Do Scapegoats Purify America? No. Scapegoating turns the nation into a pitiless mob.
We are writing a new chapter in the American story. On the surface, we are Making America Great Again by purifying the nation. DOGE purifies America by firing “lunatics” at USAID, canceling food deliveries to starving populations in Sudan and rescue operations in Myanmar. The House of Representatives is purifying America by preparing articles of impeachment against rogue “progressive” judges who block the president’s agenda. A presidential order denies federally funded health care for transgender persons in order to protect women from “gender ideology extremism.” The president is also purifying America by deporting rapists, murderers, and members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
What is the mechanism of this purification? The public theologian has a label for it: self-justification and scapegoating (Peters 1993). We begin by cursing the scapegoat. When we curse the scapgoat for being unjust, evil or weak, we identify ourselves as just, good, and strong. Such cursing is the first act of self-justification. The second act is to purge the social order of the scapegoat. The third act is to feel purer, even stronger. The final product is a fascist society.
Yale philosopher Jason Stanley refers to this cursing as representation. When a civil servant can rightfully be cursed for being a “lunatic” or a judge being a “progressive,” this justifies the next step, namely, treating the scapegoat violently. Spanish speaking immigrants are being cursed as criminals and then chained and humiliated before being deported.
“The representation of immigrants as dangerous criminals justifies the practice of penning them in large prison-like centers; once they are there, the fact that they are imprisoned leads some to conclude that they must be dangerous” (Stanley 2024, 1).
If dangerous, Spanish speakers become subject to arrest and sent to Guantanamo or El Salvador. As cursed, such criminals have no right to due process under the law. Without due process, many non-criminals are swept up in the raid and disappear.
Once fired, impeached, deprived of health care, or deported, the rest of us Americans now feel a great deal purer. Right? The scapegoat has born our stains away.
Remind me again: just how does purification work?
Human communities scapegoat in order to purify themselves. Each human community wants to see itself without blemish, stain, sin, evil, disease, or self-destructive violence.
In ancient Israel, the scapegoat bore the sins of Israel away on the Day of Atonement.
“Thus he shall make atonement for the sanctuary, because of the uncleanness of the people of Israel….Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task.” (Leviticus 16:16a, 21)
By cursing the living goat and sending the cursed animal into the wilderness, the “uncleanness of the people of Israel” could be atoned for. Once the scapegoat was gone, then the remaining community could deem itself pure.
Jews today remember this as Yom Kippur, described beautifully by Delisa Hargrove.
Also today, the United States practices a corrupt variant of this atonement ritual by firing, impeaching, and deporting countless scapegoats. If the reader is interested, the late Stanford University professor of literature, René Girard, lucidly describes the otherwise hidden way the scapegoat mechanism fools a society into believing it is pure.
Fascists purify their nation-states by scapegoating
Jewish philosopher Jason Stanley has been driven off the Yale faculty by the White House attempt to silence the kind of critical thinking that takes place on university campuses. Professor Stanley will leave the country to teach in Canada, at Toronto’s Muck School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Here’s what Stanley says about fascists that is instructive for out topic here.
“…for fascists, being political means defining oneself against an enemy. As such, fascist regimes selectively disenfranchise certain segments of their population and violently cast them into…semi-citizenship in order to emphasize the virtue and worth of the dominant group….fascists are led to take joy in cruelty against those outside this group, and others who stand to benefit from greater equality” (Stanley 2024, 2-3).
Here is the take home message. If you whole-heartedly believe in human equality and repudiate the scapegoating of selected groups, then you should anticipate becoming a scapegoat too. That’s another way fascism purifies the nation.
Cruelty versus Compassion
On Friday, March 28, 2025, a 7.7 earthquake shook Myanmar and Thailand. As of this writing, 2056 people are dead. Many others still buried beneath rubble.
Ordinarily, such disasters are met within hours by a highly professional US response and rescue team. Not this time. On this occasion, a so-called “lunatic” USAID official announced: “The U.S. no longer has the tools or personnel to respond when a global neighbor requests it.”
Fortunately, the government of China immediately sent a rescue contingent to the site of greatest damage. When my beloved wife, Karen, heard this on the news, she wept profusely. This is not the America she grew up in. She also quietly thanked God for the Chinese.
The pitiless mood of cruelty permeating Washington these days is incompatible with Christian values and, to be sure, traditional American values. This is the case regardless of whether or not the MAGA-Moscow wing of the Republican party identifies as religious. Patheos blogger Henry Karlson gets it right, I think.
“No society which shows great contempt to the poor and oppressed can be said to represent Christian values. No matter how much they like to say they are Christian, no matter how much they will true to use the Christian faith, and say they will be blessed by God, they stand against God and resemble the false prophets which the prophets in Scripture criticized time and time again.”
In purifying America, the expelled scapegoats have borne away America’s commitment to justice, mercy, and compassion.
Conclusion
Do scapegoats purify America? No. If anything, self-justification and scapegoating turn the nation into a pitiless mob.
If members of the Christian community believe the lies used to curse USAID workers, federal judges, transgenders, and Spanish speaking immigrants, then they may become complicit in the scapegoat mechanism. I believe it would be a gesture of bad faith to curse today’s scapegoats under the false belief that scapegoating could possibly purify America and make it great again.
Recall Jesus’ depicting the Final Judgment in Matthew 25.
“Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:34-36).
No self-justification here. No scapegoating here. No purification here. Only compassion and inclusion.
Patheos PT 3264 Do Scapegoats Purify America?
Substack PT 3258. Has the Rolling Coup D’etat begun?
Substack Pt 3259. Washington’s Coming Techno-Monarchy
Substack Pt 3260. Plundering Social Security
Substack PT 3262. DOGE Fires the Holy Spirit
References
Peters, Ted. 1993. Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society. Grand Rapids MI: Wm B Eerdmans.
Stanley, Jason. 2024. Erasing History: How Fascits Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. New York: Atria/One Signal .
For Patheos, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union. He co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, with Robert John Russell on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and blog site.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In