But that definition of humans isn’t quite right, said Alexander Schmemann. 

A 20th-century Orthodox Christian theologian, Schmemann coined an alternative name for our species, Homo adorans, claiming that worship is at the center of what it means to be human, not thinking. “The first and basic definition of man is that he is the priest,” Schmemann asserted without a hint of embarrassment. “He stands at the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God.”

I thought of Schmemann a few months ago while reading an essay by the Catholic writer R. R. Reno. “We are hardwired to worship,” writes Reno, using a term — “hardwired” — that is more common to the realm of evolutionary psychology. “If we turn away from the true God,” Reno continues, “we will chase after false gods.”

Reno and Schmemann are both devout believers, so it’s easy to dismiss their claims as propaganda. They want us to believe that worshipping is natural and necessary, just as they do. But is there some remote chance that they could be onto something? Could there be an evolutionary explanation for this common human act of worship? Is it grounded in an animal instinct? 

I’ve come to believe that it is. We have to try to understand worship as a biological phenomenon.

The first clue comes from the field of animal behavior, where it pays to be a bit of a prankster. Often, the goal of the researcher is to “trick” the animal and thereby reveal how it goes about its business. We all know that birds fly south for the winter, for example. But how do they do it? How do they know which direction to fly? 

Scientists in the 1970s had a hunch that the birds were looking for cues in the night sky. To test their hypothesis, these clever researchers decided to raise a flock of indigo buntings inside a planetarium. By tweaking the settings on the projector, they could create a false sky for the birds. The poor buntings, raised in the avian equivalent of Plato’s cave, would then try to fly north for the winter. Or east. Or west.

It turned out that the key variable was the sky’s rotation. Normally, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sky seems to rotate around Polaris, the outermost star in the Little Dipper’s handle. This is why we call it the North Star — because it’s always in the north. But the scientists created their own version of the heavenly sphere, in which everything rotated around, say, the star Betelgeuse. The birds inferred, incorrectly, that north was way over there and flew in the wrong direction as winter approached.

I first learned about the ingenious planetarium experiment a couple decades ago when I took a course in “comparative psychobiology” at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ants, we learned, use geometry to plot their way home if you put an obstacle in their way. Barn owls, if you plug one of their ears, aren’t able to locate their prey in space and will strike at the wrong spot. Catsharks can be induced to attack an empty patch of sand if you embed electrodes in the sand that mimic the electrical field produced by the shark’s prey, a flatfish that buries itself to hide.

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Faith is the new Successor Ideology

By Tim DeRoche

Our professor, the cognitive neuroscientist Randy Gallistel, had a particular goal of disabusing us of our naive notions about the nature-versus-nurture debate. Nature and nurture are all bound up with each other, he claimed: “your genes create your environment.”

What? I remember my puzzlement at this statement. Your genes create your environment. What could he possibly mean by that? Your environment, by definition, is everything that happens to you after your genes miraculously cohere at the moment of conception, I thought. Your genes have no control over it.

But that’s not so, Professor Gallistel argued. Your genes control what aspects of the environment you pay attention to. Our confused buntings, for example, are genetically programmed to pay attention to the stars in the night sky. Their genes “know” that the birds need a sense of direction to avoid dying of cold or hunger during the hard winter months. Because of this, the sky’s rotation is a part of the bird’s environment. Other animals are completely oblivious to this phenomenon, presumably because it isn’t relevant to any of their behavioral choices. 

At the most basic level, our genes even determine what we perceive. Human beings can see all the colors of the rainbow, but we are blind to ultraviolet and infrared light. These colors exist in the natural world, but they aren’t a part of man’s visual environment. It is our genes that make it so, as they contain the instructions that tell our body how to make our eyes. Apparently, our genes “believe” that awareness of UV and infrared light isn’t necessary for a human to survive and reproduce.

If we are to consider worship as a biological phenomenon, we need to ask ourselves: what kind of organism is a human being? What does man pay attention to and why? And what are we trying to bring about for ourselves when we engage in the act of worship?

In the brutally violent climax of the movie Apocalypse Now, the murder of Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is intercut with the ritual sacrifice of a water buffalo by the natives. And this was no product of movie magic: Francis Ford Coppola and his crew captured a real religious ritual of the Ifugao people of the Philippines, who had been hired to play the Vietnamese natives in the movie. In the scene, the bull is viciously hacked to death by three native men carrying large machetes, and the animal is nearly decapitated. 

“The horror,” whispers Kurtz as he dies.

Perhaps the hardest thing to explain about the act of human worship is how destructive and violent it can be. It is indeed often horrific. The ritual killing of animals has recurred again and again across the world and throughout human history. Often, the body of the animal — or some portion of it — is burned or destroyed, rather than being consumed by the worshippers. 

Studying the native peoples of America and Northeast Asia, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss noticed that their tribes, unrelated and often so distant from one another, shared a common system of ritual trade and worship that he called potlatch. At its center was the willful destruction of one’s own property.

“All the forms of potlatch in the American Northwest and Northeast Asia,” wrote Mauss, “know this theme of destruction … precious oils [are] burnt, copper objects [are] cast into the sea, and even the houses of princes [are] set on fire.” This is all baffling from an evolutionary perspective: why would a creature destroy its own food or shelter? 

But if we are going to understand and explain human worship as a biological phenomenon, we will have to contend with an even more extreme and horrifying example of this destruction: human sacrifice, child sacrifice.

It is a discomfiting fact that the ritualistic sacrifice of children appears again and again in the historical and archaeological record. Corpses of murdered Incan children have been discovered on the mountaintops of Peru. The early Roman and Hebrew sources contain numerous accounts of child sacrifice in the ancient Middle East. In 2012, the remains of 80 teenage girls were unearthed under the wall of a fortress in what is now the Shaanxi province of China. And the phenomenon is surprisingly persistent, right down to our own time. In the past few years, there have been disturbing cases in Africa and India.

Weirdly, some common forms of modern worship still echo these horrors. Perhaps Coppola was fascinated by the sacrifice of the water buffalo partially because it resonates with the Roman Catholicism of his own upbringing, a religion which puts the torture and ritualistic murder of Jesus Christ at the very center of its liturgy. God, we are told, “sacrificed His only son” for us.

