How should world leaders deal with the Trump administration? Most presidents and prime ministers are opting for flattery and servility. But the head of the Catholic Church is different.
Pope Leo XIV’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, published last month, could not be less Maga-like. Emphasising the duty of Christians to serve the poor, it condemns “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation”.
This is awkward for JD Vance, who previously clashed with the pope, when he was mere Cardinal Robert Prevost, over their very different understandings of Jesus’s teaching. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 – a few years before he converted to Trump (having previously likened him to “America’s Hitler”). He later wrote about that transformation, crediting the French philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) for helping him to ditch his atheist ways.
Who was Girard, and can he help to explain Vance’s brand of Christianity? Dermot Roantree has been researching Vance’s faith in his role as editor of the Irish Jesuit journal Studies. He offers some enlightenment as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
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Girard is associated with mimetic theory. What’s that about?
“It was that human desire is imitative: we come to desire things by seeing them desired by others. To use a simple example that Girard himself gave: If you place two toddlers in a room full of toys, as soon as one shows interest in a particular toy that toy becomes an object of desire for the other. Such mirrored desires lead to rivalry, which in turn gives rise to escalating and contagious violence.
“In early societies, Girard held, it was the need to contain this violence that led to sacrificial rituals as a means of purging the source of conflict and restoring social cohesion. Internal conflict would be channelled towards a single target – an innocent scapegoat who would then be cast out or destroyed ...
“As societies evolved, the sacrificial mechanism was transformed into other means of conflict containment that didn’t entail open bloodshed, such as legal systems, civic institutions, and moral or ritual traditions. But these substitutions are fragile. When they weaken or are disregarded, the underlying sacrificial logic re-emerges. Societies revert to building group cohesion by excluding or persecuting the ‘enemy’ – a person perhaps, but often a group, an ideology, or even a historical construct.”
Where does religion come into this analysis?
“Religion is at the heart of it. Girard held that the earliest rituals and sacrifices served to legitimise the violence of the scapegoat mechanism, representing it as necessary for social order and sanctioned by the gods.
“But for Girard, who returned to the Catholicism of his childhood as he developed his anthropology, the Judeo-Christian narrative tradition, while it shares in this mythic structure, at the same time turns it on its head. Uniquely, the Bible takes the side of the victim – think of Job, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, the lamenting Psalmist, and the widow, orphan and stranger that God’s people were commanded to protect.
[ JD Vance is a key advocate for the Trump regime’s view of the EU as an enemyOpens in new window ]
“Think too of Christ’s passion. That, for Girard, is the ultimate exposure of the fiction, the lie, at the heart of human progress, namely that those we victimise are actually guilty. By revealing this, precisely through his own innocence, Christ deprives the scapegoat mechanism of its power. Which brings on a crisis, of course, as what Christ offers instead is a much more difficult path. It is, Girard says, ‘the frightening principle that: you shall love your neighbour as yourself’.”
How did Girard come to influence JD Vance?
“It was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel who introduced Vance to Girard’s thought. Thiel, who studied under Girard and became Vance’s mentor, found in the concept of mimetic desire a way to understand competition – to see, for example, the value of investing in Facebook, an ideal vehicle for monetising human imitation and envy.
“What Vance, for his part, found in Girard was an anthropology that helped explain the web of conflicts, damaged relations, and scapegoating in his Appalachian world and a Christian vision that could break the destructive patterns.”
What other Catholic thinkers have shaped Vance’s thinking?
“Thiel also appears to have introduced Vance to the thought of the German jurist and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, a Catholic, argued that political order requires a strong leader who distinguishes between friends and enemies and acts decisively on that basis, even if it means suspending legal constraints ...
“This Schmittian perspective is also evident in the Catholic postliberal right – Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule, for example – that had a deep influence on Vance in the lead-up to his conversion and continues to do so.”
Is Vance reading Girard correctly or misinterpreting him?
“Vance understands Girard’s insights well, but his political alignment with Trump has led him to abandon them. Worse, having learned the power of scapegoating, he appears to exploit it rather than expose it ...
“Vance has vigorously defended Trump’s attacks on his perceived enemies – calls for indictments, imprisonment, exclusion, and censorship. Nothing could be less Girardian. As Girard warned, this is precisely what occurs when the restraints on violence – the rule of law, due process, decentralisation of authority, and the preferential option for the victim – are cast aside. Cohesion – in this instance, of the Maga base – is achieved through scapegoating.”
The autumn edition of Studies, edited by Dermot Roantree, is out now: studiesirishreview.ie
