Bulletin 85 – August 2025

According to Edwards, Alison is able to progressively discover God’s love for him through being set free from mimetic resentment. This happened through reading and digesting Girard’s account of mimetic desire as an experience of crisis and conversion lived and written about by outstanding novelists (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 74). But what happens to Alison in his reading of Girard is no purely private, personal resolution of crisis. In Edwards’s account, nothing less than a revolutionary shift in theology itself takes place, understanding the personal experience as a crux in human existence, a radical matter of transformed anthropology through God’s touch. Alison’s theological method becomes the entirely fresh discovery of God through the humanly transformative resurrection appearances of Christ to his disciples.. “In Alison’s view, truly perceptive theological reflection is only possible as an inevitable outgrowth of the initial experience of conversion that begins in the presence of the risen Jesus, who approaches his victimizers as a forgiving victim” (106). Here is the beginning point for theology—not any abstract scheme of thought derived from extra-biblical sources. And because of this radicalized mimetic method, Edwards sees Alison in terms of a fundamental theology, the very rationale (or, better, relation) whereby theology knows or understands at all (fides qua, 62, 114-15).

Edwards will follow in some detail the content of Alison’s conversionary theology, and I will get back to it again below. But before he turns to that he gives a very relevant introduction to Girard, offering a measure of critique that throws into greater relief Alison’s contribution. Through an exposition of Deceit, Desire and the Novel and Things Hidden, Edwards underlines the modern intensification of mimetic desire, in which the Judeo-Christian revelation has played a particularly provocative role. “Girard’s perspective in Things Hidden appears to be that, by gradually undermining the effectiveness of the victimage mechanism, Judeo-Christian revelation opened the path for the development of desire into its modern, metaphysical form” (47). What this means is that in the modern world the objects of desire are essentially unreal, mediated only by rivalry between persons. But it also tells us that the modern world is—in a technical but real sense—a Christian world, only in an inverted, problematic way. This reflection of itself heightens the importance of Alison’s theology of conversion, underlining the urgency of theological development coming from mimetic theory by telling us that conversion might be the final, organic, necessary antidote to today’s ever-more unhinged spirals of desire. This is the profound direction in which Edwards’s book takes us, but before getting there, Edwards points to what he sees as two key deficits in Girard’s governing account.
First, Edwards indicates a generally recognized ambivalence in Girard in respect to mimesis and mimetic desire. Girard acknowledges that the mimetic faculty is itself crucial to human growth and identity (50), but there remains a “lingering identification of mimetic desire with a rivalrous mode of that desire” (51). Edwards’s conclusion from this is fascinating. From the lack of a clear separation between rivalrous desire and positive modes of mimesis, there results a need for “a consistent conceptual language,” something that can come only from “a systematic theological perspective . . . necessary for developing a theoretical vocabulary adequate for this task” (52). Edwards seems to suggest here that a clear conceptual expression of positive mimesis—and with it a resolution of the contemporary crisis of desire—can only come at the level of theology and, specifically, a theological language of conversion.

Earlier, Edwards argued that Girard did not elaborate on the question of how biblical revelation subverts the victimage mechanism (44-5), but simply asserts that this is what happened. This might be an even more consequential reflection than the one on mimetic desire, because it demonstrates the need for a continuing wider and deeper reflection on the process by which the biblical tradition inserts itself into human culture to subvert it and transform it. Connected to this, Edwards makes the pointed remark that Girard was “thrown off his own theological scent” (61) by his repeated claims to do only anthropology. In other words, Girard could have developed a theology, one that might have answered some of the questions raised by mimetic theory, but he didn’t. My own feeling always was that Girard continued to accent anthropology in the belief that theology would eventually catch up. Edwards does not deal with Girard’s final work, Battling to the End. In that work, Girard seems to conclude that theology had proven incompetent to deal with the crisis in which humanity finds itself—the crisis of metaphysical desire. Perhaps, however, it’s true that Girard’s insistence on anthropology, including the doomsaying of Battling to the End, is itself the urgent and necessary spur to theology finally fulfilling its task. And—so it seems—right on cue, Edwards enters the discussion in the company of James Alison!

