Holy Week — Jesus and Scapegoating
Jesus went willingly to the cross, not because a blood sacrifice was necessary to pay the penalty for sin, but because going to the cross unmasked the scapegoat mechanism, revealed the violence inherent within the heart of men, exposed the myth of redemptive violence, and brought an end to the war that men had waged on God for centuries. Jeremy Myers. https://redeeminggod.com/jesus-as-the-divine-scapegoat/
We will remember 2020 as the year of the COVID19 pandemic, but we should also remember it as the year when political scapegoating revealed the banality of evil. Girard and Arendt have given us two lenses we can use to understand why we failed so miserably to make the personal sacrifices necessary to prevent over 400,000 preventable deaths from COVID19. René Girard’s theories of the scapegoat mechanism’s role as the primary means human groups maintain unity, plus Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Since self-proclaimed “Evangelical Christians” were predominant in the anti-masker and faux epidemic crowd, we also need to understand the complexity of religion, evil, and the scapegoating mechanism.
We throw the words scapegoat and scapegoating around, but we also may point fingers and label other groups of people as evil. For the past five years, while Donald Trump dominated our news (traditional and social media), it was impossible to ignore the use of…