I thought of calling this talk “Us and Them”, but that seemed pretty worn out – and did you ever notice how even trying to label this idea, we NEVER say “Them and Us” – we are always first – “Us and Them”.  But I think this idea is very popular these days – the idea that our problems stem from our tribalism – its always “our side” against “their side” and both of these are so far apart and there are no shades of gray, no spectrum in between, and that’s what we call “polarization”, a term taken from physics, from the two poles of electric charge, positive and negative, although in that case there IS a middle position, Neutral.  But our culture does not seem to have any NEUTRAL when dividing people up into camps.  And we (we Quakers, at least) understand that demonizing your enemy is not a way to live peaceably together.  Is there anything new to say about this idea?

I want to talk about another aspect of this problem – a “theological” aspect, maybe, about HOW we got this way, and WHY we got this way, from a RELIGIOUS point of view, since I think we are a community of, if not “‘religious” people, at least “ethical” people who believe there is a spectrum of behaviors between “right” and “wrong” actions, and we try to move in the direction of “right”, wherever we now are on that spectrum. 

These ideas are a distillation of a study our Meeting community did not too long ago.  This was during COVID, so we were all online.  It was a study of the French philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard.  His ideas spread out among us – LaVerne Biel told me afterwards that she was basing her material for Childrens Church on these ideas.  And then there is that “Seventh Story” group that meets here on Thursdays – their material references Rene Girard.

So what does Rene Girand have for us?? He starts with the idea that we are who we are because of the people around us.  We are a species that takes a long time to gestate and a long time growing up. Some species are born knowing instinctively how to survive.  The baby sea turtle never knows its parents, it just knows to head for the sea.  We, however, would die after birth without someone taking care of us – our only survival skill is to cry and hope someone hears us and takes pity on us – and sometimes someone has to slap up on the back before we can even cry.  How do WE learn to survive?  To grow up?  By copying what other people do.  We learn to walk, we learn to talk, we learn to use a spoon and fork.  Girard would say that we imitate other people.  Of course some of the things we want to copy are GOOD– we want to crawl on the floor rather than lie on our back, we want to run after we learn to walk, so mimicking others to satisfy our needs is sometimes has a GOOD result,  a necessary result for us to mature.  As toddlers  we  WANTED to feed ourselves, we WANTED to drink out of the big glass. And those were good desires that helped us live together more successfully.

BUT…

Rene Girard says that SOMETIMES we copy behaviors we DO NOT WANT and DO NOT NEED. In other words we can also copy BAD desires that lead to violence. Even from very early ages we do this – when very young children are playing together, no one cared about the red ball until one child noticed the red ball and started playing with it; then another child suddenly gets interested in the red ball also and tries to take it away.  In high school, Joe starts dating a girl no one paid much attention to, and suddenly other guys want to date her also and she becomes a popular girl.  Rene Girard says we copy even the DESIRES of others, and THAT is what leads to violence – that is why another child suddenly wants the red ball, that is why another guy is hitting on your girlfriend, and all the violence in the world comes from wanting what someone else has.  When you think about it, that’s what all of modern advertising is about – to make you want something because someone else has it.  You never even thought about a red  Corvette or even a cold beer —  until you saw this cool guy on TV and he was with a beautiful girl.  Hopefully you don’t go out and steal a red Corvette or rob a liquor store, but some people do, and violence ensues.  In fact, it seems to be legal now to kill someone who threatens your property — it’s called “standing your ground,”  and that guy just wanted the same thing you wanted. 

No one wanted to live in that desert land – until someone else wanted to live there – and now we copy their desire to live there, and now there is a war.   Rene Girard’s starting point is that violence happens because we want what someone else wanted. They got it and now you must have it also.   We call it “keeping up with the Jones”.  Or we call it envy or jealousy.  God calls it the last 5 of the 10 commandments – they are all aimed to stop us from wanting what someone else wants or has.  Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not tell lies about others, thou shalt not covet. They are all there to curb our violent streak, our original sin.  

SO . . . how are we going to curb our violence?  How can we ever live together in relative peace and harmony?  Rene Girard’s answer is SCAPEGOATING.  Remember that Old Testament practice of “scapegoating”?   It was when the Israelites, out in their desert wanderings, confessed their sins and got forgiveness by metaphorically placing them on a goat and driving that goat out of camp, never to be seen or heard from again (because no living creatures do well in an environment where there is no food or water.)   And the word became part of our vocabulary – we “scapegoat” someone by putting all the blame for something bad on someone else, or we “scapegoat” without even saying who the goat is, except to say “It’s all THEIR fault”.   We see it today in practically every political speech we hear, in letters to the Editor, and (“Oh, no!”) on social media, which sometimes seems like a viper pit, if you take an opinion not held by one side — a viper pit, I might add, that drives some teenagers to suicide.