The heart of Edwards’s thought lies in the two chapters that describe the process by which the disciples’ experience of conversion, as articulated by Alison, becomes its own theological reflection, and, conversely, this theology, when developed, acts as a spur to conversion. The disciples’ encounter with the crucified and risen Christ is the singular pivot through which Christian faith and meaning enter the world. There is no presupposition, either religious or metaphysical, prior to this, by which Christian knowing can truly occur. Alison came to this insight because of Girard’s presentation of novelistic conversion in Deceit, Desire and the Novel. “Alison intuited that the structure of the conversion experiences of Girard’s selected novelists and their protagonists was similar in essence to the structure of the experiences of the disciples upon meeting the risen Jesus. . . . Alison believed that . . . he could use Girard’s reading of the conversions in the novels to illuminate and deepen his own understanding of the New Testament resurrection accounts and the experiences of the disciples . . .” (74). This statement comes within a section titled “Alison’s Epistemology.” Here Edwards points to what he calls the “intelligence of the victim,” which is the intelligence “operative in the mind of Christ” (68). It is important to underline, as Edwards does, the non-abstract or “non-intellectual” character of such “intelligence.” In Edwards’s descriptions, it is always relational, dependent on relationship with Christ, who, in turn, is related to the Father, meaning that it is holistic relationship which is remaking the world for the disciples (122-23). Because the “intelligence” of the risen Christ is relational, it can arise without intellectual presupposition. In fact, a disciple begins from a situation where their previous world has collapsed or is collapsing, and as such “There was no universal principle, all-embracing idea, or pre-formed discourse which they could simply adopt . . . [Their] only perspective . . . was a perspective received by the process of finding themselves to have been involved in something which had been knocked to the ground” (107, quoting Alison from Faith Beyond Resentment, 55).

The epistemology described, therefore, is nothing short of irruptive, transformative, re-creational. Edward’s systematic presentation is to be commended for making this unmistakable. His general name for Alison’s theology is “inductive,” meaning initiatory, “induc[ing] a new self into being” (109), and it maintains that character even as it becomes expository or systematic. Theology, derived from this initial experience of radical conversion, has the quality, not of accommodation but of witness. In aid of the argument, Edwards draws attention to Alison’s distinction between “the order of discovery” and “the order of logic.” The first is, again, the reception of Christ’s transformative forgiveness of the victim, and the second is the way this forgiveness becomes fixed within a conceptual scheme. But the latter can easily become “a way of ordering the doctrines of Christian faith to tell the story of Christianity without any explicit reference to the experiential dimension of how these doctrines came to be discovered and articulated” (113). Theology must, therefore, be reattached to the order of discovery for it to regain its inherent dynamic and human power. It must connect and witness to the new intelligence or knowing or relationality of the victim to do its job. When Edwards also emphasizes that for Alison theology “is a participation in God’s self-communication to humanity” where “God is not its object, but its protagonist” (110), we also grasp how urgent, irruptive and inherently revelatory Alison’s theology is.

The foregoing brings us to consider Alison’s own overall experience, which is evidently a form of what he is describing. The collapse of Alison’s world was the inbreaking of a freshly experiential theology, one mediated in turn by Girard’s extraordinary literary account of conversion. Stepping back, perhaps, we can see something of what is at stake here. In his illuminating foreword, Alison mentions that at Blackfriars he was in “a culture of reading, based both loosely and really around the thought of Aquinas” (x.) He was “on the inside of an organic whole” that was inherited from a pre-modern era, something that contrasted with the more “professional,” departmentalized academic ethos he would later encounter when he studied with the Jesuits in Brazil. Both these aspects—an inherited organic whole and a modern division or specialization of thought—are part of what I called “history and its evolving ground” at the beginning. Girard’s oft-noted contribution is to provide a paradoxically postmodern global theory, an “organic whole” which defies and reverses contemporary fragmentation. Alison’s discovery of Girard enabled him to be faithful to the holistic tradition he got from the Dominicans, by identifying a powerfully encompassing theology in mimetic conversion overcoming mimetic rivalry. But, at the same time, there is no way either Girard or Alison could be indifferent to the wider tides of thought swirling around them which—even as the possibility of mimetic conversion becomes clear—continue to reflect and shape the actual world. Aquinas employed a framing Aristotelian universe to develop his organic whole, while Alison, in addition to encountering Girard, experienced at least the trailing bands of liberation theology blowing through the Latin American continent in the immediate prelude to his time there. Even though, to my knowledge, he does not reference the “preferential option” for the marginalized and poor, asserted in the two continent-wide episcopal conferences in 1968 and 1978 (Medellin and Pueblo), this liberation theology helped set the stage, I feel sure, for Alison’s theologically-founded affirmation of being gay. As Edwards says, Alison is “writing from within a historical consciousness that recognizes the fundamental role of human experience as the medium in and through which persons and communities come to understand themselves and the created world” (112). This could easily be stated as the perspective of liberation theology itself an inheritance from thinkers like Paolo Freire and others. In a way it might be said that Alison’s work is gay-based liberation theology, not for the sake of a validation of gay sexuality as such (although this is not excluded), but as liberation from the cycles of condemnation and counter resentment by which any marginalized existence may so easily be consumed. Thus, once Alison discovered the extraordinary conversionary humanity illustrated by Girard, a wide-open territory of life-giving theological reading lay right before him. It is this liberation, from metaphysical cycles of violence, that may then stand as normative for everyone, gay or straight.

