Monstrous Doubles: René Girard and the Mimetic Inheritance of Religious Structure

Preface: A Theory for Our Moment

Watch American politics long enough and a strange pattern emerges. Democrats and Republicans each claim to defend victims against persecutors. Each accuses the other of being "fascists" or "authoritarians." Each sees the other as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures. The rhetoric is structurally identical—only the names change. Each side's tactical innovations provoke reciprocal escalation from the other. Each violation of norms licenses counter-violations. "They did it first" becomes the universal justification.

Most strikingly, the more similar the two parties become—both captured by donor classes, both professionally managed, both dependent on outrage cycles, both competing for the same educated professionals—the more furiously partisans insist on their fundamental distinctiveness. Maximum resemblance is experienced as maximum difference.

This pattern—intense rivals becoming mirror images while convinced of their absolute opposition—is not unique to contemporary America. Consider the Cold War: the United States and Soviet Union, locked in ideological combat, developed strikingly similar institutions. Both built military-industrial complexes, surveillance states, and technocratic managerial classes. Both pursued the Space Race with identical fervor—each side wanting to reach the moon because the other wanted it. By the 1960s, convergence theorists were noting how the two systems had become operationally similar despite their opposed ideologies.

Or consider the relationship between Marxism and Christianity examined in our companion essay, "The Secular Eschaton." Marx defined his movement against Christianity, calling religion "the opium of the people." Yet Marxism replicated Christianity's narrative structure (fall, redemption, apocalypse), its moral orientation (preferential option for the poor), and its institutional forms (party as church, confession rituals, heresy trials). The more intensely Marxism attacked Christianity, the more completely it absorbed Christianity's architecture.

Why does opposition generate resemblance rather than difference? Why do rivals become twins? The French theorist René Girard (1923–2015) spent his career answering these questions. His "mimetic theory" offers a systematic explanation for why we become what we oppose—and why the inheritance documented in "The Secular Eschaton" was not accidental but structurally inevitable.

This essay introduces Girard's framework and applies it to the Christianity-Marxism relationship. Where the companion essay demonstrated that structural inheritance occurs—drawing on Voegelin, Löwith, Talmon, and others—this essay explains why it must occur. The answer lies in the nature of human desire itself.

I. Introduction: The Puzzle of Structural Inheritance

In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), René Girard articulated a paradox that would occupy his thinking for half a century: "It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity." This insight—that intense opposition generates not distinction but resemblance—offers a distinctive answer to a question left partially open by the secularization theorists examined in "The Secular Eschaton."

That essay concluded:

"When an ideology inherits a religious narrative structure, it also inherits that religion's social reflexes, emotional defaults, and institutional pathologies. This is the lesson of Marxism's Christian inheritance: not that Marxists secretly believe in Jesus, but that they unconsciously reproduce Christian patterns of social life."

But demonstrating that such inheritance occurs is different from explaining why it occurs. Why couldn't Marxism simply reject Christianity and build something genuinely new? Why did an explicitly atheist movement end up replicating the confession ritual, the heresy trial, the eschatological narrative, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the religion it opposed?

Girard's answer lies in the nature of desire itself. For Girard, human desire is fundamentally imitative: we want what others want, and we become like those we oppose. This has a disturbing implication. An ideology that defines itself primarily through its opposition to Christianity cannot escape Christianity's gravitational pull. The more intensely it struggles against its religious predecessor, the more completely it absorbs that predecessor's structure—becoming what Girard calls a "monstrous double."

II. Mimetic Desire: We Want What Others Want

The Triangular Structure of Desire

Girard's foundational insight, developed through his study of the great European novelists—Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust—is that human desire is not spontaneous but mediated. We do not simply want objects because they satisfy some pre-existing need. We want what others want, because they want it.

Consider two children in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and begins playing with it. Immediately, the other child wants that specific toy—not any of the hundreds of other available toys, but precisely the one that someone else has chosen. The toy becomes desirable because it is desired.

This triangular structure—subject, object, mediator—distinguishes human desire from mere appetite. Hunger is biological; you want food because your body needs it. But most human desires are not like this. You want a particular career because someone you admire has it. You want a particular lifestyle because your social circle values it. You want a particular romantic partner partly because others find them attractive.

Girard called the person whose desires we imitate the "mediator" or "model." We look to models to learn what is worth wanting. This is not weakness or conformity—it is the basic mechanism by which humans orient themselves in the world. We are, as Girard put it, the most mimetic species on earth.

