The Scapegoat Reflex
In the mid-90s, an intrepid youth ministry in my hometown began hosting touring Christian bands in their church’s unused, former sanctuary. But The Chapel, as it was lovingly dubbed, didn’t feature sanitized youth group fare. Under the general direction of a long time concert promoter it became an actual venue: from shoegaze and hardcore bands with legitimate scene cred to industrial acts with first wave pedigree, The Chapel was a haven for teenagers looking for a hangout that respected the organic art of the underground while pushing back against the chaos of life. Kids danced in the pit. Kids prayed. Some kids even got saved.
Then the local newspaper unwittingly stirred the pot.
Buried toward the end of their otherwise fair article was a quote from a friend of mine, who, trying to embody the provocative legacy of punk, told the reporter: “I thought it would be funny to get in a fight in the mosh pit. If they’re Christians, they can’t hit you.”
He wasn’t offering moral commentary. Rather, by conjuring his best Jello Biafra impression, he was poking the bear and saying something outrageous because he knew who’d be paying attention. Church leadership took the bait. An inquiry was called. My father, a local therapist and pastor, laid his career on the line in an unsuccessful bid to save the venue.
The Chapel was shuttered, the ministry suspended, and the kids shooed away, confused. Did anyone really considered this young man’s motivation, how it may have mirrored their own youthful ignorance, or why The Chapel was thriving in the face of such cynicism? Did anyone ask why people like me — a newly minted Christian, fresh out of drug use — needed it as a harbor of respite?
No, I don’t believe so.
Instead they gave life to a scapegoat. A representative icon that they could subsequently tear down to restore purity.
“And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid.”
— Sufjan Stevens, John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
But what happened at The Chapel wasn’t unique to any particular time, place, or group. It was instead, symptomatic of something deeper in us. An animating reflex embedded in how we make sense of, and ultimately purge or protect threat and innocence.
The Architecture of Scapegoating
As it turns out, our tendency to animate and attach to surrogates is not accidental. Rather, it seems to be embedded in our cognitive architecture. In his work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that both primitive and advanced human communities inscribe collective identity onto symbols, treating what he called totems as extensions of the tribe’s soul. Yet this pursuit hasn’t only been used for cultural meaning making. In fact, modern consumer psychology has begun to observe that this totemization / personification of the symbolic has become commonplace in our everyday lives. In her work on brand “personalities,” Aaker (1997) described how brands acquire consumer loyalty via employment of five, human-like dimensions. Additionally, in her foundational paper (1998), Aaker’s colleague Fournier revealed to us that consumers seem to form genuine psychological “relationships” with products, services, teams, ideas, etc. — an idea supported by former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts’ Lovemarks concept (2004).
But why does this bizarre transmutation of inanimate objects into “living” totems take place? Nicholas Epley and colleagues (2007) identified anthropomorphism as a core feature of human cognition, offering that we instinctively attribute minds, motives, and moral responsibility to non-human entities. An impulse so powerful that Waytz and colleagues (2010) likewise found that it extends even to abstract systems such as markets, institutions, and even ideologies, concluding that anthropomorphizing “nonhuman agents seems to satisfy the basic motivation to make sense of an otherwise uncertain environment.” But is this totemization really only a model for the development of wayfinding heuristics, or, when combined with our intuition, is fashioning a totem more likely to lead us to cognitive bias and logical fallacy?
To help answer that question we can turn to philosophers Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, who both suggest that our folk psychology — the intuitive framework we use to understand others — systematically distorts moral reasoning. In fact, Knobe (2003) showed that we’re quick to see deliberate malice in harmful actions but reluctant to credit good intent in beneficial ones. A finding further explored by Nichols’ suggestion that once we label something as a moral threat, we lock it into a villain role, making it nearly impossible to reassess. The music, the gun, and the platform become typecast as the problem — the straw man — not because evidence demands it be so, but because our cognitive machinery has already typecast it as the antagonist.
So, what happens when the product of this unconscious machinery is suddenly reinforced by an in-group status-driven wave of cultural consensus?
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Propaganda, that’s what.
