Everyone knows what a scapegoat is, but few realize that the word comes from the Bible.
In Leviticus 16:20-22, Moses told his brother Aaron to take a live goat, lay his hands on the goat’s head, confess all the sins of the Israelites onto the goat, and then send the goat into the wilderness. Through this act, the goat would “escape” and bear all the transgressions committed by the community.
While sending a goat into the desert to atone for the failings of an entire people may sound odd to modern ears, the phenomenon of blaming your problems on a scapegoat is alive and well today. Examples can be found in every daily news cycle. No matter what the problem may be, there will be a group of people who insist that a specific person is entirely responsible for that problem, even when the situation is far too complex to be blamed on one individual.
Philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) developed the theory of mimetic desire, which explains this phenomenon. Girard wrote many books to describe this theory, but Father Elias Carr has also written an insightful and easy-to-read introduction to Girard’s thought called I Came to Cast Fire. Mimetic desire, as Fr. Carr describes it, “explains that what we desire often depends profoundly on what others desire.”1
Everyone can recognize this behavior from their teenage years. We suddenly find ourselves attracted to something—a style, a phrase, a pop culture icon—simply because a friend or group finds it desirable.
Another aspect of Girard’s theory is called the scapegoating mechanism, which is a pattern that Girard demonstrates is in literature, myths, history, and the Bible.
As Girard describes the scapegoating mechanism, the community first selects a victim. The victim is arbitrary but not random. This person may possess qualities that are irritating or, on the other hand, exceptional. He may be from the top of society or from the bottom, but he is usually a stranger. He is different. The community spontaneously selects him as the scapegoat, but without recognizing that this is what they are doing. However, they do believe, at some level, that killing this victim will restore peace to their community.
Fr. Carr explains: “If the scapegoat mechanism is successful, then the community undergoes catharsis, a release from the mimetic fury, and a concurrent, seemingly miraculous reconciliation.”2 However, it is possible that the death of the victim will fail to reconcile the community, and another scapegoat will be sought.
If this description of the process doesn’t seem relatable to everyday life, consider this story of an Austrian saint.
In the year 1012, an Irishman3 named Colman undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During his travels, he stopped in the village of Stockerau, Austria. At the time, there were constant battles between the Austrians and their neighbors. The villagers were suspicious of the traveler who suddenly appeared in their community. Since Colman did not speak their language and could not explain himself, the people of Stockerau became convinced that he was a spy. They killed him by hanging him in a tree.
But Colman had not responded with fear or anger as he went to his death. Instead, he died with Christlike patience and peace. Afterward, the villagers noticed that his body remained incorrupt for months, even though it was still hanging on a tree. Since they were Catholics, some villagers began to ask for Colman’s intercession from heaven, and miracles began to occur.
Colman’s body was later translated to an abbey, and he was acclaimed a saint. He is still revered by the people of Austria and is currently celebrated on July 17 in the Church’s liturgical calendar.
The scapegoating of Saint Colman perfectly follows the pattern identified by Girard. When Colman, a stranger, arrived in the village of Stockerau, the citizens were already unsettled by constant fighting with other cities. They swiftly decided to execute Colman, thinking (at perhaps some subconscious level) that his death would restore peace to their community.
Yet Colman’s death brought a different kind of peace than the sort of group catharsis which they expected. That is because Colman was following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.
Through His Passion, death, and Resurrection, Christ destroyed the scapegoat mechanism. By allowing Himself to become a scapegoat for the sins of the world, rather than following the pattern of violence and murder which had existed from the time of the Fall, Jesus Christ exposed the lies of Satan and defeated him.
Or, as Frank DeVito explains in his essay, Christ and the End of the Scapegoat:
Scapegoating will never bring about the peace and catharsis we seek. … But our only hope for final victory in this world is Christ, who offers us personal and communal transformation. All we can do with the inclination towards mimetic rivalry is turn it to positive ends: instead of imitating the desires of rivals and escalating violence, we must imitate Christ and the saints and bring about holiness.
Christ is both the ultimate and only effective scapegoat.
Understanding Girard’s theory can help us recognize when we are following the herd and treating others as scapegoats instead of following the loving example of Christ. As Fr. Elias Carr writes:4
Read Girard and discover Jesus anew. The world needs courageous people who can love their enemies because they know that human beings are not the enemy: mimesis gone awry is.
