dlmCommentary

The Religious Source of the Victim Mentality

It is difficult to observe our society in any depth without noticing that there is an abundance of individuals and groups that identify themselves, to one degree or another, as victims of some other group. Many people of color believe themselves to be victims of white bigotry, many women believe themselves to be victims of an oppressively patriarchal society, many people of low income believe themselves to be victims of corporate greed. The handicapped, single mothers, homosexuals, the homeless, native Americans, sufferers of certain diseases, undocumented immigrants, even witches, have champions or advocacy groups that press their interests against rivals and oppressors. To some, it might seem that the only people who are not victimized are politically conservative heterosexual white males – especially if they are members of the Religious Right. But some members even of these categories feel unjustly attacked – even if we limit the discussion to so-called “institutionalized” mistreatment..
Broadly speaking, there seem to be two ways of interacting with the habitual victimhood phenomenon. Some seem to minimize the fact that some people or groups really are habitually cruel to other people or groups. This is the Get-over-it-you-bunch-of-whiners” response, and can lack compassion even when compassion is warranted. The more compassionate among us take a different route. They choose which victimization claims are legitimate, and the join the fight. Of course, such decisions are extremely subjective, based on one’s own background, psychology, race, ethnicity, gender, income, occupation, religion, physical health, citizenship status, etc. So it’s hard to imagine our very diverse culture ever arriving at a consensus in such a sea of possibilities. (If such a consensus is ever achieved, I’m sure we all hope we do not get named the primary trouble makers, as the Jews were in Hitler’s Germany.)
Where does this eagerness toward self-identified victim status come from? And is it common to all cultures throughout history?
Perhaps a more preliminary question needs to be asked first. What if there’s no deeper psychological or sociological meaning behind self-identified victim status? Blacks were once slaves, some people really do hate homosexuals, the homeless really are marginalized. What if people feel like victims simply because they’re victims? What could be simpler?
This is too simplistic an analysis, for three reasons.
First, there is no necessary relationship between how much a given individual has suffered, and how much they self-identify as a victim. Everyone is familiar with the stories of people who have endured great agonies while retaining great peace, optimism, love, and appreciation for life. Anne Frank is a standard example. Conversely, we are familiar with real life examples of those who are habitually angry and complaining even though their daily life is quite comfortable and nourishing.
Second, even the compassionate among us don’t give equal weight to all claims of victim status. The most zealous champions of “gay rights” are usually far less zealous when it is the traditional family which is under attack. Those who scream from the rooftops about white-on-black crime are usually much less zealous about black-on-white crime. The most strident advocates of leveling the playing field in education are also the most strident opponents of school vouchers, even though the majority of poor inner city parents want them. Clearly, the most compassionate among us need to choose their priorities; they simply ignore, or even repudiate, the pleas of some self-proclaimed victims.
Finally, we can not ignore the fact that the victim self-identity – even when its external cause has been or can be improved – often remains at the same intensity, or even gets worse. The lot of black Americans, notwithstanding the problems that remain, has improved profoundly since the early 1800’s, or even since the 1950’s. But the rhetoric of some prominent black leaders is far more inflammatory than Martin Luther King ever was. And there is a host of other examples: the woman who lives a pattern of choosing men who are abusive, but rejects the kind and caring man who truly wants to love her; the homeless person that constantly rejects offers of assistance; the oppressed ethnic minority of a third world country that pleads for mercy, then gains political power and becomes the oppressor.
Indeed, the victim mentality, when it finally obtains power, very often leads to the creation of more victims. The abused child often grows up to become an abuser. Feminism has led inevitably to the destruction of viable human life. The victim spirit of Hitler’s Mein Kampf led to the Holocaust.
So, to ask the question again, where does this eagerness toward self-identified victim status come from?
The beginning of an answer comes from a growing body of theologians known as Girardians, after the teacher and writer Rene Girard. The viewpoint is most helpfully introduced by Gil Bailie in his book Violence Unveiled.
In summary, the Girardians have opened wide the anthropological meaning and power of the crucifixion of Jesus. They have shown with exquisite thoroughness how fallen human beings, if they are to live together in any semblance of harmony, must share a common negative energy toward a common scapegoat or enemy. Outside of the Kingdom of God, nothing draws humankind together so solidly as a shared contempt. What holds together the tribe on this side of the river – what keeps their everyday squabbles from becoming culturally destructive – is the tribe on the other side of the river. Is that tribe not inferior? Or evil? Or poised to attack at the slightest provocation?
