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Scapegoating

The good citizens of St. Petersburg had ambivalent feelings about Huck Finn. On the one hand they held him in disdain. His father was a drunkard. He had no home, didn't bathe, went around barefoot, skipped school and church, had a tattered hat and raggedy trousers held up by one suspender. He didn't speak proper English. In other words, he wasn't normal - like the other kids and adults in town. And therefore he became the immediate target of suspicion if anything went wrong - if the other kids misbehaved. He was the town's prime candidate for scapegoat. On the other hand no one wanted to run him out of town. And why? Because it was convenient to have him around! His chaotic presence made others feel good about themselves. They could look at him and thank God they were different: proper, acceptable, righteous and therefore invisible and not likely to become scapegoats themselves.

Huckleberry provides a prime example to support the Stanford scholar Rene Girard's theory that all human societies from earliest times, be they tribes, nations, empires or neighborhoods have achieved fragile cohesion by finding some scapegoat upon whom they might dump. Have we been hit by a plague? Find somebody to blame like the gypsies. Does social conflict between rich and poor threaten political and economic stability? Find a scapegoat - like perhaps the Jews (as Germany did during its social upheaval after World War I). When my family resided for a while at my Scots-Irish grandmother's home, she reflexively traced anything that went wrong to my mother because she was of Italian descent. Crazy? But whole nations have behaved as crazily. Indeed, societies sometimes become so dependent on scapegoats to retain a sense of majority comfort that they institutionalize their scapegoats; house them in ghettoes. Or stereotype them as comical or menacing TV or vaudeville characters.

Look at today's Gospel. Jesus and his Jewish disciples must pass through a Samaritan town. Samaritans and Jews had been scapegoating each other for generations. (Sounds like current events!) So the Samaritans refuse them hospitality and the disciples implore Jesus to call down fire from heaven upon the town (miraculously, of course, since they didn't have helicopters in those days). And Jesus refuses. The text actually says he "muzzled" them. And why? Because, according to Girard, a prime intention of Jesus was to end scapegoating as a means of maintaining social solidarity. Indeed he associated so much with the Huckleberry Finns of his day that proper folk like the scribes tagged him, too, as a menace to society, victimized the very Son of God to salvage their biased status quo. "Don't you know," said Caiaphas, "it's expedient that one man die lest the whole nation perish?" That might stand as the scapegoating motto of every nation under the sun - and every neighborhood whose other motto is "Not in my backyard".

Of course, we might say that here in America Christ's stance against victimization has had some success over the years. We seem to have become generally conscious of scapegoating as a counterproductive way to achieve social unity. The Civil Rights movement was essentially driven by Gospel values. But we still have such a long way to go before scapegoating becomes entirely outmoded. Today Muslims are the convenient explanation for all that's wrong with the world. And from the point of view of many Muslims it's America that's odd man out and must be annihilated. And so it goes. And you're left wondering - after 2000 years - has Christ's Gospel, which advocates mutual grace, forgiveness and respect among individuals and nations, made any progress at all! At times it seems the Gospel has only left us with a guilty conscience about victimizing others. -- But hey! That's a beginning!

-- Geoff Wood