So WHY do we “scapegoat”?  Girard’s answer is that we do it to OVERCOME OUR VIOLENCE.   Violence and scapegoating are right there in our creation stories.  In the very first family one brother kills another one (reason enough to call violence our “original” sin??) and when called to account he says “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  Translation:  Why are you asking me?  It’s not my fault . . .  it’s his fault for his offering being more acceptable to God, or it’s God’s fault for appreciating his offering more than mine . .  whatever, but don’t blame me.

So, then, how do we keep from killing each other?  Or more broadly, how do we keep from behaving violently toward others, even our own family members or tribal group?  Girard’s answer is that we do it by blaming it on someone else.  Basically, we do it for our own protection, so we can “take sides” – so there are some people in the world we can feel safe with, and we can project all our violent thoughts and actions on someone else, the “other” side, and thus we can live with some sense of safety against violence from our own neighbors.  It is easy to incite men to war (I say men, because I think politics would be much less dangerous in the hands of women, but then we have never had a chance to try that out, have we?)  If you are not willing to die for your country, you are “unpatriotic”, a “draft-dodger”, a “coward”.  We still have the same old impulse toward violence, but we can now direct it outward, against THEM.  True, we do retain some of those violent thoughts/actions in our own culture – toward, say, the homeless, or people of color, or those corporate CEOs, those economic “fat cats”, LBGTQ folks, etc.  But generally, we can feel relatively safe and comfortable in our own culture, because the majority of our violence is directed toward “them” – we scapegoat them, both BLAMING THEM for our problems and DIRECTING OUR VIOLENT TENDENCIES toward them, not our next door neighbors.

Has this worked?  Has it proved successful in its mission of curbing our violence?  I think the answer is found in our experience during the two thousand years since Jesus said “Love your enemies.”   Maybe we banished violence from our everyday lives, but certainly not from society at large, mothers still send their sons and daughters to be devastated or even sacrificed to the violence of war.  That’s called “serving your nation” or “patriotic” or “defending our way of life”.

So this is Girard’s formula

•  We copy wanting something because someone else wants it or has it.  That can lead to
• Violence within the small circle of our nearest and dearest.
• We can keep the peace among ourselves by BLAMING SOMEONE ELSE for our problems.

Leading to  “us” versus “them” – or shifting our violence outward so the inner circle can remain comfortable.

Did it work?  Sort of – we pushed our violence as far away as possible by scapegoating other people – them, and we get to be the crowd cheering our protectors on, while remaining relatively safe ourselves.

But – particularly as Quakers – we would say “no”, it didn’t work,  because how does supporting the destruction of “them” exist alongside “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God”?  Jesus has not “saved” us from our violence as a species, we have not seen “the war to end all wars”,  we have seen weapons of mass destruction, economic policies meant to crush our “enemies”, and local politics which end up with members of one side seeking out the houses of members of the “other” side with weapons of individual destruction.

Now why should any of us good, non-violent people care about this?  I think Rene Girard – and other theologians – want to understand why Jesus died, and they are not happy with the theories of atonement they were taught as children.  Not only did some of us leave the churches we grew up in, but we did not want to return to them as adults to find out if they now tell another story.

We heard about fire and brimstone and eternal suffering and a mean and stern God  to whom justice was more important than love and mercy, and that he could only be satisfied with the death of his own Son; nothing else would satisfy his thirst for vengeance.  And that God piles all our sins on him – he was the scapegoat for all of us.   I imagine this worked pretty well in the Middle Ages, when people couldn’t read the Bible for themselves.  And remnants of that harsh God are alive and well today, and that God is called upon by those who want to get rid of “the other side”.   And some people that call themselves Christian are very angry and violent toward “the other side,” who happens to be us.  Thomas Gates (Friends Journal, December 2022) said  “ In my view, the satisfaction theory of the atonement and its variants have done more than any other church teaching to discredit Christianity in the eyes of thoughtful seekers.”

