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The relationship of René Girard's mimetic theory to world religions has become one of its most controversial aspects because it stakes out a claim for the uniqueness of the Christian revelation -- something which is, quite frankly, against the current stream of popular thought. Girard is accused of Christian triumphalism. Girardian Gil Bailie has also run into this problem. As he presents to Christian peace groups, for example, whose members have been dabbling for years with Eastern religions, New Agey stuff, and especially Native religions, they challenge him for advocating the uniqueness of the Christian revelation. The particularity of Jesus Christ would seem to be a stumbling block to the modern openness to world religions.

I would like to suggest a connection with this resistance to another modern problem that concerns me a great deal, namely, the waning of membership in the mainline churches. I have had a growing sense in recent years that the loss of a sense of Christian uniqueness has been a main ingredient in this decline. A great many people in this country simply go shopping in the marketplace of religions, doing much of it on their own, or in small groups with fellow religious adventurers; and then they may throw in a trip to church now and then to stay connected with their roots. There are many explanations for why the mainline churches are struggling, many of them charging some form of irrelevance on the part of the church to meet the needs of the modern person. But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is the main reason (a supreme form of irrelevance, if you will): we've lost our means of talking meaningfully about the uniqueness of the Christian revelation, and to do it in ways that don't fall back into the age-old pattern of religion, i.e., the sacrificial structure of us vs. them.

I believe that the anthropological work of René Girard can help us to revitalize and reconceive our Christian uniqueness, while at the same time helping us to guard against so-called "triumphalism." In lifting up the truth of the Christian revelation, we are not trying to scapegoat anyone. We're simply trying to point to the Christian truth as the best version of the Truth. This is where the scientific claims of Girard's theory are important. Do we, for example, accuse Einstein of triumphalism for having suggested that his physical theories more adequately represent the truth than Newton's? No, he let others look at the same data and decide for themselves. I think that's what Girard is trying to do: Present the Christian revelation as a way of making sense out of the data of human experience, especially our experience as religious beings. I believe that his is the first comprehensive theory of religions that begins to permit some discernment between religions.

Thus far, prior to Girard, the comparative study of world religions in the modern age has largely created a jumble of undifferentiated religions. It has led the average, educated person to become aware of a problem: there has been, through the ages, thousands and thousands of gods, most of them claiming to be true gods. So how do we begin to evaluate them? How has the typical modern person tended to deal with this awareness?

There is the fundamentalist approach, which is virtually to deny the problematic nature of this multiplicity and to simply become further entrenched in one's own religion: "We are right, and everyone else is wrong. It's obvious." The more conservative, fundamentalist folks find it much easier to stick with the old time religion, without a need for shopping around to the other religions. And so the more conservative churches are generally having an easier time keeping their like-minded folk in the pews. Not so with the non-fundamentalist, "mainline" churches -- hence, the problem I'm attempting to sketch out here.

There are a few modern folks who have simply become atheists (though polls continue to indicate that this is still a decided minority). These are the folks who have decided that all the gods are false, simply a fiction created by humankind. Oh, they may recognize a few more sophisticated versions, the "major religions," but in the end they still lump them together with the other "primitive" religions.

The majority approach for mainline religious practitioners, I would argue, has been to take the eclectic approach to this problem of a multiplicity of gods. Confronted by these wide-ranging truth claims about a myriad of gods, most people have decided that there must be at least a little bit of truth to a lot of these gods -- often expressed with something like, "Each religion points to another piece of the truth." And the assumption is that, if we put them all together, we'll come up with a larger, more complete picture of the truth. This approach is based on the assumption of a relativized truth component in most religions. It gives truth the benefit of the doubt.

I think that Girard's approach offers people a decidedly different approach. I'd go so far as to say that it even has more in common with the atheistic approach than with the eclectic one. For Girard's approach to religion places more emphasis on knowing the nature of the falsehood of gods. It doesn't merely suggest that most gods are false, but it's "generative anthropology" tries to reveal in our human nature a need -- a mechanistic compulsion, if you will -- to create false gods in order to justify our own human violence. We are beings who base our whole common life together on a collective murder and then unknowingly cover it up under a shroud of sacred violence. This compulsion is so strong for us that, presumably, even if we were engaged by the true God, we would still be inclined to veil this God behind our false ideas of gods in order to remain deluded about our violence. So, rather than giving truth the benefit of the doubt when it comes to gods, Girard's theories makes the truth about gods almost an impossibility. It would be very difficult for even the true God to break through our unconscious need to remain veiled in sacred violence.

There's an important question that might immediately arise to this posing of the theory: If even the true God would have trouble breaking through our delusion and revealing all this, then how did René Girard do it? At this point, I think that the Christian faith becomes necessary to explain the very existence of Girard's theory itself: it simply couldn't have happened if the true God hadn't already succeeded in breaking through with the revelation of our sacred violence. And I think that Girard makes a good case that the event which makes the most sense for having started the ball rolling on revealing all this is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian revelation is unique in its power to reveal our human nature, i.e., our proclivity to fall under the spell of sacred violence. And the Girardian theory urges us to press the question: Without this revelation, how can we even begin to hear the voice of the true God? Moreover, it compels us to squarely face the modern escalation of violence, and its connection with religion, before it overwhelms us in an apocalyptic fashion.

I firmly believe that the evangelical anthropology of Rene Girard is urgently needed in the mainline churches. More than even a matter of relevance, it can revitalize our proclaiming of the Gospel in a way that more Christians could even experience the Gospel as uniquely necessary once again. Members of the church could hear Acts 4:12 -- "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" -- and embrace it with both a new understanding and a revitalized sense of call -- and yet be wary of renewing violence in the name of religion since it focuses on the link between religion and violence as the heart of idolatry.

Paul Nuechterlein
February, 1998