The persistence of child sacrifice seems to make a mockery of the evolutionary account of human beings. If man’s purpose for living is to reproduce and transmit his genes to the next generation, then the slaughter of one’s own children would seem to be, at the very least, counterproductive.

But it’s equally unkind to other worldviews. In the face of child sacrifice, it’s going to be difficult to hold out a Rousseauean faith in archaic man as the “noble savage” who was only later corrupted by modern society and civilization. And it certainly gives the lie to the Greek philosophers’ idea that the essence of man is “rationality.” Man may be fitfully rational, but he is something else besides.

Perhaps it suggests that man has no essence or nature at all beyond some basic biological urges. Perhaps human culture is completely malleable and arbitrary. Maybe the social engineers, the utopians of both the Right and the Left, are right, after all.

But I don’t think so. It was a couple of Freudian psychologists, and a colonial-era anthropologist, who helped me understand what’s going on in child sacrifice. Ernest Becker won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, which argues that human beings embed themselves in religion and culture — the world of symbols — in order to escape or deny our inevitable death and decay.

But it is a later book by Becker, the more speculative Escape From Evil, published in 1975, that addresses directly this question of sacrifice, destruction, and worship. In it, the author argued that worship is man’s response to an existential dilemma. “Man,” he wrote, “has always casually sacrificed life for more life.”

Mauss, the anthropologist, said something similar when he attributed to archaic man “the belief that he has to buy from the gods and that the gods know how to repay the price.” And Norman O. Brown, another Freudian who influenced Becker, put it even more bluntly in his 1959 book, Life Agaist Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History: “In the archaic consciousness, the sense of indebtedness exists together with the illusion that the debt is payable; the gods exist to make the debt payable.” 

Becker, Brown, and Mauss believed that we offer the gods life so that they might give it back to us. Their underlying assumption was that we human beings experience life as a gift, whether we like it or not. Whether we admit it or not. And we feel a compulsion to repay the gift. “The original sacrifice is always food,” Becker taught, “because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life.”

This is an ancient idea that recurs again and again in archaic societies. In Hinduism, for example, the sacred scriptures of the Satapatha Brahmana claim that every man is “born as a debt to the gods.” One makes sacrifices to the gods “because of a debt owing to the gods from birth.” 

If Becker and Brown were right, then human sacrifice — child sacrifice — is a case of reciprocation gone wrong. It springs from a mistaken belief that we can enter into a trading relationship with the gods and thereby gain some control over our destiny. According to the anthropologist H.M. Hocart, “the ritual aims at abolishing the uncertainty.”In the grips of this theological error, we sacrifice our food, because we want more food. We sacrifice our shelter, because we want shelter. We sacrifice a life, because we want more life. 

But maybe this all sounds like psychobabble. Perhaps the urge to reciprocate with the gods is just another pseudo-Freudian notion about the ultimate hopelessness of the human psyche. It’s not psychobabble, though. We have very good scientific reasons to believe that man is the animal with a hyperactive attention to gifts. Just ask the evolutionary psychologists. Pay attention, they will tell us, at food sharing in the vampire bats.

The field of evolutionary psychology may have been born in 1971. It was in that year that a young graduate student named Robert Trivers published a now-famous paper laying out a theory called reciprocal altruism. It was, among other things, an evolutionary explanation for the emotions of gratitude and sympathy. “I suggest,” Trivers wrote, “that the emotion of gratitude has been selected to regulate human response to altruistic acts and … that the emotion of sympathy has been selected to motivate altruistic behavior as a function of the plight of the recipient of such behavior.” 

Trivers used the dry, tactical language of evolutionary theory (and the math of genetics) to explain how and why humans commit selfless acts for those unrelated to us. His most surprising claim? That the emotions of gratitude and sympathy pay dividends for the human organism in its effort to survive and reproduce.

In the animal world, the classic example is vampire bats. These blood-sucking creatures can only survive for a couple of days without food, but on any given night, there’s a fairly good chance that the bat will be unable to feed. The bats’ solution to this vulnerability is sharing. A bat who hasn’t fed will “beg” for food from a bat who has, and the satiated bat will regurgitate some of its meal for its “friend.” At a later date, the tables are likely to be turned, and the gift will be reciprocated. It’s a kind of crude insurance.

We can imagine that food sharing was an essential fact of early human life and shaped our evolution as a species. As Professor Gallistel from UCLA might argue, our social environment is created by these hardwired emotions of gratitude and sympathy. Gratitude puts us on high alert for gifts, and it triggers a biological instinct to reciprocate. Sympathy puts us on high alert for the needs of others and triggers an urge to help or to share.

Now, imagine, for a moment, that the vampire bats could talk to each other. What would they discuss? They would probably talk about their food and where they got it. “Hey, those cows that we fed on? Now they’re over by that oak tree.” And they’d talk about each other. “I shared with Charlie last week, but then last night he stiffed me. Can you believe that? I’d stay away from him, if I were you.”

Reciprocity is turbo-charged by language — the ability to speak. For one thing, language opens up whole new vistas of gift-giving. No longer must I regurgitate my food for my friend; I can just tell him where the food is. But language also means that I can trade with many, many other individuals, because who shares — and who doesn’t — quickly becomes public knowledge. If I tell my friend to avoid Cheater Charlie, then I am simultaneously giving a gift to my friend (he can avoid costly interactions with the cheater) and punishing Charlie (who will find it harder to participate in the sharing economy).

For the individual organism, this is a whole new world. If I am generous to one, word quickly gets around, and suddenly everyone seems eager to share with me. But if I am stingy with one, soon everyone seems to be reluctant to share with me when I need it. It starts to feel like I am trading not with isolated individuals, but with the community as a whole. And I start to worry about my reputation: what could they be saying about me when I’m not around? From this evolutionary perspective, it seems likely that gossip is the core function of language (a hypothesis first put forward by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar). It’s no accident that, in English, we often refer to the act of conversation as “sharing.” 

Let’s assume, for a moment, that Trivers is right. Let’s assume that the human animal is designed by evolution to be on the lookout for gifts, for every gift is an invitation into a sharing relationship that may save my life later on. Let’s take it as a given that human beings have a hardwired instinct to reciprocate the gift, an instinct that was amplified by the ability to speak. And now that reciprocating instinct is as strong as the urge to eat or to reproduce. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it is the core drive that makes a human being a human being and not, say, an indigo bunting or a catshark or a chimpanzee.

