Christopher’s Substack
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Pastor Chris White says to all of you: HELLO MY FRIENDS. May the Lord bless you today.
HOLA MIS AMIGOS. Que el Señor los bendiga.
Scapegoating is one of humanity’s most reliable social technologies. It appears wherever people gather in sufficient numbers and remains popular because it is cheap, emotionally satisfying, and almost entirely ineffective.
It follows a familiar syllogism:
- Our group was once happy, or at least we remember it that way.
- Our current misery seems to coincide with you—your arrival, your behavior, or your failure to behave properly or at least like we do.
- Therefore, the most efficient path back to our happiness is to blame you, correct you, or remove you.
On rare occasions, this logic is true and straightforward. Much more often, it requires a generous rearranging of facts, memories, and timelines to make the conclusion feel respectable rather than merely vengeful.
As a clergy person, I’ve seen this logic play out regularly in couples counseling. “I used to be happy until we got married. Now I’m miserable. If only he would change—or she would leave—I could finally be myself again.” The marriage becomes a crime scene, and the spouse is already guilty.
The same dynamic unfolds in dysfunctional families. One member quietly absorbs the role of the problem. If only Junior would try harder, clean up more, behave better, motivate themselves, stop that, or start this, marry someone nicer—then familial harmony would return. The family problem depends on Junior’s failure; without it, everyone else would have to look in the mirror.
Societies do the same thing, just with better slogans. Outsiders, newcomers, and immigrants make excellent scapegoats: they look different, speak differently, and cannot easily defend themselves with institutional power. Their very visibility becomes evidence of guilt.
Human history offers no shortage of examples. Whenever fear rises and explanations run thin, blame reliably flows downhill toward the most vulnerable available target. . Violence follows soon after, often wearing the respectable clothing of tradition, security, or moral clarity.
A remote historical example of this is the pogroms against Jewish communities during the Black Plague of the Middle Ages. They came to the community well after everyone else did because of ceremonial practices related to their religion. The Gentile community, not understanding where the plague came from, thought perhaps this outside group was poisoning the water. They had nothing to do with the problem but were targeted because of their difference in practice even though they too were suffering the same problems as the rest of the populace.
Why Scapegoating Feels So Good (and frankly, So Right)
Scapegoating survives because it meets several deeply human needs at once, like some sort of spiritual fast-food combo meal: quick, comforting, and 100% bad for us.
First, it offers moral simplicity in complex situations.
Most of life’s problems are fairly intricate. They involve history, systems, mixed motives, bad luck, personal failures, misunderstandings, unintended consequences, and the slow erosion of things we once took for granted. Scapegoating cuts through all that complexity with a certain kind of elegance. Suddenly, the story has a clear plot, a clear cause, and—best of all—a name and face we can point to.
Second, scapegoating provides emotional relief without personal responsibility.
It allows us to discharge anger, grief, and shame without the messy inconvenience of self-examination. We get the relief of expression without the risk of confession. Instead of asking, What did I contribute to this? or What have I lost that I haven’t mourned?, we ask the far more energizing question: Who did this to me?
Blame feels like we’ve accomplished something. We feel lighter—not because anything was actually healed, but because we successfully relocated the weight of responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders.
Third, scapegoating creates group cohesion through shared hostility.
Few things unite people faster than a common enemy. Scapegoating turns diffuse anxiety into social glue. Suddenly, we are us because we are not them. Agreement is no longer required on values, goals, or solutions—only on who is to blame.
This is why scapegoating often masquerades as solidarity. It feels like belonging. But it is a sad kind of unity, sustained by mutual resentment. The group holds together precisely as long as the scapegoat remains available to absorb its tensions.
Taken together, scapegoating functions as a shortcut around grief, guilt, and fear. It spares us the slow work of naming loss, acknowledging limitations, or facing our own complicity. Instead of sitting with grief and sorrow, we prosecute someone. Instead of naming fear, we rehearse certainty.
Scapegoating works because it turns anxiety into certainty and shame into righteousness. It does not solve the problem, but it does solve the feeling—at least temporarily. And for many of us, that feels close enough to salvation.
The only thing more dangerous than scapegoating is the comforting belief that we would never use one (or be one!).
Scapegoating and Accountability
The biblical tradition is painfully honest about this human impulse. Leviticus does not pretend that scapegoating is rare or exotic; it assumes it as a human reality. Once a year, Israel enacted the drama liturgically. A goat was selected, hands were laid upon its head, sins were named aloud, and the animal was sent into the wilderness bearing the accumulated weight of their communal failure (Leviticus 16). The ritual worked precisely because everyone knew what was happening. Guilt was being transferred. Blame was being displaced. The community could breathe lighter again.
What is striking is that the goat was never confused with the cause of the problem. No one claimed the animal deserved this. The ritual was not an act of moral confusion but an act of symbolic mercy—an acknowledgment that sin, once released, must go somewhere. In this circumstance, into the wilderness which would be the modern equivalent of being sent to oblivion (think deep space or the bottom of the ocean).
Christian theology makes an astonishing claim: that this ancient pattern reaches its fulfillment not in another goat, but in a willing person. Christ does not become the scapegoat because he is guilty, incompetent, or foreign. He becomes the scapegoat precisely because he is innocent. He absorbs what we cannot face without deflecting it onto someone weaker, nearer, or more convenient.
This is where the story becomes uncomfortable for modern readers. The cross does not validate our habit of blame; it exposes it. Christ refuses to pass suffering downstream. He breaks the cycle by taking responsibility for what he did not cause—so that we might finally take responsibility for what we did.
Which leaves us with an unsettling question. If God in Christ absorbs blame rather than assigning it, what does that say about our eagerness to locate “the problem” everywhere except the mirror? When we feel that familiar itch—If only they would change, leave, fail, or disappear—are we reenacting the old ritual without the honesty of naming it?
The gospel does not deny that things are wrong. It denies that our unhappiness can be cured by sacrificing someone else. The work it calls us to is slower and far less satisfying in the short term: self-examination, confession, repentance, and the courage to remain present when blame would be easier.
Scapegoats promise relief. Christ offers transformation. One lets us feel righteous without changing; the other insists that healing begins when we stop asking, Who ruined this for me? and start asking, What am I refusing to see?
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” (Matt. 6:12)
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