This is the first part of a Two Part essay.
You can listen to an audio version of both parts here.
I. Our Political Religion
These days there seems to be no shortage of pundits and would-be philosophers bemoaning the influence of religion on modern Western politics. Each of them, when making a coherent argument, makes the same argument: matters of policy should be determined by verifiable facts, not irrational fears and superstitions. I must confess that on this point I agree with them.
Given that I am a Roman Catholic who takes his religion seriously, this may seem surprising at first glance. However, I cannot deny the facts: the American Republic and nearly all of Western Europe have been overtaken by a particularly insidious breed of superstition, one that is uncompromising in its beliefs and militant in its attitude towards nonbelievers. It does not tolerate dissent, nor rational discussion, nor allow any area of society to be outside the judgement of its magisterium. Worst of all, despite the good will and best intentions of many of its adherents, it has brought little but anger and strife to our political discourse.
I am referring, of course, to the Cult of Adolf Hitler.
To clarify, I am not referring to any sort of pseudo-church that sees Hitler as a deity, demigod, or demiurge. I am also not referring to any group that, while denying any claims of his divinity, holds that he was some sort of saint or guru, or any sort of model of good behavior (though sadly, I am certain such groups exist). I am not even referring to white supremacists of any kind, nor any group who shares his reprehensible views on race. In fact, the sort of devout believer to which I am referring would be offended and scandalized to be associated with the man in any way, shape or form, save as an eternal adversary.
What, then, do I mean by the Cult of Adolf Hitler?
Imagine a professed Christian who speaks very little of Christ but talks at great length of the devil. Their favorite, or at least most quoted, Bible verses always seem to involve either the punishment of the damned or the craftiness of the devil, or the oracles of the prophets denouncing the wicked. They always appear both frightened and angry, fearing demonic influence from the most mundane things.
It would be wrong to describe such a person as a Satanist. It might be fair, however, to say that fear of Satan holds more weight in their mind than the love of Christ.
This is what I mean by the Cult of Adolf Hitler: an effortless mode of behavior and thought that treats Hitler not as a mere man, a murderous dictator in a century full of murderous dictators, but as an incarnation of an immortal evil that may return at any time, wearing a new face, weaving new lies, and murdering new victims. To the devotees of his cult, he is an object of ever-present fear, a devil in a world without God.
II. Rene Girard and the Scapegoat: How Gods are Made
If a Cult of Hitler of the sort I propose does exist, the question naturally arises: how did such a cult come to exist? This begs the question of how any cult comes to exist. For that, we must turn to the late Rene Girard, former Stanford Professor and one of France’s legendary Immortals. Girard is best known for his theory of contagious desires, which he calls “mimetic theory.” According to this theory, all of our desires beyond basic survival instincts are not inborn but learned from others. Just as we learn behaviors by observing and imitating others, so do we form our desires and values by (consciously or unconsciously) imitating the desires and values of others. This is a continuous, life long process, and in itself is harmless.
The trouble arises when the objects desired by an ever-increasing number of people are limited in quantity. Only one candidate can be hired to a particular job. Only one team can win the championship. A woman may wed only one suitor, no matter how many come to call.
It should come as no surprise that such situations of scarcity lead to rivalry and, all too often, violence. Girard observed, however, that imitation of behavior and desire is still present, even in adversarial relationships. The rivals, unconsciously, continue to model themselves after each other. In fact, the more they try to become unlike each other, the more similar their behavior becomes. As the rivals continue to act as obstacles for each other, their hatred and obsession with each other intensifies to the point that the original object of desire is forgotten: only the possession and destruction of the rival can bring fulfillment.
As anyone who has endured a spat among friends, family, or coworkers knows, this rivalry does not take place in isolation. Because desires are contagious, others near the conflict will be drawn into it, taking one side or the other, or perhaps even making their own claim for the desired object. This only intensifies the conflict and the probability of violence.
Of course, in a stable society with strong institutions to maintain law and order, there is only so much damage that such a quarrel can inflict. But suppose law and order have already broken down? Such a conflict, such raging rivalries and hatreds, could potentially destroy the entire community.
Girard’s research presents our ancestors in such a situation: proto-communities tearing each other apart and, unlike their animal cousins, unable and unwilling to put the brakes on their aggressions. Humanity might have destroyed itself in its infancy, if not for a momentous, accidental discovery.