Such a creature cannot help but find itself trapped in an infinite regress of gratitude. After two weeks of near starvation, I’m suddenly gnawing on this extremely delicious leg of wildebeest. I got it from my older sister, who got it from my mom, who got it from my dad, who got it from the chief of my village. The chief got it, in trade, from the chief of that village over there by the lake. And he presumably got it from his village’s best hunter, who got it from nature, as the wildebeest presumably got its life from its mother, who got her life from her mother, and so on into infinity.

Modern men and women face a similar conundrum. Every day, I’m told that there are thousands and thousands of people cooperating to put food on my plate. Fishermen in Alaska. Farm laborers in rural Mexico. Ship captains from Europe. Truck drivers on the roads of America. Plus, all the backroom employees of the grocery stores, snack shops, and restaurants that I visit. They’re all somehow serving me, despite the fact that I’ve never met them. Modern life is a never-ending (and terrifying) paradox of plenty. We are trapped in the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Isn’t it possible that God exists in the vanishing point where our hardwired gratitude disappears into the distance of infinity? Or, if you prefer, we could say this is where the idea of God exists. It would explain why the act of worship is bound up with gratitude and thanks. The etymology of the word “Eucharist” is the Greek word eukharistos, which of course means “gratitude.” It is a ritual, after all, of food sharing.

In his published writings, Trivers never considered the existential implications for a thinking beast that is hardwired to be grateful. If he had, he may have come to similar conclusions as Becker, Brown, and Mauss. “Unlike us,” wrote Becker, “primitives knew the truth of man’s relation to nature: nature gives freely of its bounty to man — this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return.”

If you’re a nonbeliever, think of it as a glitch. Our biological instincts trick us into seeing life as a gift, even though it’s all just a grand accident. Of course, the believer will counter that human beings are the only animals who have evolved the capacity to recognize that life is a gift. “The unique position of man in the universe,” wrote Schmemann, the theologian, “is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from him.”

What’s striking here is that many forms of Christian worship — including the Catholic Mass — bear a formal resemblance to the archaic sacrifice ritual, but they are bloodless. And instead of trying to barter with the gods to abolish uncertainty, biblical faith urges one to submit to uncertainty. “Not my will,” says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, “but yours be done.” 

Indeed, it’s possible to read the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures, as well as the Christian gospels, as an extended meditation on what it means to be indebted to God and what is the appropriate way to respond. “What shall I render to the Lord for all the things that He hath rendered to me?” asks the Psalmist. Like the pagans before him, Abraham is prepared to murder his son Isaac in an act of sacrifice. But God, at the very last moment, tells him that it isn’t necessary and provides a substitute.

Perhaps one lesson of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is this: stop sacrificing your tribal enemies, your fallen kings, your children, and even your goats. There is only one life that is yours to give — your own.

But gratitude isn’t a given, and this is no utopian vision. For if man is the grateful beast, he is also the suspicious beast. “We do not quite forgive a giver,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in a strange little essay titled Gifts. “The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.” 

We share because we are vulnerable, but the act of sharing also makes us vulnerable in new and scary ways. In the evolutionary logic of Trivers, a sharing animal like man will always be wary of being cheated — of offering a gift that isn’t fully reciprocated. But we are just as fearful of being branded as cheaters ourselves or becoming known as stingy. In his studies of archaic cultures, Mauss observed that giving and receiving are always fraught with risk and high emotion. “The gift is something that must be given, that must be received,” he wrote, “and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept.” Our gratitude may indeed be hardwired, but it is also contingent. 

We are especially suspicious of the unsolicited gift, because it is an invitation into an ongoing relationship of reciprocity. “To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is — like refusing to accept — the equivalent of a declaration of war,” observed Mauss. “It is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.”

Of course, the difficulty for us is that, in the primordial burbling of our nervous system, we feel our very existence to be an unsolicited gift. This is what Martin Heidegger was getting at when he called attention to the geworfenheit (the “thrownness”) of human existence — I didn’t ask for this. This existential angst is the flip side of infinite gratitude and indebtedness.

On a more prosaic level, even our daily economic life is fraught with ambivalence. We are trapped in an endless game of calculation, tracking who owes what to whom. “Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging,” Friedrich Nietzsche mused, “all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself.”

The idea that we have an inborn instinct to give and receive gifts, to reciprocate with our fellow human beings, is a kind of key that can help us understand so many different spheres of human life: the social, the moral, the economic, the psychological, the legal, and the religious. But, of course, for early man, there was only one sphere of life, and it encompassed all of these. Sharing and reciprocation held it all together. It was a “total” system, as Mauss called it.

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The temptation is to imagine archaic man living in an arcadia of unconflicted relations with his fellow man, and to hope that we might somehow return to that state. The anthropologist David Graeber wrote a fascinating book, Debt: The First 5,000 years, touching on some of these themes. In it, he imagined “that children born today might live to see the day when there is no longer an ‘economy.’’’ He seems to have believed they will be better off than we. Nietzsche, meanwhile, fantasized about a world in which aristocrats and warriors are no longer burdened by a sense of pity or responsibility for those in need. I suppose we all have our Edens.

But if Robert Trivers was right, then suspicion and social anxiety and pangs of sympathy are all features, not bugs, and they are precisely what make us human. They are also the reason why it’s so hard to be at peace with one’s self and the world.

“He is a good man,” wrote Emerson, “who can receive a gift well.”

How does one respond to a gift?

It’s possible to reject a gift outright, of course. Or you can accept it and then later complain about the quality of the gift, as if you deserved more or better. You can deny that it was really a gift at all. Or you can attempt to return it for something else. You can try to repay the gift, so as to be square with the giver. You can try to avoid the giver out of fear that there is no possible way that you could repay it. 

Yet another possible response is to accept the gift graciously with joy and wonder. You might attempt to show honor and respect to the giver, especially if the gift cannot be repaid. If the giver is unseen, faceless, you might attempt to bestow upon the giver a name and a face. You might set up a place where you could go and imagine and encounter this unseen giver. You might design certain habits or rituals, and tell certain stories, that would remind you of your gratitude and help you to avoid slipping into ungratefulness or resentment. You might do this with other people who have also received the gift.

