The Rise of the Victim Bully
by Dwight Longenecker, The Imaginative Conservative:
One of Christianity’s contributions to civilization has been a startling compassion for the victim. As René Girard has pointed out, from the beginning of time primitive peoples focused their animus on the outsider, the oddball, or the eccentric in their midst. It was the disabled, the alien, the poor, and the weak who most often took the blame for society’s ills. The crowd turned on them as the origin and cause of their problems. They became the scapegoat. As they were ostracized, excluded, persecuted, and killed, the source of the tribe’s problems was eliminated.
Consequently, the tribe felt cleansed. The violence unleashed a feeling of power and freedom. As the evil was purged, thrill surged. All was well. Life could continue and the tribe could prosper. Until, of course, another crisis developed—and at that point another victim would be needed. Because of the regularity of the crises, religions developed the ritual of regular sacrifice. Victims were found, throats were cut, blood was shed, and if animals were substituted, it did not mitigate the truth that the society still ran on the blood-fuel of the victim.
This may seem terribly primitive in a modern age, until one see videos of ISIS soldiers ritually beheading their victims. Modern Americans may think they are far removed from the barbarities of the Aztecs until they view a video of a wine-sipping high priestess of the cult of abortion describing how she dismembers children and harvests their organs. Is this so far removed from the haruspication of the ancients? When crazed and enraged young men—be they Islamist or racist extremists—open fire on their innocent victims, are we so far from Girard’s theory of the scapegoat?
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