French theorist Renée Girard, in his influential 1972 study Violence and the Sacred, argued that the origins of human religion are rooted in the ever-present threat of all-consuming, retributive violence: “Vengeance . . . is an interminable repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy,and that is why it is universally proscribed. . . . The danger of interminable escalation remains” (14-17). There were, after all, no courts nor legal systems in so-called “primitive” communities; if someone was killed, the only recourse to justice would be for the victim’s kinsman to kill the murderer in retaliation–which would in turn cause that victim’s kinsman to retaliate in kind–which would promptly provoke further retaliations until one or both communities were consumed and eradicated entirely with ever-escalating violence. (This, of course, is the central leitmotif of the Book of Mormon, but more on that in a moment.)

According to Girard, the only manner by which to short-circuit the interminable cycle of all-consuming violence is the pharmakos, a Greek term, defined as both the poison and the cure (hence the root for “pharmacology”); in other words, the scapegoat that is sacrificed for the larger good of the community. In Girard’s model, violence arises specifically out of the competition for the same resources between rivals sharing the same mimetic desires, each of whom sees the other as the “monstrous double” of themselves. That monstrosity must therefore be transferred from each other to a scapegoat to prevent further violence. Says Girard: “the sacrificial process furnishes an outlet for those violent impulses that cannot be mastered by self- restraint. . . . the sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence by keeping vengeance in check” (18). The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, “the Lamb of God,” according to Girard, would be the premier examples of a pharmakos that short-circuits the cycle of retributive vengeance not just for a local community, but for everyone, but infinitely.

Girard, incidentally, converted from agnosticism to French Catholicism in 1961 after reading the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevski; unlike so many of his other French high-theorist peers of the post-war period, he wrote on religion not from the clinical remove of the anthropologist nor the critical gaze of the atheist philosopher, but as a believer grappling with the larger ramifications of his faith.

Not that his religious faith disproves his theories, on the contrary: a cursory gaze at the present state of the world would seem to confirm Girard right. Certainly the latest war between Israel and Palestine arises specifically out of the competition for the same scarce resources (in this case, who gets access to the very limited real estate in the so-called “Holy Land”) between rivals sharing the same mimetic desires, each of whom sees the other as the monstrous double of themselves. As defenders of the Palestinian side have repeatedly argued, it is just as anti-Semitic to call for the extermination of the Palestinians as to call for the extermination of the Jews, because the Arabs are also Semites. For that matter, both the Palestinians and the Israelis are adherents of Abrahamic monotheistic religions with strong religious connections to Jerusalem. That is, what each side finds so monstrous in the other isn’t in how they are different, but in how they are exactly the same.

Nor is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unique in this regard: the Serbian and Croatian languages for example are mutually intelligible–they are more closely related than, say, Spanish and Portuguese–yet these two neighbors in the former-Yugoslavia positively hate each other. In Northern Ireland, one can tell whether you were raised Protestant or Catholic based on how one pronounces the letter “h”–something that an outsider can’t even hear, yet which a local must be absolutely wary of lest they wander into the wrong neighborhood and get stabbed–for when two groups are so identical, the smallest differences become magnified into monstrosity. Most Westerners couldn’t tell a Tajik from an Uzbek if their life depended on it, yet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are sworn enemies. Hindi and Urdu, the two official languages of India and Pakistan respectively, are orally identical (they only have different writing systems), yet Pakistan and India have full-scale nuclear arsenals pointed at each other in Mutually Assured Destruction. For that matter, the United States and the Russian Federation are both continent-spanning global powers with full-scale nuclear arsenals pointed at each other as well (not to mention both being nominally-democratic governments in the pockets of local billionaire oligarchs, both featuring horrific recent histories of foreign interventionism, hyper-nationalistic fetishizing of WWII, and etc.); what fills these two nations with such deep antipathy towards each other is arguably in how alike they are, not in how different.

I need to be careful here, because I am wary of invoking some overly-simplistic and reductive both-siderism that flattens and ignores the still-very-real differences between each of the sides just cited, as though one group in each of these conflicts didn’t have very real and legitimate grievances against the other, or as though that there wouldn’t be genuinely negative consequences if one particular side were allowed to prevail over the other (certainly I’m grateful that the USA, not the USSR, won the Cold War, for example). I would hope that the past couple decades of national and world history would’ve dispelled forever the juvenile notion that “both sides are exactly the same.” It really does matter who wins, at least sometimes.