Over the last 100 years or even more, I fear that we, like the indigo buntings in the planetarium, have been looking up at a false sky. Perhaps seeking relief from existential anguish, we have been telling ourselves stories that let us off the hook, that promise us respite from the weight of infinite gratitude. We try to convince ourselves that there is only the human will and its eternal fight against the chance and entropy of the material world. In our more delusional moments, we almost come to believe that we are winning that fight. But when we accept those stories, we put our conscious mind at war with the biological instincts of our unconscious mind, which cannot help but wonder at the gift of life.

Perhaps now is the time to step out of the planetarium and stare, without blinking, at the night sky in all of its terrible strangeness and beauty, confronting our own smallness, our inexplicable existence, our utter dependence on each other and on nature. When we do, we may find that the only appropriate response — the fully human response, the biological response — is to bow our heads, get down on our knees, and offer a prayer of praise and thanks.

But we can now say confidently that Yang didn’t get it quite right. Woke-ism, for lack of a better term, no longer seems to be ascendent. Those ideas remain common, maybe even dominant, in many elite institutions, from academe to media and even some houses of worship. But somehow, they seem stale now. When Malcolm Gladwell starts talking like J.K. Rowling, it’s safe to say that mainstream culture is somewhere past “peak woke.”

What, then, is the real Successor Ideology? The short answer might be faith — the old-fashioned kind.

We seem to be in the beginning stages of a Christian revival in the West. About 10 years ago, a new group of secular thinkers, led by the historian Tom Holland and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, began defending the civilizational value of Christianity, noting its contributions to peace, tolerance, and civil rights. After decades of more and more people coming to regard Christianity as a set of repressive superstitions, it suddenly became conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Christianity is good for people and societies.

Then, surprisingly, a number of high-profile artists and intellectuals, many of them British, started announcing their conversion (or return) to Christianity: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Russell Brand, and Nick Cave. What’s more, YouTube has exploded with Christian-curious seekers making and watching videos about “the meaning crisis.”

The open question has been this: Is this just another celebrity-fueled online fad, like cold plunges or Ozempic? Or will the people actually return to the pews? Charlie Kirk made the case on Facebook just six days before his assassination: “There is revival in the Christian church. Churches are growing. Young people are flocking to faith in God.” But this is the kind of thing that Christians are so desperate to see after decades of decline. It’s possible they’re seeing what they want to see.

Still, some data suggest the ferment is real. Consider a new report from the Bible Society purporting to show that church attendance in England and Wales has surged in recent years. Survey data from The Quiet Revival, as the report was titled, suggests that the number of churchgoing Christians in England and Wales increased to nearly 6 million last year, up from about 4 million in 2018. That’s a 56% explosion in just six years. Perhaps even more surprising, it is young men driving the growth, with 21% of 18-to-24-year-old men reporting that they go to church once a month, compared to only 12% of young women.

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“In churches across society,” the report proclaims, “something amazing is happening.”

I’m not the first person to be skeptical of the numbers. As Stephen Bullivant pointed out in First Things, the study suggests that five times as many young men are attending church relative to 2018, and at least 500,000 additional worshipers should be in the pews every week. That’s hard to square with reports of lower attendance since the pandemic.

But there is something going on, and it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in the United States. More young men are telling pollsters that they are religious, and Catholic churches are reporting higher numbers of converts. I recently spoke to two friends, a married couple, who work in ministry at a large nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. They report that the church is seeing an influx of hundreds of young people from the local colleges like the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s more men than women,” he reports. “And their faith is unusually authentic,” she adds. About half of the kids seem to come from traditional Christian families, and the other half seem to have followed a path that started online with someone like Jordan Peterson. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”

What’s weird is that secularization is continuing apace. A recent Pew poll found that the Catholic church loses eight of its faithful for every single person that joins. And the mainline Protestant churches remain mired in a precipitous decline.

Here’s a theory: secularization and re-enchantment are happening simultaneously. It’s showing up as a creative churn in the English-speaking world. As young people, especially young men, enter the church, older folks, especially women, are leaving. I wonder if one day we may be forced to retire the haggard stereotype of the “church lady” who drags her reluctant husband and kids to services every Sunday. 

But I also wonder how a church can adapt to a sanctuary filled with “church bros.” Are these men bringing with them a “rad-trad” vision of male-female relations that they picked up online? Or are they rejecting both the nihilism and the macho Nietzscheanism so common in digital spaces? Will young women follow the men back through the church doors? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Not all churches benefit from the churn. While milquetoast suburban congregations founder, two very different types of congregations are seeing growth: the first are more traditional, devout congregations in the sacramental traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy; the second are nondenominational megachurches that emphasize a personal, emotional relationship with Christ. The report from the Bible Society suggests the same thing is happening in England and Wales: Catholics and Pentecostals increase in number, while the Church of England continues to see decline.

On the ground, this can be quite disorienting. Here in Los Angeles, my family attends weekly Mass at a gorgeous Italianate church built in the Twenties. It isn’t the Latin Mass, but there is a lot of Latin in the service, and the choral hymns and organ music are defiantly traditional. On a typical Sunday, the pews are full of young families who have traveled up to an hour for this style of reverent worship. It’s often standing-room-only.

Just 10 minutes away is a nondescript Catholic church building built in the Fifties. My family visited one Sunday last year. There’s hardly any Latin, and a folksy guitar player sings modern worship songs. The vibe is eager-to-please, but whom is it pleasing? Not very many people, frankly. The sanctuary is mostly empty, and the average age is north of 60. As the young seek out tradition and transcendence, it is the older Christian generations who cling to flat modernity.

Is it possible to imagine that some new-old iteration of Christianity could evolve into a Successor Ideology that would hold our body politic together, much like liberal Protestantism did for most of the last century? Sure, it is.

Charlie Kirk’s moving memorial, with pyrotechnics and an altar call, was an unabashed mash-up of a tent revival and a MAGA campaign event. You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president. He may not preach the gospel or live a holy life. But like many a Protestant preacher, he combines elements of the prosperity gospel with the subversive instincts of a great stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings are more sober Catholic men like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

In this transitory time of social fragmentation, however, Christians aren’t the only ones searching for signs. As some look for evidence in the pews, others are looking to the polling places. Consider the joy and optimism that have greeted Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be the mayor of New York. For some Democrats, Mamdani’s win in the primary last June was a harbinger of a new, populist Left that would retain a softer woke-ism in combination with democratic socialism in the style of Bernie Sanders. They seem to imagine that this fusion could produce the true Successor Ideology.

At the same time, we are seeing a zealous, idealistic fervor erupt around artificial intelligence and the new reproductive technologies. It seems that much of Silicon Valley is converging on a kind of techno-utopianism that they envision as the engine of the next age.

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And, finally, as we are constantly reminded, you can also squint your eyes and see in Trump not an embodiment of any Christian spirit, but the prototype of a more autocratic leader tapping into a cult of personality. This path could be quite ugly, even if the risk of real fascism seems remote. And this type of leader, despite his populist promises, might be most likely to use his power to promote the interests of his cronies.

 It may be helpful here to recall what the Successor Ideology was going to replace. Since World War II, at least, the default ideology of the West was basically a form of Christian liberalism. The relative proportions of Christianity and liberalism might have fluctuated up or down a bit, but the basic throughline was there.

 This ideology made two overlapping transcendent promises: eternal life in heaven and infinite progress here on earth, thanks to the onward march of America-inspired liberal democracy. It was Christian liberalism that provided the ideological oomph for that political phenomenon often called neoliberalism.

 Between 1980 and 2010 or so, however, Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever. Its apogee was the legalization of gay marriage which swept the West in the 2010s.

 The current moment of political upheaval and social crisis is a direct result of the failure of that ideology, which eroded institutions and failed to feed the human hunger for communal transcendence. That’s why woke-ism — with its rituals of confession and penance without forgiveness — was so attractive to so many among the urban professional classes, and why it briefly felt like the thing that was going to overtake the world.

From where we stand now, it’s hard to tell exactly where we are headed.  But it’s probably safe to predict that the true Successor Ideology is going to make some sort of transcendent promise. If it is to last, it will also have to renew our institutions and our traditions. In the end, we may be left with the same choices as those who have come before us. Where will we find our transcendence — in God, in the king, in mere government, or in promethean “progress”?

 May we choose wisely.

When I first saw the sign, at the beginning of the school year, it barely caught my attention. It was typical, something you might see in any public school in America. I’m also very much in favour of being kind. But, seeing it every day for several months, it started to bug me. Is that true? Is kindness “kool”? What is the school trying to communicate here? Suddenly, the banality of the sign was precisely what made it worthy of my attention.

Let’s start with the obvious fact that, no, it isn’t always true that kindness is cool. The cool kids often act unkindly. And I can think of many scenarios in which I would want my son to be kind, even if it meant that everyone would regard him as uncool. So this seems to be a classic case of a category error: what’s moral is not always what will make you popular or cool. Perhaps we ought not to be lying to our children about the nature of good and evil.

But, I can hear you protest, surely, the sign is meant to be merely aspirational. It’s a way of saying that we hope to live in a community in which it’s cool to be kind. I fear, though, that this makes things even worse. For it seems to concede that morality is secondary to “coolness”, and all we can do is hope that the Arbiters of Cool decide to use their considerable powers to promote kindness.

And yet I think the sign hints at an even bigger problem. Like many of our cultural institutions, my son’s school seems to have elevated kindness to the top of the moral hierarchy.

Here is the school’s mission statement: “Be kind and encouraging; Accept responsibility; Respect others and be safe!” Again, utterly banal. But also wrong-headed. Kindness is not some kind of Uber Value from which all moral behaviour flows. In fact, when I think back on the acute moral crises of my life, these were the times when kindness wasn’t nearly enough, and I had to summon the courage to be unkind in order to do what was right.

My son’s school is actually quite a good school, and there are lots of strong, moral people who work there. The question is: why are they talking about morality in this depleted way? Why are their stated values so bland and so weak?

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Our public understanding of morality is in crisis. Indeed, even outside of school, we struggle to talk about morality at all. In a recent advice column in The New York Times, a reader asked whether it was okay for her adult daughter to bring her married lover on a family trip to Greece. Instead of telling the writer to keep this creep as far away from her family as possible, the NYT expert advised her to be more tolerant:

“This is about respecting your adult daughter’s choices. You have substituted your idea of happiness for hers. This is a common (and often well-intentioned) trap for many parents. It’s not productive, though… As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her.”

The phrase “not productive” is doing a lot of work here. We often now use words such as “unproductive” or “inappropriate” or “unhealthy” to describe behaviours that we want to eliminate, either in ourselves or others. But those are borrowed concepts — one from economics (“productivity”), one from etiquette (“appropriateness”), and one from medicine (“health”).

Economics, etiquette, and medicine are wonderful. I’m in favour of all three. But these are clumsy metaphors for morality, and I fear that talking this way has led us astray. For the production of something may be for good or for ill; what’s appropriate or polite may not be what is morally right; and a healthy body may be engaged in deeply immoral activities. (And, no, I’m not just talking about sex.)

I think what’s going on here is that we’ve become very uneasy about using the moral categories of the past. “Kindness” and its cousin “tolerance” are the only values that seem consistent with our current age of agnostic pluralism. We’ve also been trained to defer to an individual’s preferences, and it seems wrong to pass judgment on another person’s choices (unless, of course, they’re being “unkind”).

A certain kind of conservative sees all of this and argues that we just need to get back to the simplicity of Right vs Wrong. Perhaps all this talk of being kind, encouraging and respectful is just a muddled-up way for us to avoid making the difficult judgments about good and evil. And there’s some truth in this critique. But I also believe that “Right vs Wrong” is already an impoverished framework. Those categories are dualistic, and they imply a flat moral world in which every action can be plotted on a sort of number line and given a positive or negative value. That’s not how we experience questions of morality.

I think it’s right, though, to look back into our past. There we can rediscover the concepts of Virtue and Sin.

“What have you learned about virtues?” I asked my nine-year-old daughter last week. We have her in a small classical school that was founded by Catholic lay people. (My son is joining her there this fall.) Defiantly counter-cultural, the school has a very different approach to talking about morality. I was curious what she would say.

