From “Scapegoats: The Gospel Through the Eyes of Victims” by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Modern societies use scapegoats as well, but where the ancient practices involved the ritual of driving out or killing scapegoats, contemporary practices of scapegoating have expanded, appearing in new and different ways. Scapegoating today manifests itself in discrimination of all sorts – social, racial and ethnic, political, and religious. Rene Girard notes that “scapegoats multiply wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identity – communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on.” But understanding that multiplication requires digging down its roots. “All discourses on exclusion, discrimination, racsim, etc.” Girard argues, “will remain superficial as long as they don’t address the religious foundations of the problems that besiege our society.”
For Girard, we have not moved beyond the ancient practices of ritual scapegoating – we have just become better at hiding them. Explicit forms of scapegoating (which ended in the killing of the scapegoat) have become more implicit, more insidious, and easier to ignore. How did this gradual evolution occur? Sociologist Tom Douglas argues that as societies developed, so did the function of scapegoating. When homogenous, religious communities gave way to larger, more diverse societies, religious atonement rituals no longer stood at the heart of the scapegoating process. The communal nature of scapegoating behavior moved from society as a whole to distinct societal segments. The transference of blame or responsibility continued to serve as a main motivation behind the creation of scapegoats, but individual (or small group) self-preservation rather than community preservation became its driving force. Douglas identifies four reasons that people or groups scapegoat others: “extreme dislike, fear, ignorance, and the displacement of blame from powerful originators to those perceived to be much weaker.”