Edwards has a final chapter on the application of Alison’s inductive theology to regional theological questions such as natural law, atonement, and original sin, but I am inclined, in the space available, to double down on the fundamental breakthrough his theology represents. Alison’s reading of the scene of resurrection contains noteworthy, concrete elements that help unpack the new conversionary humanity he is offering. There is a core contrast between the disciples before, who were convinced of “the ultimacy of death” and hence were filled with shame and fear, and the disciples afterward, who were encountered by “the utter vivaciousness of God,” unbeholden to death in any way (91-3). Before Alison (himself après Girard), the scene would have simply held apologetic value or material for sermonic commentary, but now, it stands as the breakthrough of an entirely new human transcendence, over against the primary Girardian scene of the killing of the victim. As Alison himself says it, “God, by becoming human, created a real human story which is the celestial subversion from within of our violent history . . .” (102, from Raising Abel). “Subversion” is, of course, a political trope, while “from within” tells us of the radical human dimension where it takes place.

When Alison speaks of the “utter vivaciousness of God,” the phrase has an expressive, lyrical feel to it, but it is a phenomenon of extraordinary density and impact. There is something here way beyond any purely technical immortality communicated to humanity. Instead, it is a positive, pro-active event, bearing peace and forgiveness in human relationships, forming the germ of a new human existence. And I would suggest it cannot be separate from the “negative” term of nonviolence—used now of God in a formal via negativa sense. But it is not simply a matter of correct use of language, the right way to talk about God, but rather it is fully experiential in bringing not shame or guilt or anger and, thus, further cycles of violence, but rather peace, renewal, and freedom. As Edwards comments, the expression means “‘God’s complete noninvolvement in death’ . . . referring to death as . . . the most extreme form of social-exclusion and violence” (96 n.92). God’s nature as nonviolent has, therefore, entered human history, and is itself the overcoming of death.

In which case Alison’s gay-based liberation theology floods out of those moments of personal transformation—essential to the first disciples, to Alison, and to everyone bedeviled by metaphysical anger—into the trenches and deeps of human history itself, now fully the scene of phantasmagorical rivalry. The personal scene of destructive resentment has become comprehensively the public scene, relationally the res publica itself. We only have to think of Ukraine and Gaza, where violence has become terminally metaphysical, beyond measure, beyond life itself, or the many countries with permanent cycles of offense in their political spheres to know the kind of pass we humans have come to. It would seem only a Girardian thought and theology are competent to describe this condition and, hopefully, even at this late hour, also offer healing. Alison’s (and Edwards’s) scene of human breakthrough cannot be confined to a purely “spiritual” sphere (if it ever could), but belongs fully to the human impasse as such.

The landscapes of the world and theology do not collide; they converge. James Alison and a Girardian Theology offers rich and compelling corroboration of such continental movement, both in biographical detail and theological significance. Edwards consciously claims a theology whereby theological thought is constituted, and it seems to be one of unparalleled urgency. Rather than simply a book about Alison, it seems Edwards has brought us an authentic reflection of our human landscape from the close grain of personal drama to the broadest contours of planetary crisis.

Metaphysical desire has been variously interpreted in the reception of Girard, sometimes to include any desire for what is not physical or does not meet basic needs. Girard himself eventually seems to have left the term behind. Douglas’s definition of it as desire for identity fits well with Girard’s early use of the term to mean desire for the being of the models whose desires we imitate. It also serves well to link Girard to a larger philosophical problem and to other thinkers.