But many of us read the Bible for ourselves and we learn about the life of Jesus and he gives us an entirely different picture of God.  God is a loving father, who runs out to forgive his son before he even has time to apologize.  He says God hates religious leaders who make people follow many religious rituals and who run away from travelers lying half-dead in the road and demand animal sacrifices in the Temple.   So we want to turn away from churches that teach anything other than what Jesus taught.   And we don’t want to be told that God is a divine child abuser.  So we need to make sense of the death of Jesus in some other way.  I think that is why Girard and many other people have turned to different understandings of Jesus death and resurrection.  So that’s where we are headed:

 How does Jesus save us?

Girard’s theory says that our violence arises from our scapegoating others.  He says that everyone around Jesus did “throw him out of society,” so to speak.  The Romans washed their hands of  him, the Jews hated him because he mocked the teachings of their scribes and pharisees, even the disciples betrayed him at the end.  It DOES seem like Jesus is cast out by the rest of society, and maybe that’s where the idea of Jesus being the scapegoat for our sins came from. 

But now we have a different story –From Girard’s perspective, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus brought an entirely new conception of the human condition and of the character of God. Violence and victimization were shown to be the very basis of human culture and God was revealed to be entirely without violence (Hardin 2013, p.181). By removing judgement and retribution from the work and character of God — “someone has to pay” — the God revealed in Jesus was utterly nonviolent  What a radical change – instead of God judging us, we are valued as beloved children of God.  The person that everyone rejected doesn’t play the game.  He doesn’t return violence with violence.  He shows us what God is really like – he isn’t interested in violence, he does not hate us, he loves us.  If Jesus shows us what God is like (and he said, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father), no price has to be paid, we don’t need a scapegoat to take our sins away. 

When God raised Jesus, the scars and wounds of his victimization were still visible in his resurrected flesh. The resurrection is a victory over the scapegoat mechanism and sacred violence.

Forgiveness abolishes the sacrificial principle because it is simply, freely and profusely given us by God.  Forgiveness is the only way that the cycle of retributive violence can be ended. This is what we see in the way of Jesus; in his life and in his death.

We have someone new to imitate.  Jesus imitates his Father’s desire, making it his own.   God, as the transcendent one, is not in rivalry with us,  and so Jesus, as an imitator of ‘the Father’, is not in rivalry with us. Jesus’ relationship with God becomes the foundation of a new community of disciples (Warren 2013, pp.71-72). This new imitation of Jesus  is not acquisitive; it contains no rivalry, no covetousness, no scandal  (Warren 2013, p.73). We can become like Jesus by imitating him and in doing this, we can break out of the imitation of each other which leads  to violence,

 A new way of being human

If the cross shows us how humans really are in all their violence, then the resurrection offers the possibility of a radically new life, a life of  nonviolent compassion, servanthood, humility, generosity and love.  Jesus becomes the model for a new humanity (Warren 2013, p.73). Allowing Jesus to be one’s model generates the desire to do the will of God and seek the good of the other, rather than the covetous desire to acquire from the other.  To imitate Jesus is to imitate his own imitation of the Father. This is a radical reorientation of life that frees us from the perpetual cycles of violence. In this sense, salvation is not an intellectual matter of confessing certain dogmatic beliefs, but an experience grounded in the same desire to copy others, but now modelled on Jesus (Warren 2013, p.115). The imitation of Christ rewires our violent neuro-circuitry, linking us together as a community and reconciling us to the nonviolent God, 

And THAT is the way Jesus saves us.

The good news is that the Spirit of Christ is at work within the world in an organic way. It does not need a systematic body of doctrine or the institution of the church to have an effect. It is like a virus working within the hard drive of human culture

So the nonviolent, forgiving, compassionate and self-giving Christ represents the only life-giving alternative to violent destruction (Warren 2013, p.340). If we imitate him rather than each other, Christ offers the real power to break the hold of humanity’s bondage to wanting what others want and the escalation of reciprocal violence that it produces. Will we accept the offer to follow Christ?

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Lois Kieffaber during Sunday morning worship on February 4, 2024.

References:

Stuart Masters, A Quaker Stew   https://aquakerstew.blogspot.com/2015/09/r-is-for-rene-girard-human-violence-and.html

Thomas Gates, New Light on Atonement; No More Scapegoating, Friends Journal, Dec 2022.

Hardin, Michael (2013) The Jesus-Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus (JDL Press)

Warren, James (2012) Compassion or Apocalypse? A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard (Christian Alternative)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard