Victim Worship

An Addendum to Girard

Photo by Megan Nevils

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We live in an age in which a phrase like ‘victim worship’ has far more of a political than a religious bite. A hundred years ago, it might have sounded like a term from anthropology, something out of Frazer’s Golden Bough. Now, however, I think most readers will be hearing it in the way I’m using it; they will have picked up the scent quite easily.

This is revealing. The fact that it immediately feels political means that victim worship has become a live concern, rather than a matter of history. It is not a phenomenon from the murky, primitive past. It is very much a fixture of our primitive present. Let me say what I mean by it.

There is a strain in our society which we all know very well, and which I don’t need to describe except to say that it idolizes victimhood everywhere. It positively sees virtue wherever it sees a victim. This strong attraction is for a few reasons:

1. Our society, especially the young in it, loves attention. Victims get attention. Attention (quantified in views, likes, subscriptions, mentions, buzz, trending tallies) is almost the supreme form of social capital in our day.

2. Caring about victims makes us feel virtuous. We can observe ourselves empathizing with the plight of victims and be reassured that we are good, moral people.

3. There is a wave of self-hatred that has slowly spread over the entire West. It became quite popular in academia and elite circles, and dripped down from there. This is a self-recrimination which we feel to be eminently proper and fitting, like feeling bad for hitting your sister. The religions, the cultures, the achievements, and the leaders of the Western world, especially since Christianity arose, are all in vogue to hate. The natural counterpart to this self-loathing is a veneration of the other: down with the West, up with the Rest. This is of course connected to the previous reason.

4. We have also nearly given up all traditional moral bases and convictions. All that is left to us is a very skeletal, a very unreflective, and a very tangible kind of moral ‘impulse’, which goes something like: “I’m hurt. I will hurt back.” We intuitively and viscerally understand and identify with this impulse. But only someone who has been made a victim can feel and respond to it. Therefore, in this framework, it’s really only victims who can be moral beings at all.

5. Finally, the attractiveness of the victim lies in the impunity that is felt to be his to indulge in the most vengeful, violent, wicked desires the psyche can serve up. Most of us, in our worst moments, have lusted for the free rein and freedom from conscience that would allow us to gratify or muse on these urges. The worshiper of victims believes it is a right, if you have been wronged. And do we not see the romance, the rush, of feeling so deeply? Are we not constantly extolling passion as one of the chief virtues? Who is more passionate than the bloody, wronged, purpose-wrung victim out for justice, or his courageous allies joining in the righteous cause? Even as audiences, we intuitively get on board with this. We can (some of us anyway) stomach the violence of Django or Edmond Dantes because of what has been done to them.

Enter Girard

Perhaps more than anyone in the recent past, Rene Girard wrote about victimization and its connection to religious activity in history.¹ He is best known for his theories on mimetic desire, but he spent just about as much time and ink confidently laying out his idiosyncratic views about what he called the scapegoating mechanism of religious violence in human societies, which he also saw as the hidden foundation of myths.

For Girard, widespread envy (in the form of mimetic desire) would move like a contagion through a society (say a tribe) and acts of violence would break out which, threatening endless reprisals, endanger the existence of the whole thing. To avoid this, the tribe eventually comes to a kind of implicit agreement to focus its ire on one person and destroy him, sacrificing him for the sake of the group. This is the scapegoat. Then, for many groups, the victim is subsequently deified in some way, in part because of the sudden and mysterious peace that resulted from his death. This peace-giving power in sacrifice was palpable and could only be understood by ancient cultures in religious terms. Then myths or fantastic stories arose, covering the original violence, of which the societies were ashamed. So Girard thinks.

Over time, as civilizations developed to be able to centralize power into a judicial system that gained a monopoly on violent reprisals, ending blood feuds and the like, we were able to comfortably forget the violent deeds at the bottom of our societies and religions. Religion (grounded in sacrifice) was no longer vitally felt to be the savior from mimetic contagions. This, then, naturally paved the way for various atheisms to spring up.² In his view, all storytelling and religion-making can be traced back to this pattern.

Girard didn’t always show his work very well on the sociological and anthropological side of his theories. I am not persuaded of all of his conclusions or his reasoning here.