But in either case, Girard’s point isn’t that one side might not have a genuinely better cause than the other, but rather that a certain point in the endlessly escalating violence, righteousness of cause ceases to matter. Our own Book of Mormon is a premier example of the same: we will recall that it concerns two ancient civilizations that were completely and genocidally wiped off the face of the earth. Although Mormon is careful to emphasize that the Nephites were “inspired by a better cause” (Alma 43:45) in the times of his hero Captain Moroni, by the time his own son Moroni was born, the distinctions between Nephites and Lamanites had long ceased to matter: “notwithstanding this great abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people” (Moroni 9:9). The D&C itself warns us moderns against becoming “as the Nephites of old,” for we are in the same position today. One could argue that the thesis of the Book of Mormon is identical to Renée Girard’s Violence and the Sacred: that all of human civilization is at constant risk of total self-destruction, unless we all accept the intercession of the pharmakos–namely, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the poison and the cure that short-circuits the constant cycle of retributive violence.

I was reminded of Girard just recently, during the hullabaloo of the LDS Church finally acquiring the Kirtland Temple from the Community of Christ (née RLDS Church), of all things.

The rivalry between the so-called “Brighamites” and “Josephites” has thankfully never gotten anywhere close to violent. This is indisputably a good thing! Yet I am also unable to shake the feeling that many on the LDS side (I don’t have near enough experience to speak for the CoC) has perpetually looked askance at the CoC as a low-key monstrous double of itself–a Mormon sect that is almost like the Utah variant, but not quite–and therefore a Girardian rival for the same scarce resources: for converts, for divine approval, for the Kirtland Temple itself. No matter how much the First Presidency’s press release of the purchase tried to play down any animosity between the two churches, no matter how many internal memos have clearly instructed Church employees to “not spike the football” about the purchase, no matter how utterly inoffensive the CoC itself may be just in general, that has not prevented many rank-and-file LDS members from celebrating to an unseemly degree the purchase of the Kirtland Temple, as though there were something validating about this purchase, as though we were getting revenge on them for having the temerity to own the Kirtland Temple in the first place!

Yet ironically, this celebratory attitude betrays a perverse level of insecurity on the part of many of the faithful–an unconscious feeling that if we didn’t possess the Kirtland Temple directly, then our claims to divine authority must necessarily be incomplete and tenuous. For these people, the LDS Church’s ability to buy out the CoC seemed to validate our truth claims–which again, ironically gives away that so many of us don’t fully trust our own truth claims to begin with, not really. For if the positions were removed–if it was the CoC that had millions of members and billions of dollars while the LDS were struggling for solvency (as it did in the ’60s)–it would not make their church anymore “true” or ours any less so.

The history of religion (as is also found found in our own Book of Mormon) is replete with figures who were content to be the only faithful believer alive, to glory in being of the poor of the earth, while all the world lied in sin and darkness; an orthodoxy of one was still greater than an apostasy of everyone. Neither Lehi nor Nephi nor Alma nor any of them ever cared that they were definitely in the minority, or were definitely the ones without the wealth. Each of our church’s respective bank reserves and membership rolls are utterly irrelevant, because it is ultimately still the Holy Spirit alone that converts–not numbers, not property, and certainly not portfolios.

Such a reliance on wealth and numbers to establish divine authority also betrays a lack of faith in Christ Himself–He who multiplied the fishes and the loaves, who called on the rich young man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor and he would have treasures in heaven–as we scrounge hungrily for resources He clearly intended for all of us to share and share alike. If, as Girard taught, the pharmakos was necessary to short-circuit the endless cycle of retributive violence–and if violence always arises in competition for scarce resources–then the infinite Atonement of Christ is essential because it eliminates the very categories of scarcity and “rivals” altogether. It is why we are to love our enemies, because we in reality have none. The Community of Christ, I hope it goes without saying, is not our “monstrous double,” but fellow children of God and hence potential-inheritors of the inexhaustible riches of Eternity. Let us treat not only them but all peoples with the same love and humility, lest we really do become as the Nephites of old…