This week, John Houmes and Brad Edwards devoted an episode of their excellent podcast PostEverything to my series of articles on the crowd culture rising in the wake of expressive individualism, especially my latest piece, “When the Tribe Eats the Church.” They took the diagnosis further than I had gone, bringing into view the work of René Girard as well as the relevance of double imputation in our theology.
I recommend listening to the whole episode (Spotify, YouTube, Apple), but I wanted to share a few of their insights here.
Why the Tribe Feels So Good
Early on, Brad quoted Eugene Peterson’s observation that throughout history, people have sought religious meaning in three ways apart from God: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, and through the ecstasy of crowds. That third category deserves more attention than it usually gets. Brad wrote an article about this for The Dispatch last year, where he said,
Crowds are easy. They offer affirmation without vulnerability, attention without sacrifice. The only responsibility incurred in “belonging” to a crowd is reciprocating attention: You have to give it to get it. No one joins a crowd to be challenged or constrained, only affirmed and validated. Nothing is asked of anyone that they don’t already want to give.
Brad showed where “crowd culture” leads once it comes into contact with a yearning for significance in our modern world: We make meaning by making enemies. It doesn’t take much to gather a crowd. All you need is a plausible source for grievance—someone responsible for the gap between the world as you think it ought to be and the world as it is.
The online era has made it easier than ever to spread ressentiment, because social media platforms have built-in incentives that reward outrage as a way of grabbing your attention. And, as Brad put it, much of this online ecosystem isn’t conducive to building anything of value; it only burns down what others have constructed.
Mechanism Beneath the Madness
This is where John introduced the French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard. (If you’re looking for a crash course in Girard’s thought, I recommend Luke Burgis’s accessible treatment in his book Wanting.)
Girard’s central insight is that human desire is mimetic. We don’t arrive at our desires independently. We learn what to want by watching others, especially those close to us, those we admire or envy. We want what our models want, often without realizing we’ve borrowed the desire in the first place.
When two people or two groups end up wanting the same thing, a rivalry forms. As the rivalry intensifies, the object of desire becomes less important than defeating the rival. The rivalry itself becomes the engine. Political victory, for example, is no longer about some shared vision of flourishing or something we’re working toward; it’s about conquering them before they conquer us. “You don’t hate them enough!”
What is the community’s solution to this escalating rivalry? Girard pointed to the scapegoat mechanism. When mimetic rivalry builds toward chaos, a community unites, usually against a person or group. The scapegoat is identified, accused, and expelled. And remarkably, the expulsion seems to work. Peace returns. Order is restored. The community experiences what feels like purification and justice.
That’s why it’s so hard for crowds to resist this urge. The purity spiral is a social technology that delivers a short-term sense of unity and relief. As John put it, the tribe doesn’t experience the expulsion as violence but as cleansing.
Gospel Counter
The church ought to stand out in a world of scapegoating crowds. Why? Because the church is constituted on the good news of Christ bearing our guilt and shame. Jesus stepped into the scapegoat mechanism as the only truly innocent One.
Every other scapegoat in human history has been accused and expelled by a community that told itself a story justifying the violence. But the resurrection busted up those false stories. It vindicated the One who gave himself for us as our sacrifice. It exposed the injustice and transformed the impulse.
Brad sees even more gospel resources that speak directly to this moment: Christ wasn’t merely the innocent scapegoat. Through the doctrine of double imputation, we know he not only took our guilt; he also gave us his righteousness. The wondrous exchange! That means, in the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, we’ve already received what the scapegoat mechanism promises but always fails to deliver: true righteousness, true justice, real purity, and enduring peace.
If it’s true that peace through tribal purification is a pale and temporary imitation of what we already possess in Christ, then when Christians join the scapegoating crowd, we’re acting contrary to the gospel. We’re living as if the once-for-all sacrifice wasn’t sufficient and it’s up to us to generate our own unity, perfect our purification, or implement perfect justice through expulsion.
The line from Brad that has stuck with me is this: Our need to find scapegoats is a confession of our insecurity in Christ. This means that whenever we succumb to the temptation to manufacture our identity or grasp for significance through opposition—apart from who we are in Christ, and apart from the embodied life of the local church—we are, in practice, denying the gospel we proclaim.
Toward a Better Engagement
The point of all this isn’t to chastise ourselves or others for being frustrated at the lack of fulfillment of our aspirations or desires in the temporal realm. Nor is it to claim that all controversies or debates are somehow inappropriate or un-Christian.
It’s to remind us, as Christians, that our desires and aspirations are reoriented by the gospel, such that the gap in what is and what could be doesn’t drown our hearts in ressentiment but becomes the place where hope takes root—a hope for lasting change flowing from the gospel, not earthly, unjust ways of getting whatever we want. It’s to remind us, as Christians, that many of the internal squabbles of the church can be chalked up to the fun of fighting phantoms, where we keep dividing and subdividing into tribes that cannot possibly bear the weight of significance we want them to give us.
If we truly believe we battle not against flesh and blood, but that sin, death, and the Evil One are our true enemies, then we’re free to engage in debate and to take part in controversies from a position of security in who we are in Christ, not the pursuit of tribal belonging to one of the many political or ecclesial subgroups on offer.
We’re free to pick the right battles, not just the easiest that arise in front of us, and to fight from love and for love. We’re able to see and resist the injustice in our scapegoating tendencies, to differentiate between the true Enemy and his unfortunate prey, to see through the manufactured controversies of so much online discourse, and to celebrate and live in light of the world-altering sacrifice of Christ.
The church that has received the once-for-all scapegoat has no need to invent one.
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