to the lies that lead to these cycles of destruction? Christians can ask themselves: Is my response to our current societal situation one that fosters communion, or one that tears apart? Am I thinking like a person involved in a rational deliberation or like one involved in a mob? Have I begun to reduce and dismiss whole classes of people whom I have never met and really know little about?

René Girard recognized that, throughout history, Christians have fallen prey to mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism, but he believed that the better we understood the Gospel, the better we would understand that the cycle of violence is a lie and the better we could work toward communion. This is a message not for any one side of a political binary, but for each and every person. The temptation to hatred and violence will come to us clothed in the garments of justice and righteous anger, whoever we are. In such times, we must cast out the accuser and remember the lamb. 

This article appears in December 2025.

Nathan Beacom writes from Des Moines, Iowa. His writing has previously appeared in Plough Quarterly, Comment Magazine and elsewhere.