In any human community, the more uniformity is aspired to, the more noticeable any differences become, no matter how minute. Even in normal circumstances, any person with a physical deformity, different ethnicity, or who belongs to a minority religion sticks out. But in the scenario just described, when society has broken down in an all against all mimetic rivalry, outsiders draw even more attention to themselves. Agitated and eager for peace to be restored, the crowd turns on the outsider, blaming them for the whole affair. What follows is all too predictable: the outsider, now a scapegoat, is either expelled from the community or, more likely, murdered by the mob.
The murder of the scapegoat proves cathartic, and peace is restored. The community, not understanding what has happened, begins to associate the victim not only with the chaos it supposedly caused, but with the peace that resulted from its death. The victim, they conclude, must be more than human; they must be divine. This notion is reinforced when the next crisis comes about and, to prevent another violent outbreak, a new victim is sacrificed in the same manner, with the same results. The original victim is elevated to godhood, worshiped with ritual slaughter of human and/or animal substitutes commemorating the original crime (what Girard calls the “founding murder”), and a new society is born. According to Girard’s theory, this same process, repeated in countless variations, is the origin of archaic religion and blood sacrifice, and indeed of all human culture.
At this point the fashionable religious skeptic will comment on the similarities between this story and the death of Christ, and pompously conclude that one is no different from the other. According to Girard, our skeptic is correct in noting the similarities between the two accounts but draws the wrong conclusion. The chief difference between the two lies in the perspective of the story. According to the pagan myth, the “god” is guilty as charged. In the Gospel, the Victim is innocent. This cannot be overstated. (Compare, for example, the story of Cain and Abel with the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus. Both Cain and Romulus murder their brothers, but Romulus is portrayed as the hero). It is only because we have spent the past 1500 years marinating in the shadow of the Innocent Victim that we see through the illusion that so beguiled our pagan forebears. We look on the murder of Jews blamed for the Black Death as a ghastly crime of bigotry, not as a reasonable assumption. Our very use of the term “witch hunt” shows that we assume such things are a farce.
Unfortunately, Christians, being human, are not immune from scapegoating, as countless historical examples show. Furthermore, it could be argued either way whether a culture in which Christian truths are assumed to be self-evident makes a people more or less likely to scapegoat. What does seem self-evident is that a society broken loose from its traditional religious moorings is fertile ground for the emergence of new cults.
III. The Character of Archaic Gods: Satan Driving Out Satan
Just as our long history of (at least) cultural Christianity has allowed us to pierce the veil of illusion surrounding the scapegoat, it has also made almost incomprehensible how our pagan ancestors viewed their gods. The very word “God” conjures in a typical Western man a plethora of images of a benevolent celestial Father, looking down on his children with loving affection. If such a man is a Christian, he will also recall images of Jesus meek and mild, dying for the salvation of Man, so full of compassion that He begs forgiveness for the very people who kill Him.
It would not be so for an archaic pagan. For while the Christian worships an innocent God condemned as a criminal, the pagan worships a god who is a criminal. (Indeed, the very character of the vast majority of pagan gods of any tradition seems proof enough of Girard’s theory.) Imagine paying worship to Zeus, a deity who had not only violently usurped Lordship of the Universe from his father but had fathered numerous children from adulterous affairs with mortal women, and who could just as soon as rape your daughter (or son) as grant your prayer for a good harvest. Imagine a universe with Selene, the Greek Moon Goddess, who put a mortal shepherd boy into an immortal sleep simply because she took a fancy to him (this did not stop her from having children with him). Imagine living in Pagan Scandinavia, where men who practiced seiðr magic were condemned as unmanly deviants, yet supreme homage was paid to Odin, who practiced the same sort of magic (with the same unmanly overtones). Imagine the sort of gods who would delight in hearts ripped out atop Aztec Temples, widows burning alive on Hindu burial pyres, and babies being tossed screaming into bull shaped ovens on the high places of Canaan.
These gods may have inspired fear and respect in their suppliants, but I find it hard to believe they were loved in the same way a Christian loves Christ. If the Christian prayer is “Come near, Lord Jesus,” the pagan prayer might have been “Stay far away, Lord Zeus.” The myriad of sacrifices offered in pagan worship would be less acts of love and more acts of necessity: bribes offered to the Celestial Mob Boss to keep him from revisiting the original chaos and violence on the community.