From Model to Rival

The problem arises when the model and the subject occupy the same social space—what Girard called "internal mediation." When we imitate the desires of someone distant (a celebrity, a historical figure, a fictional character), no conflict results. But when we imitate the desires of someone close—a colleague, a neighbor, a sibling—we inevitably compete for the same objects.

The admired figure who demonstrates the desirability of an object becomes an obstacle blocking access to that object. Admiration transforms into envy, and envy into antagonism. The model becomes a rival.

This dynamic explains why the most intense conflicts often occur between those who are most similar. Neighbors feud more bitterly than strangers. Sibling rivalries exceed conflicts with outsiders. Academic departments are notorious for vicious disputes over trivial stakes. Civil wars are more brutal than international conflicts. Proximity intensifies mimetic rivalry because proximity means competition for the same objects.

The Crisis of Undifferentiation

As rivalry intensifies, something counterintuitive happens: the rivals become more alike, not more different. Each mirrors the other's aggressive responses. Each escalation provokes counter-escalation. What began as competition over some specific object becomes a contest over being itself—each party seeking to prove their superiority, their difference, their unique claim to existence.

Girard identified this pattern in classical tragedy as "tragic cyclothymia"—the alternating rise and fall of antagonists locked in combat. But as the rhythm accelerates, the distinction between victor and vanquished blurs:

As conflict progresses, the rhythm of cyclothymic alternation speeds up to the point where the subject's perception of the difference between him and his enemy begins to blur. Persons and entities become "cinematically" superimposed on each other.

This is the "crisis of undifferentiation"—the collapse of the differences that structure social life. Paradoxically, it is experienced by participants as a time of monstrous difference. Those caught in mimetic crisis feel surrounded by aliens, by enemies who threaten their very identity. Yet what they are actually experiencing is the terrifying recognition of their own reflection.

Here we can understand the Cold War's peculiar dynamics. Americans and Soviets each saw the other as absolutely alien—godless communists versus imperialist capitalists. Yet this perception of absolute difference masked increasing structural convergence. The rivals were becoming twins while convinced of their opposition.

The Double Bind of Opposition

Girard drew on Gregory Bateson's concept of the "double bind" to describe the trap facing those caught in mimetic rivalry. The rival simultaneously commands: "Imitate me" (as model) and "Do not imitate me" (as obstacle). The more faithfully one imitates, the more violent the rivalry becomes. The more one tries to differentiate oneself, the more one reveals dependency on the rival as the standard of comparison.

This double bind has profound implications for any ideology that defines itself through opposition. An anti-Christian movement faces an impossible choice: it can ignore Christianity entirely (impossible, given Christianity's cultural centrality in the West) or it can oppose Christianity intensely (thereby entering into mimetic rivalry with it). The second path guarantees that the movement will absorb Christianity's structure while inverting its content.

Marx and Christianity were not competing for markets or territory. They were competing for the same object: the role of providing ultimate meaning, explaining history's trajectory, offering redemption, commanding total allegiance. Both are what we might call "soteriological" systems—they tell you what's wrong with the human condition and how it will be healed.

This explains why, as "The Secular Eschaton" documented, Marxism replicated Christianity so precisely: "Marxism's moral authority derives from its identification with the oppressed; political legitimacy flows from representing the 'suffering class'; power itself becomes morally suspect. This is 'the meek shall inherit the earth' translated into political economy." Marxism did not borrow this framework strategically; it absorbed it through mimetic rivalry with a model it was trying to surpass.

III. The Scapegoat Mechanism: Sacred Violence and Its Exposure

The Founding Murder

Girard's second major contribution is his theory of the "scapegoat mechanism" or "surrogate victim mechanism." When mimetic rivalry threatens to destroy a community through escalating violence—when the crisis of undifferentiation reaches its peak—a spontaneous resolution sometimes emerges: the community's aggression is collectively redirected toward a single victim.

This victim—chosen for some mark of difference, some vulnerability, some marginal status—becomes the lightning rod for communal violence. The murder or expulsion of the scapegoat produces a paradoxical effect. The victim who was blamed for the crisis now appears as the source of the restored peace:

The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back.

This is the origin of the sacred in Girard's anthropology. The victim is divinized because their death accomplished what seemed impossible—the restoration of social order. Sacrifice, in its original form, is the ritual repetition of this founding murder. Myth is the retrospective narrative that conceals the arbitrariness and violence of the original event, presenting the victim as genuinely guilty and genuinely powerful.

The Biblical Revelation

What makes the Judeo-Christian tradition unique, in Girard's analysis, is its systematic exposure of the scapegoat mechanism. Where myth tells the story from the perspective of the persecuting community—presenting the victim as guilty and deserving of death—Scripture increasingly tells it from the perspective of the victim.

