Am I a Christian or Not? (or: When Hubris Becomes an Act of Faith)
René Girard & the Jesus Principle in Theory & Practice, Part 4
Reading from René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
(Audio version at end of piece)
(Art by Michelle Horsley)
Camels & Needles
Last week, I discussed two key points of Girard’s Gospel thesis.
First, that the Christian “Apocalypse”—generally thought of as God’s wrath directed at a sinful humanity—is the result of mimetic contagion in which human violence—unleavened by the Christ-principle of loving one’s enemies—inevitably leads to Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.”
It was Girard’s view that, since Christ, such violence has “become its own enemy and will end by destroying itself.” The Kingdom of Satan is the house divided that cannot stand.
The only difference is that by remaining faithful to violence and taking its side, however little they may be aware of the fact, men have deferred the revelation once again and compelled it to take the terrible path of incalculable violence. It is upon men and men alone that responsibility falls for the tragic and catastrophic nature of the changes humanity is about to witness (p. 195).
The second key point is that, just as the Christ impulse—the Gospel or “good news”—is the only solution to mimetic violence (“resist not evil,” “turn the other cheek”), by its very nature it is also “powerless” to oppose the satanic kingdom of mimetic violence directly.
A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence—by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence. But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious reinsertion of some violence into the conception of the divine (p. 211, emphasis added).
This is also why (or how it was that) even the earliest and most intimately acquainted interpreters of Christ’s message, in the New Testament (most specifically Paul), added the element of sacrificial violence.1
Those who believe Donald Trump was saved by God, that he is doing the work of God, can only do so by harboring (and becoming captive to) a conviction that it’s possible to be of the world and in service to the divine. Girard’s reading of the Gospel makes clear that one can never be an imitation of Christ as long as one’s orientation is towards the world, and not towards God.
It is self-evident that one cannot achieve worldly power without a worldly orientation.
If “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” it is perhaps less because wealth itself is an evil (or even necessarily the attachment to it), but because accumulation of wealth is only possible to those with a worldly (satanic) orientation.
The Way to Worldly Power
The point Girard is making is this: to the degree that one is living in service of God—embodying the principle of divine love—one is essentially going to be impotent in the world—or to be apparently impotent (in terms the world recognizes—wealth, power, status, a capacity for violence).
If such individuals aren’t completely destroyed by the world, it is because they are perceived by the world as ineffective and irrelevant.
When it comes to characters like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, Alex Jones or Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand or RFK Jr., on the other hand— “countercultural” figures whom people regard as genuinely opposed to the satanic world system—the very fact that they possess the power to “make a difference” is proof that they are aligned with the world-system, whether they know it or not.
Girard provides a succinct summation of this principle that I think is self-explanatory, and largely self-evident, once spelled out clearly. Of course, people continue to want to find exceptions, to believe that God works through human beings in ways that can make a real difference in the world at a global level, and in our own lifetimes. But this is only wishful (and worldly) thinking.2
Belief in world-saviors usually involves the idea of “the means justify the end”: if you want to save souls, you have to achieve some worldly power. Yet this idea is clearly refuted in the Gospel, when Satan offers Jesus power over all the kingdoms of the world, if Jesus will only bow down to him.
The only way to have power in the world, ergo, is to bend the knee to Satan.
Of course Jesus says no. If he had bent the knee to Satan, any souls he might have “saved” thereby would only end up going to his new boss.
Case closed.
Burying Christianity
Question: If I follow you correctly, this revelation consistently makes the sacrificial Christians play a role like that of the Pharisees confronted with the first preaching of the Kingdom of God.
Girard: Yes, indeed, the task is to show that the Christian sons have repeated, even aggravated, all the errors of their Judaic fathers. The Christians have condemned the Jews, but they themselves are condemned by Paul’s statement in the epistle to the Romans. In passing judgment upon him, you condemn yourself because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. . . . I believe it is possible to demonstrate that historical Christianity took on a persecutory character as a result of the sacrificial reading of the Passion and the Redemption. . . . In effect, this sacrificial concept of divinity must “die,” and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have ever set eyes upon (p. 215, 216, 226).3
Passages of this sort are presumably what many Christians object to in Girard; and certainly, one can see why. Personally, they have been enormously helpful in reconciling me to not becoming a nominal Christian: a question I’ve been going back and forth on for much of my adult life, and now more publicly, here at the Children of Job.
Am I a Christian, or not? Can faith coexist productively with hubris?
If a true Christian is one who practices absolute non-violence, who loves his enemies, as well as his neighbors, as himself, then I am not a Christian. But nor have I ever met—or even heard tell convincingly of—a true Christian.
Not since Christ, at any rate.
(Over the Paywall: Christ as Hook, Why Worldly Christianity = Nihilism, the Current Christian Revival & Why Social Movement = Stagnation)