René Girard and the Paganization of Western Civilization

By Dave Doveton,                                                                                         

ANGLICAN MAINSTREAM                                                                          April 23, 2025 

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6.12).

In my last blog I examined the mimetic theory of René Girard, the French literary theorist and anthropologist, and how it may explain the current surge in identity crisis within our societies. Girard was also prophetic in the sense that he foresaw that western civilization faced an existential threat which aimed at its total collapse.  

In the last chapter of his final book “I see Satan fall like lightning”, Girard[i] outlined what he saw as the roots of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. He believed that the underlying dynamic was a conflict, a conflict between societies and institutions based on Judeo-Christian values, and a neo-paganism which aimed at overthrowing those institutions and systems – be they cultural, political, educational, legal, or religious.

A prime example of totalitarian movements is Marxism, which flowered in its political manifestations as the communist regimes of Russia, China, Ethiopia, and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Presently we experience the ‘long march’ of cultural Marxism through the institutions of the civilised west which has put this conflict on full display. Michael Giere writes,

“The only connecting tissue in the Marxist worldview is that Christianity and its foundational moral ethos must be destroyed, and the sovereignty of the individual and classical reason must yield to scientific socialism – and its core theory that the institutions of Western culture psychologically oppress everyone. No longer is communism only for the “workers of the world.” Now, everyone is a victim.”[ii]

Note that we are dealing with a movement, not just the political manifestation of an ideology, but a massive movement that infiltrates the institutions of a society and eventually sweeps all before it. Hannah Arendt in her writings on 20th century totalitarian systems observed this, most notably with regard to the Stalinist and Nazi movements.

 “The totalitarian form of domination depends entirely upon the fact that a movement, and not a party, has taken power…”[iii]

We are dealing with a movement based on a philosophy of victimisation and group guilt that turns out ultimately to be a paganising crusade maintaining a moral high ground. Girard called this ideology ‘victimology’ and he outlined its method,

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and “radicalizes” the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.”[iv]

We recognise in this description those contemporary ideologies such as ‘wokism’ and the social and cultural movements that aim at tearing down not only statues but the very fabric of western civilisation. By latching onto every scrap of evidence that heroes of the past may have skeletons in their closets, they cry for the delegitimising of our past cultural, literary and political leaders. They deface statues of Disraeli and Mandela and rail against Shakespeare.

Girard is not the only one to characterise the attack on Western civilisation as totalitarian. The French intellectual Renaud Camus, banned from entering the United Kingdom, has characterised this trend as based on totalitarian ideology. He has been described as “a clear-eyed analyst of a shocking, even catastrophic, cultural and social trend: the suicide of Western civilization, orchestrated by elites in many different fields—politics, business, academia, media, and the church.”[v]

The danger of this movement is that it is extremely deceptive in the way it presents itself – namely as more genuine and more effective than Christianity in standing on the side of victims and the oppressed. It claims to be the authentic way to freedom and true human liberation.

“This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.”[vi]

Furthermore, Girard describes how this neo-pagan movement then casts Judeo-Christian morality in its strategy to delegitimise Christianity.

 “Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition.  Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious…”[vii]Here we are given an answer to the conundrum of why the Jewish people who have borne centuries of victimisation and persecution are attacked instead of Hamas. Jews represent through Moses ultimately the Lord almighty, the great lawgiver of the legal and moral order of western civilization which is defined as the oppressor. Note how Israel and by extension the Jewish people are framed by their detractors in pejorative terms – as oppressors, as colonisers, as an ‘apartheid state’. In the words of intersectional theory, they are labelled as ‘white’ – even though most Jews in Israel are not European but Semitic (Middle Eastern) and many were refugees having been expelled from Arab states in the mid-19th century or migrated north from Africa.

How, we are asked, did so many young people at institutions of higher learning in the UK and the USA cheer the rapists and killers of a death cult like Hamas[viii], and how are so many well-meaning citizens caught up in the frenzy of antisemitic marches through the streets of capital cities?[ix] Why is Luigi Mangione, who is facing charges of shooting a corporate executive in cold blood in New York, idolised by masses of people on social media?  Being caught up by the psychological dynamics of crowds and mass demonstrations, virtue-signalling and idealism certainly are part of this, but there are more powerful forces at play.

The movement turns killers into cause célèbre by portraying them as victims. Even the laws of homicide can be ignored – but why? The answer is that the Movement is primary – Arendt described it as flowing like a river which permitted nothing to hinder its flow. Thus, laws can be ignored and institutions brought down[x]. We see this in both Stalin and a school of legal theorists in Nazi Germany who, Arendt says, “tried their best to prove that the very concept of law was so directly in conflict with the political content of a movement as such that even the most revolutionary new legislation would eventually prove to be a hindrance to the movement.”[xi]

Today’s movement has much of the basic philosophy used by the totalitarian movements of the 19th and 20th century. They have used similar arguments to those used to justify the most horrendous violence and mass murder ever seen – in the 20th century the deaths of over 100 million people. Paradoxically, the movement that appears to be motivated by compassion and justice turns out to be the purveyor of mayhem and suffering. This should not surprising because, Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

Girard describes this descent into chaos as ‘mimetic, violent contagion’ the all-powerful mechanism of pagan societies. However, he offers us the way of salvation for a civilisation swept up in this movement in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

“The resurrection is not only a miracle, a prodigious transgression of natural laws, it is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion”[xii]

And what is this power? It is the Holy Spirit, who infuses the disciples and takes charge in undertaking His great move of redemption and revival. What a great hope!

FOOTNOTES

[i] Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY, 2001.

[ii] https://thebullelephant.com/you-cant-fix-stupid-or-evil/

[iii] Hannah Arendt, Authority in the Twentieth Century, p407.

[iv] Girard, p180.

[v] Rod Dreher, Camus Against the Machine, https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/camus-against-the-machine/

[vi] Girard, p180,181.

[vii] Girard, p181.

[viii] https://anglicanmainstream.org/article/how-did-young-people-go-so-wrong-they-cheer-killers-and-rapists-of-hamas/

[ix] Douglas Murray in speaking of his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West, asks this question, “When a death cult attacks a democracy, why do so many people in our midst side with the death cult? See  https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/douglas-murray-democracies-death-cults-israel-hamas-britain-supporters-b1223011.html

[x] Karl Marx’s favourite saying was “Everything that exists deserves to perish”. A quote from Goethe’s Mephistopheles.

[xi] Arendt p 408.

[xii] Girard p 189.