By Revd Frank Julian Gelli

How primitive is modern man? The ancient Hebrew ritual of the scapegoat suggests human beings are still enslaved to that savage paradigm. The OT Book of Leviticus describes how the High Priest Aaron transferred all the sins and evils – physical and moral – of the people of Israel unto a male goat, then driven away into the desert to be devoured by demon Azazel. Quaintly archaic? No. Scapegoating lives on amongst us and in the Trump administration, apparently.

The theory is set forth in an influential book ‘Violence and the Sacred’, by the French scholar Rene’ Girard. When men go through phases of intense trouble, insecurity and competition, they seek a solution, a way out. That they find in acts of brutal scapegoating. It could be strangers, those who are ‘different’, even a big ruler who has failed the test. (Mussolini springs to mind: a dictator who lost the war and was torn to pieces by wild Italians.) Think of immigrants, deviants and misfits. Ideal subjects for the role of the scapegoat. All society’s misfortunes are transferred onto them and they violently bear the guilt.

Girard’s high-placed followers include the wealthy gay entrepreneur Peter Thiel and the US Vice-President J.D. Vance. The latter initially identified the wrong scapegoats – capitalism and the social media - but then moved to more tricky ones, such as certain immigrants eating their American neighbours’ pets. By Gad! If ‘Reform’ charlatan Nigel Farrago asserted that in England, the ensuing violence would engulf the nation. Englishmen adore their pets more than their children!

This isn’t just political. Single individuals can also become victims. At some points in my life I became a scapegoat. At the British Embassy, Ankara, where I was chaplain, I gradually realised I was unpopular. Why? The place was ridden with and controlled by Freemasons. They didn’t like me as I wasn’t one of them and undermined me in all sorts of ways. Largely thanks to the support of Turkish friends and a Canadian diplomat, I rode it out but it was an unpleasant experience. St Mary Abbots Church also got a bit like that. Being a Princess Diana man didn’t help with the squalid monarchist rabble at the top. Maybe some of you have suffered similar ordeals

King Charles I is led to his execution in 1649, a powerful scene symbolizing royal martyrdom and political scapegoating. Credit: BBC Historia.

Some of Rene’ Girard’s ideas are questionable. Take his theory of ‘mimetic desires’. Men do not desire things per se but because they are driven to copy other people’s wishes and compete with them. (‘Mimetic’ means they don’t realise the mechanism at work.) Apparently, a very influential notion in anthropology. The present writer disagrees. My desires, of which I am all too aware, aren’t based on any imitation or copycat psychology. They are very much my own and I do much enjoy them because they are genuinely mine!

J.D. Vance abandoned atheism partly thanks to Thiel and Girard. He felt scapegoating was useless and Christianity – Catholicism – was the answer. Girard had come to believe that Jesus Christ – the perfect, innocent victim – broke the terrible logic of scapegoating and wiped the guilt slate clean. I agree with that – am I not a priest? – but, to be fair, Jews have taken a very different view of the person of the Nazarene. Apart from unmentionable slurs on his mother, they have claimed that Jesus was hardly ‘innocent’. Did he not advocate the destruction of the Jewish Temple? The Holy of Holies? The response that he meant ‘the Temple of his body’ sounds somewhat ad hoc. Nonetheless, the Christian religion has triumphed. Whether the scapegoat practice has really died out in the life of Jesus’ followers...Pass!

Vance fancies himself as an amateur theologian. He invoked the Catholic concept of an ‘order of love’ in order to downgrade any religious commitment to helping immigrants. Pope Leo XIV, when still a Cardinal, told him off on X: ‘Christian love goes out without discrimination, to all!’

The last authority to do scapegoating is Labour PM Keir ‘Genocide’ Starmer. He spoke of Britain becoming ‘an island of strangers’ because of immigration. (Shades of Tory Enoch Powell?) I can see why he doesn’t get it: he is a dumb atheist, isn’t he?

* The Author is a Priest at a Church in London