At some point, I’m going to need to write about Haitian immigrants, stolen pets, and the vice presidency.
Let me qualify: I don’t need to write about this. We all know what I’m talking about by now, and plenty of ink has been spilled over it. Springfield, OH is more than 3 hours away from me, besides, so can I really comment on what’s happening in what’s not-really my backyard?
There’s a few reasons I want to add my voice to the discourse. One, J.D. Vance is my senator. What he says and does (running for vice president included) ultimately impacts me and my day-to-day life in my state.
And Vance represents me in more ways than just this. He is also forward about his Christianity, and also how much of his faith he owes to the particular lens placed over it by René Girard’s mimetic theory of human desire. Vance has quickly become the most prominent “Girardian Christian” in the world, ahead of even his mentor Peter Thiel (who is cagey about his own Christianity, to put it mildly.)
I’ve written about this already. I feel the need to write about it again because Vance has since raised the stakes by transparently scapegoating Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Not only has he endorsed false conspiracy theories in a place he claims to represent, despite the push-back from the leaders who actually live there, Vance has also stated he cares more about the social capital of his stories than he does about their veracity.
Coming from someone who claims to understand the tight interweaving of violence, scapegoating and politics in Girard’s work—not to mention Christianity’s decisive unveiling and indictment of the whole business—this is a very bad look indeed.
I was getting ready to say as much, sitting down to my keyboard over the last week. To point this out as definitive evidence of Vance’s inauthenticity, even his evil, at the very least his bald use of socially violent mechanisms for his own purposes. I combed through his article in The Lamp and prepared to tear his “conversion story” to pieces.
And then I was summarily reminded by my boss—one of Girard’s gentlest and most faithful disciples—that “having a scapegoat means not knowing you have one.”
This is the paradox of scapegoating, and of the ancient logics of sacrifice embedded deep in all our psyches: even when we know how they work, we default to them. The veil being torn away does not immediately change our behavior. In some ways, Vance’s falling back into scapegoating is precisely evidence that he takes these ideas seriously and that he is unconsciously performing the very thing he thinks he’s on guard against; that Christ will pray of him, “Father, forgive him; he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Vance may, for all his cow-towing and imitation, prove to be nothing like his running mate, because he may well look back at what he’s done and repent.
Philosopher Joseph Flanagan describes the feeling of having an insight as something akin to going to from being an idiot to being wise in 10 seconds flat. What’s more, we know we’ve been idiotic. The scales fall from our eyes, as it were, and we see the destruction inherent in our path in ways that we couldn’t before. Girard makes a big deal of the Greek word metanoia, translated as “repentance,” but meaning a full about-face. A determination that one is on the wrong path and that one must change course.
I cannot declare, out of the gate, that Vance has somehow outrun this experience on the feet of his own wickedness. I cannot deny him his very human right to be disastrously wrong in a way that is ultimately transformative. That may sound back-handed of me, and make no mistake, I’m livid at what I see as moral and intellectual hypocrisy on Vance’s part. I believe it instructive and necessary to unpack the layers of it. But to faithfully flesh that out, I’m going to need to take some time to cool down, lest I also have a scapegoat while denying that I have one. I need to wrestle in my own heart with what Vance’s behavior reveals about my own capacity to be disastrously wrong, and not know it. To earnestly believe I know better when I don’t.
In fact, there’s a book that plumbs this exact question in great detail. Another book I know Vance likes a lot. It’s called The Fellowship of the Ring. J.R.R. Tolkien’s insights into the temptations of evil and power remain resonant, even in the many misfiring contemporary adaptations of his work. For now, I’ll leave you with an article I wrote a couple years ago about one such adaptation, and how it transformed my thinking not just about Tolkien, but about politics, faith, and myself. You can read the full article over at Christ & Pop Culture; I’ll include the most pertinent bits below:
Historian Joseph Loconte reminds us what being a Dark Lord meant for Tolkien, who wrote that “The act of ‘bulldozing the real world’ . . . involves ‘coercing other wills.’” Theologian David Tracy says much the same thing, in even icier terms: “The Christian understanding of sin is . . . the horror of the self’s eternal struggle to absorb all reality into itself: to force, with both the arrogance of pride and the sloth of self-dispersion, all reality into my needs and my desires or else level it. We make a desert and we call it peace.” In Tolkien’s mythology, this struggle leads the demigod Melkor to become the first Dark Lord in his desire to control the process of creation. Seduced by Melkor, Sauron, a lesser spirit, continues this legacy as the next Dark Lord after the former’s fall and banishment from the world.