Offering adoration to such contemptible beings brings about a great deal of cognitive dissonance, and pagan cultures dealt with this in a variety of ways. Some, like Carthage, were content worshiping devils, so long as the ships came in on time and the harvest was good. Some of these, like the Aztecs, claimed dire necessity: the gods would die unless fed with human blood, and with their death would come the end of the universe. Others, like the Zoroastrians and Manicheans of Persia, split the god in two: one good and one evil, forever in opposition to each other. Still more, like the Greeks and Norse took a middle road, exonerating some of their gods and heroes and creating new gods or monsters to take the blame for their misdeeds (See, for example, the story of Loki killing Balder, which Girard sees as an attempt to take the focus off the crowd of gods who were throwing things at Baldur when he died. In the Greek case, see how often Heracles’s violent fits are blamed on madness sent by Hera).
Beneath all the revisions and rationalizations, however, one stark fact remains: the community is trying to bring peace by calling upon and harnessing the very power that nearly destroyed the community in the first place. They are fighting fire with fire, and in this case, it is Hellfire. They are, to use the words of Jesus, using Satan to drive out Satan.
Now as Jesus is recorded saying in the Gospel of Matthew, “If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then shall his kingdom stand?” (Matthew 12:26). But it seems that the kingdom does stand, for it was by this process that human society as we know it was formed in the first place. And yet, even a cursory glance reveals the contradiction, the fault lines in the foundations of the community. For what was once universally despised is now universally adored. What was contemptible is now in command. What was slain by human hands is now resurrected in human minds, enthroned beyond their reach above every human authority.
And yet the community’s morals do not change, at least not overnight. But human beings naturally look up at the powerful and successful and imitate their behavior, and there is none more powerful or successful than a god. We know very little about the community that killed the man who became Zeus, save that they must have regarded rape, adultery, and sodomy as horrible crimes. But we do know quite a bit about the communities that worshiped Zeus for centuries: particularly, we know that married women were confined upstairs in the house while her husband and his male friends held symposium parties downstairs, in which the only women invited were entertainers and prostitutes. We know that pederasty was not only common but expected. We know that women were given out to male soldiers as prizes in war. And we know that trope of jealous Hera trying to kill one of Zeus’s bastards is so common in Greek myth as to be cliché.
In other words, the society that killed Zeus not only worships him, but has been remade in his image. The people have become the very thing their ancestors hated.
IV. Hitler as the Founding Murder
I believe that Adolf Hitler is the Founding Murder, and thus the primary god, of the modern age. To qualify as a Founding Murder, five criteria must be met:
1. The victim must be killed in a time of crisis
2. The victim must be universally despised, such that even mutual enemies can unite against him
3. The victim must be accused of monstrous crimes, well beyond what is considered ordinary evil
4. The victim must be publicly killed by the community
5. The victim’s death results in the birth of a new social, cultural, and/or political order
Hitler obviously meets the first three criteria. If World War II is not a crisis, nothing is. He was certainly despised by his rapidly increasing number of enemies, and accused of monstrous crimes (Indeed, his real crimes were even more horrid than his enemies had imagined).
As for dying publicly, it is true that Hitler shot himself in a bunker, hidden from public view. However, the state he created in his own image was destroyed on the world stage. The lynching, in this case, was done by armies rather than a village mob; the difference is only one of scale.
As to the last criteria, one has only to consider the number of international organizations that sprang up in the aftermath of World War II (The United Nations, the Warsaw Pact, NATO, etc.) and the institutions that they replaced (The European Empires and the League of Nations, for example) to see its validity. Even common terms we use to describe nations, such as First World and Third World, refer to the international order formed immediately after the war. (For reference: First World = Capitalist, Second World = Communist, Third World = Unaligned).
Furthermore, Hitler and the Nazis have left an indelible mark on our popular and political culture. Though it may be considered bad form, calling a political opponent a Nazi or comparing a politician from a rival party to Hitler is so common as to be unremarkable. As for entertainment, Nazis or pseudo-Nazis are stock villains for everything from action movies to serious dramas to video games. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for instance, is about school-aged children fighting against Wizard Hitler and his Wizard Nazis. George Lucas’ Star Wars and its many sequels revolve around a plucky group of Rebels fighting against Space Wizard Hitler and his Space Nazis (who are even called Stormtroopers). Interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien spilled much ink to convince his critics and fans that Lord of the Rings was not about the Nazis or World War II. This notion has yet to die off. It seems only natural to us that any great story of good triumphing over evil must really be about the time we all came together and destroyed Hitler.