After being narrowly defeated (5-0) by the Flyers in St. Catharines tonight (but I don’t care; I got some good passes, and fell on my butt significantly less than a few weeks ago), I listened to the CBC’s Ideas. It was about Rene Girard’s “mimetic theory.” Religion on the CBC (and not of marginalized peoples)? I prepared myself for the pooh-poohing, the retreat to relativism, the self-congratulatory debunking, and the tangible avoidance of relevance. Instead, I heard a very engaging Girard expounding his very interesting theory. I will relate some of the nicer points, with apologies to Mr. Girard and anyone else whose views I mangle.

Girard asserted that Christianity was revolutionary among ideologies. Other systems of belief, he said–focusing heavily on the mythology and religions of ancient civilizations–tell stories of communities ganging up on a victim in order to preserve communal peace (e.g., Oedipus Rex). These stories are all from the point of view of the persecutors, the accusers. They emphasize the rightness of punishing of the victim, who totally has it coming.

Christianity and Judaism tell the story from the point of view of the victim, acknowledging the innocence of the scapegoat, or sacrifice, and the unjust brutality of the mob. Christianity was also revolutionary as a story about a god being persecuted but returning to his persecutors with something for them other than vengeance.

Girard added that many people think of Christianity as a popular, or even populist, religion. In fact, he sees it as totally antipopular. It points out what we all know but have “hidden since the foundation of the world”: we are violent and immoral, but we punish others for our misdeeds and call that justice.

The radicalism of an intellectual taking Christianity seriously–in public–is enormously refreshing.

I also heard comments from fanboys and -girls, who seemed to alternate worshipfully intoning Girard’s name with offering to fix the glaring flaws in his theories. Mostly the worshipful intoning, though. One of them said, “People think the opposite of violence is peace, but it’s not. The opposite of violence is order. Order can come from two sources: from coercion, whether legal or physical; or from holiness.” The guy immediately went on to spoil this insight, but I won’t subject you to that.

Another of Girard’s cheerleaders suggested that the crucifixion, widely understood by Christians to be a payment of debt by proxy, is actually something else: Jesus demonstrating that the violence attributed to His father was actually done by us. When the mob killed Jesus, they acted out what we all want to do every time we hurt another human being: hurt God. We make God the scapegoat for all the evils that we ourselves commit. Nevertheless, Jesus came back after being killed and offered us forgiveness instead of vengeance.

Nice messages. Nice thoughts. Nearly suffocated at times (especially by the narrator) under the embroidered throw pillows of intellectualism (lest anyone be accused of actually taking any of this seriously, or having a personal belief in anything; how gauche), but good thinking, nonetheless.

I didn’t agree with everything they said or the way they said it, but it made me happy to hear people debating the re-radicalized notion that Jesus had something important to say and do, and that those who actually read the texts will begin to understand that. Christianity can only be written off or casually dismissed by individuals who are willing to ignore an awful lot of salient and important information.