In his seminal work on the subject, Jacques Ellul (1962) warned that propaganda works by collapsing myth and identity, short-circuiting moral nuance. By taking advantage of this reflex to simplify, taxonomize, and label threat, the propagandist works tirelessly to build a community around a sacred narrative—a state that enshrines it as untouchable (Tetlock, 2003). You see, though it may seem complex, the psychological and philosophical processes behind the transmutation of the inanimate into a symbol worthy of cultural worship or derision are quite direct. Conversely, the path of inoculation to scapegoatism is quite difficult and unexpected — it’s not the path of the propagandist or the iconoclast, but rather the path of honest self-reflection.
The church’s leadership didn’t dislike the art, music, or any person in particular. But in their attempt to restore purity, they sacralized it within The Chapel as an icon of the breach — evidence that the “world” had infiltrated the sanctuary and threatened the boundary between the righteous and the defiled. Once labeled, shutting it down became the only viable way, in their morally typecast minds, to mitigate the threat and restore innocence.
Bandura (1999) called this act moral disengagement. It’s the psychological machinery that allows ordinary people to permit harm by displacing responsibility, euphemizing consequences, and dehumanizing victims. Convenient in that it both expedites blame and spares us from facing the harder questions, but it doesn’t help us to diagnose if the corruption isn’t “out there” but rather within?
Rival Scapegoatisms
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder, the public square erupted with these inanimate scapegoatisms. The left blamed guns, platforms, and “radicalization pipelines.” The right blamed cultural decay, permissive media, and moral collapse. Each narrative was emotionally satisfying for its consumers because it wielded this cognitive cheat code as a method of currying favor with an outraged and confused audience. A audience that demanded an scapegoat to legislate, boycott, or cancel. Each side externalized blame because facing the internal and personal nature behind such an evil act would be unbearable: too slow and too unsatisfying to satiate their desires for justice.
But when we consider the data, our scapegoats are often too vague, too mercurial to be concrete representations of cultural rot. Millions own guns and never kill. Millions navigate broken cultures and never violently radicalize. Millions live under capitalism and never exploit. Millions require public assistance and never take advantage. Thus apart from the scapegoat the question of failed system lies flat, replaced by important queries about the real actor’s will, their loves, their hates, and the formation that made violence desirable.
When we totemize the inanimate and then worship or destroy them as surrogates for our own moral responsibility, we hamstring the real work. The source of corruption is never the inert tool or system; it’s the condition beneath, and unless we face that condition honestly, we will only ever treat symptoms while the disease spreads unchecked.
Escaping Scapegoats
In contrast to the fruitless pursuit of scapegoating, the Christian answer points us back toward our own eager participation in the economies of sin. In Romans 3:23, the Apostle Paul wrote that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There is no “Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female … in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) There is no clean “us” versus defiled “them.” There is no high ground from which to cast blame or easy answer to the calculus of life. The only righteous scapegoat is Christ, who actually bore our transgressions, and accepting His atonement means also giving up any pretense of self-righteousness.
Rather, when we remember what is below our own metaphorical “floorboards,” a four step journey toward freedom in Christ begins:
- Recognition — by naming the sin first in myself I can begin to relocate the agency of fallenness where it belongs
- Humility — its presence arrests my hunger for clean narratives and convenient enemies by forcing me to remember my own sinful contributions
- Absolution — as was the case with the penitent thief in Luke 23, our honest recognition and humility drive us toward seeking forgiveness
- Freedom — in the context of our own forgiveness the shame-projection cycle that drives scapegoating falls away, replaced by a confidence that both equips us to reject the fruit of brokenness while also being sympathetic its bearers
This isn’t program. Rather, it’s formation. The only durable inoculation to scapegoatism is a people who confess their own fallenness, receive mercy, and live as freed agents — ready to bear the cost of repair and face ambiguity on a case-by-case basis.
I doubt that the leaders who condemned The Chapel undertook this work during deliberation. They required an icon and a hammer of judgement in order to purge the church of shame. Though I harbor no resentment, I can’t help but wonder — these three decades later — how many more kids could have been saved if the hard road had been taken?
Moving forward, the question for me isn’t whether we’ll construct scapegoats when we need them. The question is whether we’ll ever have the courage to look beyond them — and refuse to let a sacred inanimate surrogate blind us to the shared human brokenness that makes up their mortar?