But he was right that there is something conclusively religious about victimization, about sacrifice, about blood. And even a society such as ours, so utterly seared and calloused toward religious ways of thinking, is clumsily, gropingly, somnambulantly starting to feel that tie. If religion and victimization were once intimately connected and then sundered for thousands of years, we are, in our ignorant way, beginning to connect them again, like a toddler at a wall socket.

I believe the tether between violence/victimization and religion is the other end of the Girardian horseshoe: envy. Strangely, even though he had a lot to say about both envy and victims, he never went on to speak of the modern iteration of these categories, in which victims are themselves the objects of widespread envy. In this essay, I am closing that circle.³

The Cult of The Victim

I spoke a moment ago of our society being calloused to religious sensation. I think it is this and only this which keeps victims from being literally worshiped. But they are worshiped in an analogous way, in that they are paid the highest homage our society is capable of: they are envied and given attention.

There are many examples of the modern Cult of the Victim’s close union with violence. Look at how the Baader-Meinhof Gang wore the cloak of oppressed victims of Nazi fascism to perpetrate its terror—at times toward Jews, no less. It was not just rhetoric. It was the power of victimhood that they wielded. If there was not true power in it (that is, if victim worship were not a true phenomenon in our age), no one would fall for that kind of radical ideology. Look at the pro-Palestinian protestors in our country, most of whom have no ethnic, cultural, or religious connection with actual Palestinians. They engage in intimidation, disturbance, and sometimes violence because of what they perceive to be the profound victimization of the Palestinian people. For that matter, look at Hamas itself: they perpetrate horrific violence because of perceived victimhood and are not universally and unequivocally condemned for it. They are seen in many quarters to have a true and even noble cause, even if most people will say their methods are not justifiable. This is because of our partiality for and deep-rooted faith in victimhood.

Look also at the fear of censure should the vaunted victim class be offended, and the punishment meted out for failure to bow at the altar of the Victim. This can be seen in a large number of examples, from Bret Weinstein’s ouster at Evergreen State College to the kid at Indiana Wesleyan University who was placed on probation, dismissed from the honors program, and forced to write a reflection paper for a post about cultural appropriation.⁴

Many people want to actively find a victim to root for, and sometimes all a person or group has to do is strike the proper pose to be set on the dais. The trending rush to support Ukraine we saw in 2022 is evidence of this impulse (not that Ukraine struck a pose; they were of course really attacked and invaded; Jussie Smollett would be an example of a poser, or certain false Me Too-ers). It should be noted that I am not morally equating each example I give here; terrorists are certainly in a different class from protestors and rioters, and these in turn are different from the Ukrainians and from those who support them. I am merely highlighting examples of victim worship, and deeds done by the Cult of the Victim.

Maybe the classic and most complete example of modern victim worship that turned into violence is the Russian Revolution. Orlando Figes, in his book A People’s Tragedy, gives us a look into the sort of victim worship that existed for the Russian elites who supported violent revolution. I will quote him at length here, although in fragments:

“Riddled with the guilt of privilege, the intelligentsia worshipped at the altar of ‘the people’ [the oppressed Russian peasants].” (p. 128)

“For all too many of these high-born revolutionaries, the main attraction of ‘the cause’ lay not so much in the satisfaction which they might derive from seeing the people’s daily lives improved, as in their own romantic search for a sense of ‘wholeness’ which might give higher meaning to their lives and end their alienation from the world.” (p. 128)

“Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the revolution. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege.” (p. 127)

“If only, they thought, they could bring about the people’s liberation, then their own original sin—that of being born into privilege—would be redeemed.” (p. 127)

“Nechaev is principally remembered for the Revolutionary Catechism… Its twenty-six articles, setting out the principles of the professional revolutionary, might have served as the Bolshevik oath… Ruthless discipline and dedication were the key themes of the Catechism… Rejecting all morality, the revolutionary must be ready ‘to destroy everyone who stands in his way’. He must harden himself to all suffering: ‘All the soft and tender feelings of the family, friendship and love, even all gratitude and honour, must be stifled, and in their place there must be the cold and single-minded passion for the work of the revolution.’” (p. 133)

The Baader-Meinhof terrorists, mentioned above, have been chronicled well by Stefan Aust, who writes of Gudrun Ensslin, a young woman who started a fire in two department stores in Frankfurt:

“When they [Ensslin and another] were arrested for it, Gudrun Ensslin’s father, a Protestant vicar, said: ‘It has astonished me to find that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realization, a really holy self-realization such as we find mentioned in connection with saints. To me, that is more of a beacon light than the fire of the arson itself—seeing a human being make her way to self-realization through such acts.’ Pastor Ensslin had recognized, at a very early stage, an important factor in the motivation of his daughter and her comrades: violence as a quasi-religious experience.”⁵

Note that it’s the violence itself which the author, and the father, here regard as quasi-religious. Many ancient faiths are aware of the religious dimension which violence can take on. Sacrifice (of animals, crops, and even sometimes people) was rampant. The Aztecs offered humans from a belief that this was necessary to maintain the light of the sun on their crops. The priests of Baal in 1 Kings 18 sought to get their god’s attention by cutting themselves and bleeding profusely. Worship of Molech involved burning or killing young children for prosperity. Modern witchcraft has many uses for blood because of its perceived power.

The book of Hebrews in the New Testament says, “Without blood there can be no forgiveness of sins” (9:22). The key difference between Christianity and paganism here is that the former holds that one human sacrifice was sufficient for all time. This fascination with and primal belief in blood-power cannot be eradicated from the human psyche. It can, however, be based either on truth or lies.

Except for Those Who Aren’t?

One final thought before I end: all of this can seem rather marginal in our society. Most of the examples of victim worship that I’ve offered here involve only a small portion of our populations. The reader might be wondering about the huge percentage of us that don’t seem too moved by victimhood, either in paying online attention to grievance culture or being formally religious. Among public personalities, Joe Rogan comes to mind, as well as Eric and Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Lex Fridman, Jocko Willink, or Elon Musk.

If victim worship is so strong and ingrained in human nature, why does it seem to have no purchase on these figures, or vast swaths of our people? My answer to this is twofold. First, I think it would be more accurate to say that it is ingrained in human culture than human nature. The latter phrase conjures associations with biology, and I am not making a biological claim. Even though individual humans can be in many ways entirely devoid of overtly religious or victim-based ways of thinking, the societies they form will not be.

Second, I would push back on the premise that these guys are part of a group that is in fact unreligious in the sense of being un-infected with a reverence for the power of blood. If victim worship exists at the level of culture, then that must be our level of analysis. Cultures and subcultures can function in different ways: more tribally, less tribally; more Christian, less Christian. It is my belief that the more Christian a culture is, the less it will be buffeted by the waves of victim worship, or of blood-power, or of any other zeitgeist. This is because the Christian culture (like the Christian psyche) is founded upon the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ. It is in no need of further sacrifice.

The Christian knows he is fallen and depraved and in need of the perfect blood of Christ to be shed on his behalf—second Adam obeying God where the first Adam disobeyed. He knows God is just and must punish sin, and that unless this happens for him, he can never dwell in God’s presence and receive God’s favor. If he is a believer, this is accomplished for him.

The pagan, by contrast, is vulnerable to lies such as, ‘I am pure and innocent by nature. Therefore the evil I see around me must originate with other men or with society, and society must be pulled up by the roots and started over.’ Or, ‘The unhappiness I feel is because my reality, the truth I feel in my heart, is not being acknowledged by the outside world. Therefore it is the outside world that must be made to agree with and celebrate me.’ And so, it is those who have benefitted from being enculturated into a Christian society and have something like the Christian understanding of human fallenness that are immune from the contagion of this self-victimization. I would include the Joe Rogans and Elon Musks in this group. They live in the shade of the Christian tree.

The rise of victim worship and the revival in occultism are not disconnected. If these things continue unabated, we face another century of intense bloodshed and sacrifice of innocents. Simply because some men worship victims does not mean there are not real victims, and we will learn this in our own persons if we don’t learn it any other way.

“For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.” James 3:16

1. Cf. Violence and The Sacred, 1972, and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999.

2. I can’t now remember if Girard explicitly links the rise of atheism with the covering up of original violence, but I strongly believe he did somewhere.

3. I have read most but not all of Girard’s work. It has been some years, but nowhere do I remember, nor can I now find, him speaking of victims themselves being envied, at least not as a true and repeated mechanism of human behavior.

4. https://reason.com/2019/11/26/indiana-wesleyan-micah-sample-cultural-appropriation/

5. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of The R.A.F., p. xiv