The Psalms give voice to the persecuted. Job refuses to accept that his suffering proves his guilt. The prophets denounce the persecution of the innocent. This trajectory culminates in the Gospels, where the innocent victim is not merely vindicated but revealed as divine.

The crucifixion of Jesus exposes the scapegoat mechanism to full view. Unlike previous scapegoats whose guilt was unanimously affirmed, Jesus' innocence is proclaimed by a minority who refuse to participate in the collective violence. This refusal breaks the unanimity on which the mechanism depends:

The principle of illusion or victim mechanism cannot appear in broad daylight without losing its structuring power. In order to be effective, it demands the ignorance of persecutors who "do not know what they are doing." It demands the darkness of Satan to function adequately.

By revealing what had been "hidden since the foundation of the world," Christianity permanently damaged the scapegoat mechanism's efficacy. Scapegoating continues, but it can never again achieve the innocent unanimity of archaic sacrifice. Someone will always point out that the victim might be innocent.

The Concern for Victims

This exposure generates what Girard calls "the concern for victims"—an unprecedented moral orientation that takes the side of the persecuted against the persecutors. As Girard put it: "Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love."

This concern lies at the root of modern humanitarian sensibility, human rights discourse, and progressive politics. It is genuinely novel. Pagan antiquity did not systematically valorize victims; strength and victory were the primary values. The moral privileging of the weak, the suffering, the oppressed is a Christian innovation that has become so pervasive in Western culture that we no longer recognize its origins.

"The Secular Eschaton" documented this inheritance in Marxism:

"The preferential option for the poor, the moral suspicion of wealth and power, the valorization of suffering as the ground of authenticity—these are not universal human intuitions but specifically Christian innovations in moral thought."

But the exposure of the scapegoat mechanism does not eliminate mimetic desire or the crises it generates. It merely removes the traditional means of resolution. Christianity offers an alternative—the imitation of Christ's nonviolent love—but this alternative has proven difficult to embrace. The result is a dangerous interregnum: the old sacrificial solutions are delegitimized, but the new way of peace has not been adopted.

IV. Modernity as Christianity's Dangerous Fruit

The Gospel-Inspired Anti-Gospel

Girard offers a distinctive reading of secularization: modernity is not the negation of Christianity but its paradoxical continuation. The democratic nation-state, human rights, universal concern for victims, the legal presumption of innocence—all of these emerge from the Christian exposure of the scapegoat mechanism and the resulting sympathy for victims.

Yet this inheritance becomes distorted when separated from its theological foundation. The Gospel revelation was "relegated to a private opinion among others by modernity, and then replaced by an officially established, gospel-inspired anti-gospel of secularized victim-concern."

The result is what Girard calls "victimism"—"the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power." Our concern for victims is genuine, but it becomes weaponized when divorced from self-examination:

Religious conversion for Girard is no less than the discovery that "we are all butchers pretending to be sacrificers." Without that revelation, it is all too easy for each of us to see only the scapegoats and the victims of others, not our own.

Without the Christian insistence on universal human sinfulness and the need for grace, the concern for victims becomes ammunition in new rounds of mimetic conflict. Each faction presents itself as the defender of victims against persecutors—while remaining blind to its own persecuting tendencies.

This is precisely the dynamic visible in contemporary American politics. Both parties compete to represent true victims and unmask true persecutors. Each side's victim-concern is genuine; each side's blindness to its own scapegoating is equally genuine. The result is mimetic escalation with both sides wielding the same moral weapon.

The Totalitarian Temptation

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), Girard explicitly addressed how revolutionary movements become monstrous doubles of Christianity:

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be "revolutionary" now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity.

This passage illuminates the mimetic dynamics at work. Revolutionary movements do not simply reject Christianity; they claim to fulfill Christianity's promise better than Christianity itself. They position themselves as Christ's rivals, imitating his concern for the oppressed while rejecting his theology and his call to nonviolence:

In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.

The mimetic rival must be more concerned for victims than Christ, more radical in opposing oppression, more uncompromising in pursuing justice. This competitive logic drives the revolutionary movement to absorb Christianity's entire moral vocabulary while directing it toward worldly, immanent ends.

V. Revolutionary Ideology as Monstrous Double

The Structural Isomorphism Explained

"The Secular Eschaton" documented extensive parallels between Christianity and Marxism:

Christianity posits: Creation (Eden) → Fall (Original Sin) → History as exile and struggle → Incarnation and Redemption (Christ) → Apocalypse → Final Judgment → New Heaven and New Earth.