What happens when you attempt to turn a true follower of Jesus Christ into a scapegoat? Like Jesus Christ, he “rises from the dead.” Colman’s intercession from Heaven convinced his killers to repent of their actions, turn to God instead of violence, and start calling him a saint.
Does dwelling on angry, hateful thoughts about your least favorite political figure or most annoying family member ever bring peace? Does inviting others to join in criticizing that person ever improve their behavior? Of course not. But imitating Jesus Christ can change the world.
Endnotes:
1 Fr. Elias Carr, I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to Rene Girard (Elk Grove Village: Word on Fire, 2024), 25.
2 Ibid, 49.
3 Some traditions say he was from Scotland instead of Ireland.
4 Carr, 119.
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Interesting and thought full. As a side not must add: This explains why I hate the NY Yankees.
In one article (I think it might have been in First Things), Rene Gerard remarked that he felt restrained or very cautious about saying anything about Islam. Gerard’s theory of scapegoating or substitution goes only so far…
Might we propose, instead, that rather than substituting Christ for themselves, his accusers were not seeking catharsis, but rather were rejecting the triune nature of a relational God?
So, take ISLAM: the analogy of substitution does still apply, but takes on an entirely new meaning. radical Islam claims that jihad is always a “defensive war” (aganist infidels) but the deeper self-deception is that Islam substitutes (!) the “uncreated” and “dictated” Qur’an for the incarnate and real Jesus Christ. The “word made book” replaces the relational “Word made flesh.”
In interreligious dialogue, the symmetrical comparison is NOT between the two scriptures, but rather between Christ and the Qur’an. Muhammad also substitutes his predicted coming for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit, and himself as the book salesman for Mary as the Mother of God.
AND YET, there’s also the difference between many Muslims as “individuals” versus Islam as a package-deal and easily radicalized “religion,” as was witnessed even during the Crusades. Oliverius Scholasticus, a member of a defeated Frankish army, offers this striking report:
“Who could doubt that such goodness, friendship and charity came from God. Men whose parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters had died in agony at our hands, whose lands we took, whom we drove naked from their homes, revived us with their own food when we were dying of hunger, and showered us with kindness even while we were in their power” (Friedrich Heer, “The Medieval World,” 1963).
SUMMARY: Catholics are not only “imitators” of Jesus Christ but are sacramentally incorporated into the very Mystical Body of Christ (CCC 1374). The alternative to being absorbed—either forcefully or incrementally—into the Islam’s cosmopolitan and substitute(!) umma.
It’s odd to see the positive references to Girard around here. He wasn’t religiously orthodox. To try to depict civilisation as the result of chaos and distortion of nature is the Enlightenment view of society as unnatural and artificial, a human contrivance founded in chaos. But for Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and the early modern scholastics, civilisation and political society is a serene development inherent in nature per se, possible in prelapsarian nature. To say that not God, but chaotic human nature “requires” sacrifice is not what we are told in the Old and New Testaments of our religion. Girard would have done better to bend the insights of post-Enlightenment modernity to understanding better what we really know about our past than bending revelation to fit one’s pick of anthropological theories.
You’re onto something. Gerard tried to include Christianity as plausible at a secular university (Stanford), while the real question is whether an exclusively secular education is plausible. Here’s a germane extract from my 2025 CWR article on my encounter whether God talks to people at a secular university…
“In 1974, the chairman of my [interdisciplinary] doctoral dissertation committee was an anthropologist. His professional career had placed him in Afghanistan in the 1960s during the monarchy, where he had worked to reform the educational system. When I asked even in 1973 if he would ever return: ‘No, they would kill me as soon as I stepped off the plane.’ In a small coffee shop group, this professor also was recounting the mid-18th-century beginning of British rule in India, long before the communal and bloody 1947 partition of Muslim Pakistan from predominantly Hindu India.
“Abruptly, there came a silent pause, and then this introspection: ‘My wife is Catholic and I am Episcopalian, and I do not know if God talks to people [!]’
“[….] As in the Temple at the time of Calvary, the veil in the modernist Ivory Tower was split right down the middle. Exposed, was this the amnesia of ‘learned ignorance,’ and what Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’? What if God actually does talk to people? As in the Old Testament words of prophecy and then—in the fullness of time—’the Word made flesh’ (Jn 1:14). What if the Incarnation event is the Truth in person; and then post-Enlightenment academia is a forgetfulness and a graffiti veneer?”
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/05/24/at-a-secular-university-does-god-talk-to-people/