Mimetic Desire and Fantasies of Deliverance: Crucifying Girard's Claims About Religious Violence and Revelation

A previous paper described and challenged Girard's extensive revisions and rejections of psychoanalytic ideas, further elucidating some of his egregious misunderstandings and erroneous claims. This paper continues by dissecting his problematic claims about religion, especially his dubious insistence that Christian revelation is the only panacea for victimization and violence. Girard's fundamental (and repeated) assertions are that (1) all violence must be understood as mimetic, (2) the sole purpose of religion is to prevent the recurrence of reciprocal violence, (3) Christianity is the only revelation that offers a way out of violence, but that (4) if the history of Christianity is a bloodbath of crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and massacres, this is because people have been poorly Christianized, because the revelation is profound and takes considerable time to grasp, and because of various problems that are never the actual fault of Christianity. It's still the only revelation that offers an escape from violence, and the only one that can accomplish this feat. Despite the importance of Girard's contributions, these theological claims will all be parsed out and dismembered to demonstrate how they are irretrievably incoherent. This paper critiques such reductive and disjointed arguments, and calls for a more complicated psychology of religion and violence.