Marxism posits: Primitive Communism (Engels's "prehistoric Eden") → Fall into Class Society (Private Property) → History as class struggle → Revolution (the Proletariat as collective redeemer) → Dictatorship of the Proletariat (transitional "thousand-year reign") → Withering of the State → Classless Society.

Girard's theory explains why these parallels are not accidental. Marxism emerged as Christianity's most ambitious rival precisely because Marx took Christianity with desperate seriousness. His critique was not dismissive but engaged—the critique of someone locked in mimetic combat with a model who must be surpassed.

Consider Marx's relationship to Hegel, himself deeply shaped by Christian theology. Marx does not simply reject Hegel's idealism; he "inverts" it, preserving the dialectical structure while replacing Spirit with Matter, consciousness with production relations. This is the characteristic gesture of the mimetic rival: preserve the structure, change the content, claim to have surpassed the original.

The rivalry with Christianity is even more direct. Marx's proletariat functions as what Berdyaev called a "collective Messiah"—a chosen people bearing a world-historical mission. As "The Secular Eschaton" quoted Berdyaev:

"The aspect of Marxism which looks forward to the future Socialist society and to the great mission of the proletariat has nothing in common with science—it is a faith, 'the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.' Marx's 'proletariat' and his perfect Socialist society are 'invisible things,' an object of faith."

The proletariat is not a rival class but a rival Christ—the one whose suffering redeems, whose victory inaugurates the new age, whose mission is not merely political but cosmic.

The Inherited Pathologies

The consequences of this mimetic inheritance go beyond structural similarity to include what "The Secular Eschaton" called "institutional pathologies." Girard helps explain why these pathologies emerge with such intensity:

The Demonization of Class Enemies: If the scapegoat mechanism is humanity's oldest response to mimetic crisis, then a movement shaped by mimetic rivalry with Christianity will reproduce that mechanism even while exposing it in others. The bourgeoisie, the kulaks, the class enemies—these become the scapegoats of revolutionary regimes. As Voegelin noted in the concept of "exteriorization of evil" (cited in "The Secular Eschaton"): "the projection of all that prevents utopia onto external enemies who must be eliminated."

The Hunt for Heresy: Girard observed that "the children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them." Revolutionary regimes that denounce religious persecution reproduce the Inquisition's logic because they inherit the same certainty of possessing absolute truth. The purges, show trials, and self-criticism sessions represent secularized forms of religious discipline—but without the transcendent reference that might moderate their application.

"The Secular Eschaton" documented this directly:

"The practice of 'criticism and self-criticism' (samokritika) in Communist parties directly parallels the Christian practice of confession. The Russian Orthodox practice of public confession (ispoved'), in which the penitent acknowledges sins before the community, provided the cultural template for the Bolshevik institution."

In Democratic Kampuchea, self-criticism sessions were called rien sot—literally "religious education." The unconscious acknowledgment of the practice's religious genealogy could hardly be more explicit.

Millenarian Impatience: The Christian eschaton lies beyond history, available only through divine grace. The revolutionary eschaton is immanent, achievable through human action. This creates what Girard might call "apocalyptic impatience"—the demand that history accelerate toward its appointed end. Those who impede this acceleration become not merely mistaken but evil, deserving whatever violence removes them from history's path.

As "The Secular Eschaton" concluded:

"Understanding the genealogy does illuminate why Marxism has exhibited specific pathologies: the tendency toward millenarian impatience, the demonization of class enemies, the hunt for ideological heresy, the subordination of present welfare to future redemption. These are not accidents or corruptions of authentic Marxism; they are expressions of the eschatological structure that lies at its core."

Girard's theory explains the mechanism: these pathologies emerge because the mimetic rival inherits not only the structure but the intensity of the original. The revolutionary movement must be more urgent about salvation, more rigorous about doctrine, more ruthless about enemies—because it is competing with Christianity on Christianity's own ground.

VI. Battling to the End: The Escalation to Extremes

Clausewitz and the Logic of Reciprocity

In his final major work, Battling to the End (2007), Girard turned to Carl von Clausewitz's On War to analyze the logic of modern violence. Clausewitz had observed that war tends toward "escalation to extremes"—each side's actions provoke greater counteractions, driving the conflict toward total war.

Girard recognized in Clausewitz's analysis a perfect illustration of mimetic reciprocity at the civilizational scale:

With modern warfare comes the insanity of tit-for-tat escalation, which political institutions have lost their ability to contain... unbridled "reciprocal action" could eventually lead foes to total mutual annihilation.