“I think there’s perseverance and fortitude,” she said. “And a couple others. I can’t remember.” Then a pause. “Wait, wait! I remember,” she exclaimed, breaking into a proud smile. “From my catechism!” Here she started reciting: “The three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity.”

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In the Christian tradition, there are several different lists of virtues. Kindness is one of the seven capital virtues, standing in opposition to envy, one of the seven deadly sins. The other capital virtues are: humility, temperance, chastity (not what you think it is!), patience, charity, and diligence. Other Christian formulations include things like endurance, devotion, and wisdom.

But those concepts have no place in a public school, right? We live in a multicultural society, and I probably shouldn’t have smuggled Christian values into a discussion about public morality, especially not in the public schools. (Well, except for kindness. Let’s keep that one.)

But the project of naming and defining virtues is not a uniquely Christian one. The pre-Christian Greeks talked of the four cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice. This is the list that my daughter was trying to remember. Plato adds piety. Aristotle writes of courage and truthfulness, among others. The Romans had an even longer list.

Of course, these are Western cultures. What about someone from Africa or India or China? What about a Muslim student?

You might be surprised to learn, like I was, that all of these cultures have concepts that are quite similar to the idea of Virtue. And all of them identify individual virtues that stretch far beyond the idea of kindness. India has the ideas of dharma and aram. In Ancient Egypt, the goddess Maat represented the virtues of harmony, truth, and justice. Buddhism has the Ten Perfections. In Confucianism, there are ren, xiao, and li.

I’m not an expert in the moral and ethical traditions of any of these cultures. Indeed, like almost everyone else of my generation, I went to schools — both secular and Christian — that downplayed talk of the virtues, so I don’t even have a great handle on the Greek or Christian understandings of that concept. I wish I did.

What I’m starting to realise, though, is that we need to revive the concept of Virtue if we’re going to talk clearly and accurately about morality. Pluralism itself, instead of undermining the case, demands that revival. In our effort to be culturally sensitive, we’ve purged our moral conversation of concepts that occur again and again across all the wisdom traditions of our species. We’ve created an alien life form in a petri dish, and we’ve unleashed it on our children.

We all need Virtue. And wherever you have Virtue, you also have Sin.

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Let’s look again at the school’s list: Be kind, encouraging, accept responsibility, and be safe. All good goals. But ask yourself what isn’t on their list.

What’s missing are all the virtues that have anything to do with strength or excellence: Prudence, Fortitude, Chastity, Diligence, Wisdom, Perseverance, etc. The closest the school comes to any of these is its humble request that the students “accept responsibility”. Pretty weak stuff.

To state the obvious: you can’t be a good person without being strong. You need to be strong enough to resist your own baser instincts. You need strength in order to stand up to others who are intent on doing evil. And you need discipline — daily strength — in order to do all the good that you are capable of in this world.

The Latin word virtus comes from their word for man (vir), and it originally meant a brave warrior. But it came to mean moral strength as well. This weirdly echoes with the Confucian concept of ren, which originally meant “virility” but came to encompass morality. Other cultures also link Virtue with strength and manliness. Look at the Buddhist perfections of viriya or adhiṭṭhāna. Or the Hindu concept of dhriti.

What’s wonderful about the more traditional understanding of Virtue is that it inspires. Yet this world of virtues also leaves a ton of room for complexity, for it is quite difficult to balance truthfulness and kindness, prudence and perseverance, or diligence and humility. And this is where Sin comes in.

I know, I know. We’re all uncomfortable with that word and that idea. And certainly it has been overused as a tool for denouncing other people’s behaviour. But the idea of Sin is absolutely essential for understanding yourself from the inside. To be human is to be in a constant state of Sin.

Marilyn Simon, a literature professor, has written a beautiful essay “In Praise of Sin” about the damage we do when we try to understand ourselves purely psychologically, without recourse to the idea of Sin. And James Mumford has written about his own struggles with mental illness within a health system that, on the surface, claims to deny the reality of Sin by letting each person define his own values. “When I’m feeling worthless,” Mumford tells his psychologist, “you don’t act as if values are subjective. You don’t reply, ‘Yes, you’re right. If you feel worthless, you are worthless!’”

You can’t be a full human being without acknowledging your own capacity for Sin. If we set the bar high enough, it will inspire us to moral achievements that we can only imagine. But it will also set us up for daily failure, even when we mean to do well.

We call that daily failure Sin.

I will confess here that I don’t routinely talk about Virtue and Sin with my six-year-old son. And even just this morning I told him that his behaviour was “inappropriate” before giving him a timeout for taking a swipe at his brother. It would have been passing strange for me to say: “Son, you’ve been sinful this morning.”

But I also don’t try to shield him from these ideas. In our house, we try to talk clearly and honestly about morality. The concepts of Virtue and Sin, when they aren’t explicit, are often implied. What are we striving for? And how are we falling short? As a parent, I find that I frequently need to ask my children (or my wife) for their forgiveness, for I am always falling short of my own ideal of virtuous parenting.

Two years ago, my daughter had to go to Confession for the first time, as her school made it a prerequisite for receiving her First Communion. At the time, I hadn’t yet come back to the Church myself, and it had been at least two decades since I had gone to Confession. I was quite nervous about helping my daughter prepare to acknowledge her sins and ask for God’s forgiveness.

We sat down on our couch, and we began to go through a very simple “Examination of Conscience” based on the Ten Commandments. Her teacher had given me some helpful guidance, but I found the conversation to be quite difficult. She and I both knew exactly which incidents needed to be confessed, but she had a hard time talking about them.

It’s not that she’s particularly sinful; she’s actually an incredibly good kid. And that was precisely the problem. Being good is a part of her identity, and it was very painful for her to recollect and try to talk about these incidents when she had behaved sinfully.

She started to get upset, and tears started to flow. For a moment, I thought I had messed the whole thing up. I had triggered her shame response. Maybe this was all a terrible mistake. Maybe a second-grader shouldn’t be going to Confession.

So I slowed down. I reassured her that this was a natural part of the process. It may be shameful to sin, but it’s not at all shameful to admit that we have sinned. And I reminded her of some of my own sins, all of which she was quite happy to help me remember.