Did the Soviet Union not serve our nation well by giving us a common fear and loathing? And did we not do the same for them?
Watch how a family get-together becomes united and filled with mutual love when some “black sheep of the family” or some agreed-upon undesirable political movement is discussed.
Before, and outside of, the Gospel Tradition, this “scapegoating mechanism” was the very foundation of culture. Primitive mythologies celebrate the victory of “Us” over the expelled wicked one; primitive religion enforces those behaviors that will keep “Us” from becoming like “Them”; and primitive government is established and maintained by those who control and manipulate the largely arbitrary standards of judgment.
Whole religious or political ideologies are built and justified solely on the self-righteous conviction NOT to be some other religious or political ideology.
The prophetic tradition of the Old Testament is the beginning, in history, of questions about this pattern. For the first time, the mythologies, the religious practices, the authority figures are all confronted with the issue: If “We” are better than “Them,” then why is there so much injustice, and so many victims, even among Us? What good are our stories if we ourselves can’t get along with each other? What good is our religion if, after we worship, we go home miserable and resentful? What good is our government if it arbitrarily favors some citizens over others?
The shining moment of this prophetic tradition comes in the crucifixion – the victimization – of Jesus Christ. For in the New Testament assessment, the perfect, perfectly loving child of God was cruelly executed by the combined religious and secular guardians of “right” and “law.” Once and for all, the essential delusion, arbitrariness, cruelty and injustice in the foundations of human culture is laid bare. Anyone with courage can look and see. There is no absolute that human beings can’t twist to their own advantage. There is no power that human beings can’t turn to savagery. Human culture, by definition, creates victims. And even when it defends victims, it can only do so by creating other victims.
The Kingdom of God that Jesus preached and demonstrated, if it is anything meaningful at all, is humankind’s only hope for deliverance from this self-justifying victim-making machinery.
To one degree or another, this myth dismantling spirit – for it is a spirit more than a consciously held doctrine – invades all individuals and all cultures that receive the Gospel. To be Christian means to question myself, my sense of my own righteousness, by sense of superiority over another. The reader of the New Testament has not yet begun to understand its central message until he or she recognizes, on every page, a conflict between two ways of being righteous – of “feeling good about ourselves” in the phrase of the day.
The traditional way – the old, religio-political way – focuses on external behavior and involves being better than someone else. It is self-justifying, manipulative and argumentative. It makes victims, usually with incredible subtlety, even as it worships its god and studies its scriptures.
The radical new way – and we can not now even fathom how radical it was when it burst upon history – begins in an ocean of forgiveness, and focuses on what’s really felt, desired and intended in the hidden inner self. It is self forgetting, trusting and eager to serve. Far from making victims, it actually loves its enemies. Far from seeing itself as a victim, it is filled with gratitude.
Our culture as a whole is trapped between these two kinds of righteousness. On the one hand, it is still connected enough to the Gospel that it can not be comfortable in the old righteousness. It is too busy being “progressive,” and “questioning authority,” and ridiculing “puritanical religion” or “fundamentalism,” and guarding against hypocrisy, and exposing the holes in everyone elses self-justifying arguments. But on the other hand, it doesn’t understand or doesn’t care for the new righteousness, which smacks of being someone’s doormat: forgiving when we’d rather “get even,” serving when we’d rather “empower” ourselves, trusting people who might hurt us, confessing our faults when we need to be “looking out for number one.”
A tremendous psychological dilemma. But human beings desperately need to “feel good about themselves.” They have a ravenous longing to be – or at least feel – righteous, or right, or justified, or vindicated. What are we to do?
The answer that seems to satisfy many is victimhood. If conventional righteousness has been exposed as hypocrisy because it makes victims, then I do not share in the hypocrisy if I myself am one of its victims. If Jesus did this great work in human history by portraying victimization on a grand scale, then I – in my devotion to Jesus – will also be a victim. And I will prove my righteousness by defending other victims, the ones with whom I most naturally identify.
To consider the plausibility of this use of victimhood, one need only look honestly at the privileges that victim status stands to earn for us. If I am a victim, who is going to hold me accountable for the bad things I’ve done? If I am a victim, look at all the people who make a fuss over me. If I am a victim, I automatically have a family that will welcome me in – all others who share my particular brand of victim status. Even if I am a pretend victim, I may be able to wheedle my way into some of the special government programs, protection or resources that are intended for the truly unfortunate.