The Napoleonic Wars, which Clausewitz witnessed firsthand, represented something new: the mass mobilization of entire peoples for total conflict. This was the political consequence of the French Revolution, itself a mimetic crisis that destroyed traditional restraints on violence.

The Loss of Sacrificial Containment

What makes modern violence so dangerous, in Girard's view, is precisely the Christian exposure of the scapegoat mechanism. Traditional societies could contain mimetic crisis through unanimous sacrifice. The victim's death restored peace because everyone believed in the victim's guilt.

But after Christ, this innocent unanimity is impossible. The exposure of the mechanism means that scapegoating is always contested, always recognized (at least by some) for what it is. This prevents sacrifice from achieving its pacifying function.

Modern wars, revolutionary terrors, and totalitarian purges represent failed sacrifices—attempts to restore order through violence that can never achieve the unanimous consent required for effective scapegoating. Each failure demands more victims, more violence, in a spiral toward the extremes.

Application to Our Moment

The dynamics Girard identified operate beyond the Christianity-Marxism relationship. Any intense ideological rivalry risks producing monstrous doubles. This is visible in contemporary polarization:

American Democrats and Republicans increasingly mirror each other's tactics while insisting on their absolute difference. Each side weaponizes concern for victims. Each side identifies demonic enemies. Each side believes it alone defends truth against lies. The structural convergence is invisible to participants precisely because they are caught in the mimetic crisis.

Girard's analysis suggests this pattern will intensify. Without shared transcendent reference points, without the self-examination that recognizes one's own participation in persecution, political competition becomes a pure mimetic struggle—each side seeking to out-victim and out-persecute the other.

As Girard warned: "The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition."

VII. Conclusion: The Unavoidable Inheritance

Girard's mimetic theory provides a powerful explanatory framework for understanding why secular ideologies inherit religious structures. The inheritance is not accidental, not a matter of historical contingency or conscious borrowing. It is structurally necessary, built into the logic of mimetic rivalry itself.

An ideology that opposes Christianity cannot escape Christianity because the opposition is itself a form of imitation. The more intense the opposition, the more complete the mimetic entanglement. Revolutionary Marxism, in defining itself as Christianity's negation, became Christianity's monstrous double—structurally identical while claiming absolute difference.

This has several implications:

First, the persistence of "religious" elements in secular ideology—the millenarian expectations, the salvific community, the demonic enemy, the confession rituals—should not surprise us. They are not aberrations but necessities. They emerge from mimetic dynamics that no ideology can escape.

Second, the pathologies of revolutionary regimes—the purges, the persecutions, the demand for total commitment—are not accidental corruptions of an otherwise sound doctrine. They are intensified versions of pathologies present in any system claiming absolute truth. When that system lacks transcendent reference, when it demands immanent fulfillment, the pathologies become extreme.

Third, the concern for victims that animates both revolutionary politics and contemporary polarization is genuine but dangerous. Divorced from Christian self-examination, from the recognition that "we are all butchers pretending to be sacrificers," concern for victims becomes a weapon in new rounds of scapegoating. We persecute in the name of the persecuted, sacrifice in the name of ending sacrifice.

Fourth, the lesson applies beyond Marxism. Any movement that defines itself primarily through opposition risks becoming a monstrous double of what it opposes. The Cold War superpowers mirrored each other. Contemporary partisans mirror each other. The alternative is not less intensity but different orientation—imitation of models that do not generate rivalry.

Finally, Girard's analysis suggests that genuine emancipation from religious structure requires not its negation but its transformation. The attempt to overcome Christianity by opposing it produces mimetic doubles. The alternative—which Girard found in Christ—is the imitation of nonviolent love that breaks the cycle of reciprocal violence.

Whether such transformation is possible at scale, whether humanity can embrace this alternative before the escalation to extremes reaches its terminus, remains an open question. But Girard's analysis makes clear that the question cannot be avoided by pretending that secular ideology has escaped the religious problematic. The inheritance is inescapable. The only question is what we do with it.

As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, in words quoted in "The Secular Eschaton":

"Marxism achieved its unique position in part by adopting the content and functions of Christianity... Only one secular doctrine retains the scope of traditional religion in offering an interpretation of human existence by means of which men may situate themselves in the world and direct their actions to ends that transcend those offered by their immediate situation: Marxism."

Girard helps us understand why this adoption was not strategic but inevitable—and why any successor ideology that seeks to provide ultimate meaning will face the same mimetic entanglement with the religious traditions it aims to replace.

Bibliography

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