In the end, she was able to write down some of her sins on the paper which she took into Confession. And, by her account, the Confession went well, and she felt so much better afterward.

The whole incident had opened my eyes. Isn’t this the danger for all of us? That our shame will prevent us from looking at our sins squarely? I was grateful for this ritual, this sacrament, that helped my daughter confront — and accept — her own shortcomings. She will often now tell me cheerfully, unprompted, that she did something that needs to be confessed.

Later that year, I went through the same process when I confessed over 20 years of sins to my priest. My life was quite rocky in the years before I met my wife, and I had been through years of therapy and confronted lots of my own “unhealthy” and “unproductive” behaviours. But now I had to be honest and clear that decades of difficulties had often been the product of my sins.

Which is why I’m going to say something now that is going to sound crazy in our current environment, perhaps even appalling. Our children, in elementary school, need to be learning about Virtue and Sin. By the third grade, they are fully capable of comprehending these ideas and applying them to their own lives. That doesn’t mean it will always be easy. Being human isn’t easy. But “Kindness is Kool” isn’t going to cut it anymore.

How can this be? The economist Arnold Kling has a theory, and it’s a doozie. If he’s right, then decades of domestic public policy have been misguided.

The unfortunate truth is that Democrats and Republicans alike, under the cover of good intentions, have been passing laws that undermine the economic well-being of American families. Even more disturbing, these policies have created a whole new class of robber barons, who rely on government policy to enrich themselves. But these new robber barons aren’t railroad tycoons or rapacious oil companies. Indeed, many of them are non-profits: they include universities and hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, K-12 school districts, and real estate investors.

What is Kling’s theory? In key sectors of the economy, he says, the US government has been, first, restricting supply and, second, subsidising demand. The effect of both is to drive prices higher. And higher. And higher.

This is how it works: Claiming to be the guardian of “quality”, policymakers put up barriers to entry, making it extremely costly, for example, to launch a new university or hospital. This is the restriction of supply. At the same time, in the name of “helping” consumers, they push billions of dollars into student loans or healthcare payments. This is the subsidisation of demand.

Kling, a former economist at the Federal Reserve, first wrote about this phenomenon in his 2016 book Specialization and Trade. “The politics are always going to push in this direction,” he told me recently.

The great irony is that the vast bulk of the subsidies end up in the hands of providers, not consumers. These service providers are the new robber barons. Look closely, for a moment, at the latest student loan bailout. Last month, President Biden announced that $6.1 billion in loans would be forgiven for former students of the Art Institutes, a shuttered scam university that had been forced to pay a legal settlement of $95 million for fraudulent recruitment practices.

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It’s easy to blame the students here. It probably wasn’t so savvy to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans for art degrees that were probably worthless. But that’s a key point, isn’t it? If the degrees are worthless, then the students didn’t really walk away with the government’s $6.1 billion.

Who did take it? The former owners of the Art Institutes. The company eventually went bankrupt, but prior owners effectively stole $6.1 billion in taxpayer money (actually, probably about twice that), and all they had to do was pay $95 million in fines to various government agencies that sued them, including the US Department of Justice.

It would be quaint to think of this as a for-profit education scandal. Quaint, but wrong. For ultimately, all of the universities, including elite colleges in the Ivy League, have reaped billions of dollars in economic rents — excess profits — from student loan programmes, even as the value of many of their degrees has fallen dramatically.

At the same time, the universities operate an accreditation system which makes it extraordinarily difficult and costly to launch a new university that might compete with them. In fact, you usually can’t get your new university accredited until four-to-six years after you open. That means that your first students aren’t eligible for federal student loans — their subsidies — until you get your accreditation. It’s a huge handicap for anyone who wants to disrupt the current oligopoly of higher education.

These dynamics play out in all of the most important sectors of our economy. In healthcare, new hospitals in many states have to apply for a “certificate of need”. Often that certificate has to be signed by the other hospitals in the area — in other words, their potential competitors. Meanwhile, federal and state governments flood the healthcare system with subsidies that increase demand and drive prices up: almost 50% of health care spending comes from governmental entities in the US.

In housing, similarly, we restrict supply by making it harder and harder to build new units, especially in city centres where demand is the highest. Meanwhile, we subsidise demand by providing government-guaranteed mortgages and by offering huge tax breaks for anyone who purchases real estate, especially investors.

And in K-12 education, school districts around the country are trying to stamp out charter schools, which increase supply, while at the same time arguing for higher and higher per-pupil spending. The cost to educate one child for one year has increased 173% (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, and half the kids still can’t read.

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The pathologies of these sectors all follow similar patterns. Politicians proclaim their desire to “protect” quality and “help” consumers. Industry lobbyists step up to write bills that restrict supply and subsidise demand. Prices go up. Providers become more and more reliant on the government for their profits. Consumers become more and more reliant on the government to afford homes, healthcare, and schools. Instead of investing in innovation, providers spend their money on political donations and lobbyists. Politicians become dependent on those donations. Consumers demand more and more help because prices are going up, and they’re getting ripped off. And the beat goes on. “It really is a self-reinforcing process,” says Kling. “People don’t understand that the subsidies drive up prices, so they keep demanding more.”

In a 2020 book, I called this phenomenon the Bleeding Heart & the Robber Baron, because it represents a political alliance between the compassionate and the greedy. It goes a long way toward explaining so much of what is wrong with American public policy and the economy. It also explains what Bloomberg has called the “chart of the century”. Below is economist Mark Perry’s infamous inflation chart, showing that certain sectors of the economy have seen dramatic inflation in recent decades, even while other sectors have seen prices decline.

The top seven components of CPI — all of them in the Bleeding Heart sectors of education, health, and housing — have seen inflation of 56-210% over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, almost all of the other sectors have seen prices remain flat or even decline by up to 90%.

Using Kling’s insights, the tech investor Marc Andreessen has labelled these Bleeding Heart sectors as the “slow” sectors. According to Andreessen, the reliance on government largesse leads to “slower productivity growth, slow adoption of new technologies… and then as a consequence of all of that, rising prices”.