And there’s one more big bonus, even if I get no special treatment from others. If I fail to get the job I want, I can satisfy myself that it was the employer’s problem. If no one wants to be my friend, I don’t have to question my own social skills. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, even if its because of poor eating habits, I can always take it out on those who are victimizing me. If I feel vulnerable, or frightened, or ashamed, or hopeless, I never have to examine my own soul to see if I am my own worst enemy. For the “worst enemy” is “out there.” I can go months at a time without having to look at myself with an apprehensive eye.
In short, victimhood is sometimes the last gasp of religious hypocrisy, the final hope of those who want to feel righteous without engaging in the messy business of repentance.
This is a vicious judgment indeed if it implies that no one is ever actually ill treated by another. But it implies no such a thing. Every single person who has ever lived has been victimized. Yes, some more than others; and some, terribly so, more than any reader of this document. But as has already been noted, this fact in itself does not explain or excuse the eagerness of many to live in a perpetual self-defining prison of victimhood. Do we really desire a culture in which everyone is competing for the right to be the real victim?
It is a fact: some folks habitually choose the psychological or social rewards of being victims.
The effects on the wider culture of such a choice are varied and complex. They may be laughable, inconsequential, or profoundly destructive. Society will, in some cases, protect and provide for them, in other cases, ignore them or even perpetuate their suffering. For the disciple of Jesus Christ, it is not even that complicated. Because habitual victims make two breathtaking and tragic theological errors that are simply unacceptable to New Testament Christians.
First, to be a habitual victim, or a habitual champion of habitual victims, one must deny that the essential problem of humankind is sin. Nothing could be clearer. If being victimized is the essential problem of some people, then sin is not the essential problem of all people, and the New Testament is not a meaningful document. Yes, Jesus was quite clear that he came into the world to free captives, empower the oppressed, comfort the hurting, and care for “the orphan and the widow.” But fixing these problems on their own level was clearly NOT his ministry. He left no doubt that these would be the EFFECTS of his primary ministry, which was to preach and demonstrate the loving reign of God, to make FORGIVENESS possible for SINNERS, and to lead those forgiven sinners into his own kind of righteousness and authority. How can the habitual victim ever truly hear such a message without questioning his or her victim status?
The habitual victim’s other tragic theological error is his or her tacit denial of the essential goodness of God and God’s creation. If there really are people in the world who can go their whole lives being truly victimized by others without sufficient inner comfort and protection from God, and without a God that responds to prayers in a way that can improve their lot, then humanity is, at best, a horribly cruel joke. In such a case, why would any of us ever care about anything?
The fact is, the habitual victim could not be more wrong on this point. The world that God made is a remarkably good, true and beautiful place. There are literally hundreds of blessings available to us for every one sorrow. And where human sin does bring trouble and suffering, God’s attention, grace and mercy are available out of all proportion – if we but open ourselves to it. Some of the most profound victims of history are those who most eagerly attest to this fact.
At age 19, I worked as a counselor at a camp for handicapped children. It was there that I met Noelle, a remarkable ten-year-old with severe muscular dystrophy. She was also intelligent and Christlike beyond her years. We had many hours of conversation together which I remember in fine detail more than 25 years later because of the influence they had on my soul.
I once related to Noelle a conversation I had just had with an acquaintance in which I was expressing my gratification at being able to share Christ with the children at this camp. The acquaintance, no friend of religious things, chuckled derisively and said, “You really are heartless. Don’t those kids have enough pain without you laying the salvation trip on them?”
After reporting this incident, I looked at Noelle. She had a rather uncanny look on her face, a far-off expression containing equal parts sorrow, confusion, compassion and anger. She had a tear in her eye. I asked her what was wrong.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why should I miss out on Jesus just because I’m crippled?”
Anyone first looking at Noelle would feel compassion for her as a victim. To watch her barely walk with her twisted body was truly heartbreaking. But in truth, she was the very opposite of a victim. I think I have never known anyone more alive and more filled with life. This is part of the meaning that Christ’s resurrection conveys. Victimhood is an event; at worst, a series of events. It is not an identity or a lifestyle unless we choose to make it so.


Copyright © 2002 Donald L. McIntyre All Rights Reserved