This struggle, this instinct for control that is central to Tracy’s definition of sin, is also at the heart of Rene Girard’s understanding of [humanity]. One of the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century, Girard’s massive project pivots on this insight: “If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.” We can’t soothe this instinct towards rivalry by acting on our ambitions, either. In fact, pursuing and securing power only exacerbates the problem: “We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration intensifies, the less aware it is of its own mimetic nature.” The harder we work to carve our own identities, the more we tend to imitate those who are already more like the “selves” we want to be than we are.
Girard has a simple but theologically charged term for this sort of phenomenon, this rivalry that cannot recognize itself: he calls it Satan. This Satan appears throughout The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s ancestor Isildur cannot recognize the folly of keeping the One Ring for himself as a trophy of Sauron’s defeat. This failure leads to Isildur’s death and precipitates the events of Tolkien’s trilogy. Echoing this event at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir cannot recognize the Satanic nature of his own impulse to use the Ring’s power to defend his home; he pays for his ambition with his life, repentantly defending friends who have now come to fear him. The writers of [the video game] Shadow of Mordor continue this theme as Celebrimbor, so confident that Sauron is the enemy and that he is not like Sauron, follows the same Satanic path that first made Sauron the Dark Lord.
All this tracks with an enduring theological view that evil operates rather like a parasite. Girard argues [citing Scripture] that Satan is a sub-personal phenomenon that occurs in and amongst humans: “The mimetic concept of Satan enables the New Testament to give evil its due without granting it any reality or ontological substance in its own right that would make of Satan a kind of god of evil.”
But even if we believe in a more literal Satan, we should benefit from this caution that evil is most pernicious and effective when identified with something “out there.” Sauron is far from the only entity in Middle Earth in whom Satan has done its work, in whom the desire to dominate and subjugate has manifested as open conquest. Yet he somehow represents them all. The debate still rages over whether Sauron himself, in Tolkien’s mind, represented Adolf Hitler. Certainly the Nazi campaigns of World War II display ambition and subjugation in all their terror, but, where The Lord of the Rings operates as a mythology about England, I believe Sauron represents something far closer to home. Just as Tolkien created the Shire to represent England at its best, so Sauron is the shadow of England at its worst, the sooty and brutal legacy of industrialized imperialism. Barad-dûr may symbolize the iron arm of the Third Reich, but it is also a turn-of-the-century London covered in coal dust and smoke, full of the throngs of the poor. In this, Tolkien understood that identifying evil as strictly outside, as something Other to battle, guarantees that one’s own potential for evil remains unidentified and so continues to grow.
My friend Jonathan Heaps refers to this, in more immediate and contemporary terms, as the “negative partisanship problem.” By this, he means “supporting one [political] party because of an aversion to its opponents” while failing to recognize that “my judgment of who is silly and who is dangerous is, in fact, a problem.” The problem lies not in having made a judgment but in the way my judgment cascades to imply that someone on the other side of the line is wrong, and not only wrong but irrational, and not only irrational but bad. This triple-knot of self-justification leads to conversations of the sort I had with a youth-pastor-in-training who described his eschatology thus: “I imagine it’ll be like Lord of the Rings: Jesus will lead us into battle like Aragorn against the damned, and we’ll cut them down like they’re orcs.”