Tragically, neither party wants to talk about this. Both Democrats and Republicans have participated in — and benefitted from — this new age of Robber Barons. Democrats fight new housing in the cities; they forgive student debt; they subsidise the consumption of health insurance and healthcare. Republicans, meanwhile, support big tax breaks for real=estate investors; they pass huge entitlement programmes that subsidise the purchase of subscription drugs; they back the privatisation of giant lending companies that enjoy de facto government guarantees and therefore dominate the mortgage market.

The biggest barrier to change will be those who benefit from the current policies, as many of us are addicted to one or more of these revenue streams. Providers, the modern-day Robber Barons, will resist any efforts to shut off the spigot of public subsidies. They will also fight any efforts to allow their competitors onto a level playing field. And understandably, the average American will be reluctant to give up his or her subsidies until the prices start to return to a normal level. “I wouldn’t describe the economy as addicted to it,” says Kling.  “The economy would be fine if all of it went away. But I think the political system is addicted to it.” It’s not going to be easy, but the first step for any addict is admitting that you have a problem. And Arnold Kling is telling us the truth about our problem.

In recent years, though, I’d grown disillusioned with the modern secular worldview and had started attending Mass again. Still, my scepticism of Christianity lingered, and I sure didn’t feel like I belonged in this place on this day. In the Catholic church and many others, the holy day is “celebrated” with the Stations of the Cross and the Passion Play, both re-enactments of the horrific events leading up to Christ’s death on the cross.

It was the Passion Play that got me. I had forgotten how the congregation is expected to participate in the drama. At key moments, we were asked to play the role of the murderous mob, shouting “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
How utterly bizarre this is, I thought. And heart-breaking. The Christian tradition asks us to imagine that the son of God was tortured and murdered by a bloodthirsty horde, while the apostle Peter cowered out of sight. And then it asks us to identify not with the suffering Christ, but with the vicious mob that cheers his death.

If you were a mad scientist designing a world religion in a lab, hoping that it might appeal to the masses and spread across the world, I think it’s unlikely you would have constructed it this way. What is this strange story doing?

In my search for an answer, I looked to René Girard, the French polymath who spent the last 15 years of his life at Stanford in the French Department, presumably because they couldn’t figure out where else to put him. Girard is known primarily for his theory of “mimetic desire”, the idea that human beings come to want certain things because we see other people wanting them. This is a powerful idea, and Girard uses it to develop a provocative theory of culture and violence. But it is another aspect of his thinking that got my attention.

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Girard defied the reigning spirit of agnostic Jungianism in the humanities. It was fashionable, in his day, to look for the similarities between different world cultures. Joseph Campbell, for example, sought to prove that myths from around the world all tapped into the same archetypes, participating in the one great “monomyth” that shapes all of us. George Lucas used these ideas to create Star Wars, a mythology that has overtaken the world in the past 40 years. It was the perfect theology for a non-judgmental, multicultural age.

But Girard says, no, all these myths are not the same. In paganism and other archaic religions, mythology is used to uphold the existing social order, justifying whatever violent acts brought it into being. Indeed, for Girard, every social order — not just every government, but every human culture throughout all of space and time — is founded on violence. It is only Judaism and Christianity that expose this violence as unjustified or sinful. For this reason, he believed that there is something fundamentally different — even subversive — about the Judeo-Christian worldview. It represented a revolutionary break from the past.

You can see this in Genesis. The story of Cain and Abel, in Girard’s view, depicts the murder of an innocent victim as the founding act of human civilisation. After killing his brother in cold blood, Cain goes on to found a city. It is the first example of “scapegoating”, the process by which we identify and then expel or kill an individual victim, cementing the bonds that tie us together as a community.

The story also illustrates Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire”. It is, after all, Cain’s desire for the approval of God — a desire which he shares with Abel — that is thwarted, sparking his jealous, murderous rage. Girard traces these patterns throughout the Hebrew Bible in the stories of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, the Hebrew prophets, and the Suffering Servant. Indeed, the crucifixion of Christ echoes the murder of Abel — though in this case, the church says that all of us are complicit in the death of Jesus.

As a younger man, I was always sceptical of the doctrine of Original Sin. Why are these people trying to convince me that I harbour evil in my heart? All things considered, I’m a pretty good person, aren’t I? Yet as the years have passed, I’ve come to believe that an individual’s capacity for evil should never be underestimated, and that includes my own.

But Girard’s interpretation of Original Sin is more complex. Simply by participating in our culture, by being a member of a human society, we are all partaking in the violence upon which that society or culture was built. Judaism and Christianity work to expose the scapegoating mechanism by revealing the victim to be innocent. But that doesn’t mean the danger is gone.

Girard would be the first to admit that Jews and Christians are not immune from scapegoating, despite the subversive nature of their stories. What’s more, by showing the victim to be blameless and the crowd to be guilty, the Judeo-Christian tradition weakens the very mechanism which had previously been used to safeguard public order. In recent years, it seems that Judeo-Christian ideals have been used to undermine all forms of social bonds, including Judaism and Christianity themselves. Myths and customs that have been passed on for thousands of years have been discarded as superstitious, judgmental, and chauvinistic. But, if Girard is right, these ancient stories and rituals served to help us process our most murderous instincts. In their absence, can we keep those instincts at bay?

Though he died in 2015, I doubt Girard would be surprised by the cruelty of today’s political climate. On both the Right and the Left, there are efforts to demonise the opposition and to expel or eliminate those who pose a threat to a particular worldview. Girard even predicted the emergence of a “super-Christianity” , which reduces everything to oppression and victimisation. “This, I think, is the totalitarianism of the future,” he told Canadian journalist David Cayley. “Marxism was its most primitive form probably.”

For a civilisation rooted in Christianity like ours, the current rise in antisemitism is a special cause for concern, for it can be an early warning sign that we are entering a potentially dangerous phase of scapegoating. It is always tempting for the Christian (or perhaps even the post-Christian) to believe that it was the Jews who killed Christ, and we had nothing to do with it.

Girard is fascinating to me, but I confess that I don’t find much comfort or cover in his ideas. There are forces at work in the world that we can only perceive dimly, if at all. And Girard gives me all the more reason to quail at the thought of Christ’s Passion. Saying “Crucify him!” out loud in a church full of believers only serves to remind me that I, too, am complicit in the sins of mankind.