Unclean was my "arrival" onto the theological scene.
My scholarly career has had four phases. All of this can be traced on my Google Scholar page.
Phase 1 (1998-2003) was publishing mostly empirical clinical psychology research in peer-reviewed journals.
Phase 2 (2003-2011) was turning away from clinical psychology to psychology of religion as my research focus, still publishing this research in peer-reviewed journals. During this time I published the work that has had the most impact upon the research literature, studies on attachment to God, quest religious motivation, and terror-management theory. This phase culminated in my co-authoring, with my graduate student Andrea Haugen, the chapter on Christianity for the APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. During this time, in 2007, I started writing online.
Phase 3 (2011-2015) saw my first academic books come out, Unclean, The Authenticity of Faith, and The Slavery of Death. These books flowed out of my prior empirical research, and they represent my first attempts to "do theology."
In Phase 4 (2016-Present) I turned to popular and general-audience Christian writing. This phase started with Reviving Old Scratch followed by Stranger God, Trains, Jesus and Murder, Hunting Magic Eels, and The Shape of Joy. In 2021, I started cross-posting the original blog, which is still going, over on Substack.
Anyway, like I said, Unclean was my theological coming out party. And in Unclean I made use of René Girard's scapegoat theory.
Unclean is about the impact of disgust and contamination psychology upon religious belief, experience, and practice. That might seem to be a peculiar lens through which to explore religion, but it is a rich vein to mine. Notions of purity regulate much of our experience of the sacred, divine, spiritual, and holy.
Because of this, disgust and contamination affect how we experience moral and social categories. These are often conflated into what psychologists call "sociomoral disgust," how we perceive "sin" and those whom we deem "unclean" because of their sin. Since disgust is a boundary-monitoring and expulsive psychology it creates a "social distancing" dynamic, where the unclean are expelled from the community in order to maintain purity and holiness. (Relatedly, when this disgust becomes internalized people come to experience themselves as "unclean" and therefore unworthy of community.) And it's precisely here in Unclean where I use the work of René Girard.
Specifically, I ask two questions. First, how are scapegoats selected by communities? And second, if the gospels have unmasked the evil mechanism of scapegoating why does it keep happening? In Unclean I use disgust psychology to answer both questions.
First, disgust helps us select scapegoats because disgust has always been used to stigmatize, marginalize, and dehumanize out-group members. As Martha Nussbaum has observed,
Disgust is all about putting the object at a distance and drawing boundaries. It imputes to the object properties that make it no long or a member of the subject's own community or world, a kind of alien species of thing...Thus, throughout history, certain disgust properties—sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness—have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, groups by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status.
Second, disgust psychology masks the scapegoating dynamic. That is to say, once identified as "unclean," think of the Jews in Nazi Germany, these individuals and groups pose, in the view of the in-group, a threat to the social order. Consequently, when I scapegoat a group I don't see myself as scapegoating. I don't see the out-group as a victim, but as a danger. And this is why scapegoating continues. The mechanism has been masked.
So, even if it's true that victimizing innocent victims has become for us an evil thing, stigmatized by the gospels, the people who oppress and victimize others aren't scapegoating in a self-conscious way. Otherwise, they'd stop. In short, the argument I make in Unclean is that social scapegoating is often hidden by purity psychology, the expulsion of the "unclean" as a dangerous threat to the community. We can't see the evil we are perpetrating because we believe we are doing something holy, righteous, and good. The old dynamic persists, hidden in the background. God is still being used to justify our violence. And no one sees it as scapegoating.
Which is a very pessimistic argument to make, and goes to a bit of what I want to say in this series. René Girard's theories may be perfectly correct as a suite of descriptive and explanatory ideas. But the underlying dynamics at work, the depth of human sin and depravity, may not be so easily overcome.
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