I don’t think this person understood the tragedy of orcs in Tolkien’s world. I don’t think he appreciated what a red herring it is to go looking for black-and-white morality in Middle Earth. But his pitch did not surprise me, and we’re seeing a growing body of evidence—from Jesus and John Wayne to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill—that American Christian identity feels most alive when it feels embattled against not only evil but pure, inhuman evil. It is the same embattled posture for which Christ admonishes Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me” (Matthew 16:23, NIV). There is plenty of context to tell us that Christ was not talking past Peter, to the proverbial Devil on his shoulder, but to him. He called the disciple his accuser and his adversary, a human agent through which the forces of rivalry would do their disordering work. By identifying, in Rome, an enemy to be overcome by a triumphant Messiah, Peter closed himself off to Christ’s central admonition: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (v.24).
In a world of polarizing politics, with enemies in abundant supply, it is a spiritual necessity for Christians to identify not only with the heroes of their narrative but also with the villains. We must even identify as the villains at times—as the sources of rivalry and toxic competition that prevent us from living in community as the Church. Without such self-awareness, not only do we fail to realize the Kingdom, but we obscure the Kingdom’s very nature and purpose. Our mediation between Christ and the world becomes an embarrassment.
On the most basic level, this means recognizing the competitive and dominating impulses in our day-to-day interactions: in the classroom, on the job, in the home. We are often conscious to “resist the Devil” when he appears in external temptations or obstacles to our own plans; we are rarely as vigilant about the internal, envious impulses that make us agents of Satanic activity, pining for happiness and success at the expense of others. Such habits and attitudes prime us to fail (or, God forbid, to succeed malignantly) in our larger-scale interactions. Whether it be over issues of doctrinal purity, ecclesial structure, or even the impact of Christian identity on national and global politics, we must see ourselves as agents through which “anti-Christ” processes operate: acts of self-legitimation that we insist are really acts of Gospel witness.
“The Christian story legitimizes only one kingdom, the Kingdom of God,” says Merold Westphal. “In the process it delegitimizes every human kingdom.” This echoes Tolkien’s warnings about those like Boromir and Celebrimbor who legitimize their desires to “use the weapons of the Enemy against him.” Westphal reminds us that “the Christian narrative places ‘us’ under judgment as well . . . For whenever Christians tell the biblical story in such a way as to make their systems the repository of absolute truth or to claim divine sanction for institutions that are human, all too human, they become [something other] than biblical.” We can only avoid such politics through the Spirit who exposes and forces us to face the Satanic self-preoccupation at the core of who we think we are.
For this reason, I think it’s time for Christians to [focus a little less on] moral paragons like Aragorn. In Tolkien’s stories, the subtler heroes are those who resist the lure of the One Ring, who recognize that the legacy of the Dark Lord can bloom anew in them. Such self-knowledge allows Faramir, brother of the fallen Boromir, to deny the Ring without a second thought. Sam Gamgee’s love gives him tunnel-vision beyond all ambition, allowing him to save Frodo when he succumbs to Sauron. More famous still are the words of the ancient elven Lady Galadriel as she contemplates wielding the power of the One Ring and announces, in the potency of her magic:
“In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
This is no simple beat of temptation. Galadriel authors herself as Sauron’s vanquisher and successor. It is that very ability to imagine herself on the Dark Lord’s throne that rescues her, and all Middle Earth, from the Ring’s seduction. She recognizes the enemy is not external, that the threat does not begin and end at the boundary of Sauron’s body, but works within her own body as well. The Ring would work its enchantment precisely by convincing her otherwise. Galadriel is a model for us when she recognizes, with Girard, that “Satan is always someone.”
In fact, it may very well be [me.]
This is beautiful work Lyle. It speaks to the heart of sin as metaphysical deception rather than brokenness. If it is brokenness it can be fixed, but if it is metaphysical deception, we break thinking we're fixing. I also appreciate what you have to say about Vance having to be allowed to come to that conclusion himself. I consider it a spiritual right (no. 6 if we're counting). "Let Each One Obey for Themselves". I have a short post about that somewhere--Facebook I think. I'll see about bringing it over.