Given the form of the Zhuangzi, Douglas avoids finding in it any simple prescriptions and acknowledges his limitations as a student of this tradition. Nonetheless, he winsomely explores its approaches to escaping identity and links them to a wider range of more recent texts. I particularly like how he digs into nuances of the Chinese language, such as the contrast between the first-person singular pronouns wo and wu. Whereas the ideogram for wo suggests “self-holding” or “self-attachment,” wu is “something that can be pointed at but never identified” or “un-selfing” (33). The wu grasps at various wo, but they are always ultimately unsatisfying. Subheadings such as “Things Are Not What They Are” and “There Is No One Who Is Not Another” help capture principles that have been drawn from the Zhuangzi under the philosophical terms “transformism” and “perspectivism.” While value judgments and a sense of selfhood are unavoidable, wisdom sees their tendencies to violence. “Rather than being ourselves, we are better off vanishing and transforming into others” (73).

Spinoza’s status as a Jew expelled from his community for “heretical opinions,” and thus outside the confessional religions identities that took hold after the Reformation, helps explain his ability to see, and see through, the individualism and fixation on authenticity that were emerging within the dynamism of the early modern Dutch Republic. His masterpiece, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, “developed the most advanced psychological theory of his age” in service of “the lesson that true salvation can only come from escaping identity” (85-6).

This lesson follows from Spinoza’s analysis of desire as imitative, which leads to envy, ambition, and, on a political level, group identities and social order formed through exclusion. Douglas’s reading of how Spinoza anticipates Girard’s theses of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism parallels that of Stéphane Vinolo in the 2024 collection René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, volume 1. But whereas Vinolo holds that Spinoza responds to this diagnosis with a theory of democracy that renounces “transcendence of all kinds” (154) in favor of  a “fully immanent collective” (157), Douglas turns instead to Spinoza’s idea of beatitude. 

“All desire,” for Spinoza as for Girard, “is a desire for being.” Douglas continues: “Being always means being according to some model. In ordinary human desire, the model is of an ideal self—an aspirational identity. But in beatitude, the model is God. What is special about God is the complete absence of any determinate self or identity” (110). This is Spinoza’s concept of what Douglas calls God’s superdeterminacy. Determination is a kind of negation, not being something else. God, as infinite, “must be determined in every possible way” (112, Douglas’s italics). Humans carry an element of or capacity for that superdeterminacy. To take divine superdeterminacy as one’s model is to pass beyond identity, beyond wo to the non-identity and endless flux of wu, evoked by Douglas through several other comparisons.

When Douglas comes to Girard, he has already placed two of his three main ideas within a sort of inheritance outside of Girard’s own sources. He insightfully locates Girard himself within the mid-twentieth-century “collapsing identity regime” of decolonization, to which existentialism offered an attractive response. But while existentialism resists externally imposed identities, it falls into the trap of conformity disguised as authenticity already identified in the Zhuangzi and Spinoza, and exposed by Girard as “the romantic lie.” Douglas’s concise exposition of Girard’s first two theses, in dialogue with the earlier thinkers, sets up an account of Girard’s own response to the diagnosis of metaphysical desire, the climax of the book.

Though I would quibble with Douglas’s statement that metaphysical desire precedes mimetic desire, rather than being a mimetic desire for identity that underlies all others, he clarifies the point by correcting the misunderstanding at the root of a critical article by Girard’s Stanford colleague Joshua Landy. (Douglas also makes a briefer critique of Peter Thiel’s claims to be following Girard, which he has expanded in two Substack posts.) He makes a strong connection between his definition of metaphysical desire as a desire for identity and Augustine’s discussion, in the pear tree episode of Confessions, of a self-deceived attempt to imitate divine omnipotence seen in retrospect as imitation of his peers. 

Douglas’s account of a way out of the fall into mimetic desire for identity finds that this aspect of Girard’s thinking developed over his career, from the letting-go in which “the law of gravity is annulled” in his first book (cited here at 178 and discussed in connection with contemplative practice by Brian Robinette at this year’s COV&R meeting) to the imitation of the right model, which, following Girard’s third thesis about the importance of Christian revelation, is Jesus. What does this look like in terms of identity? Douglas cites passages from Girard’s last book, Battling to the End, that define imitating Christ as identifying with the other. Clearly, he notes, this can’t mean sharing a common identity. Rather, he proposes, “this ‘more real form of identity’ is really communion in a shared identitylessness…. To use the terms of the Zhuangzi…we merge arcanely into each other. We join in superdeterminacy.” One fruit of this remarkable conversation across cultures and centuries is the insight that “the imitation of Jesus will lead to ecumenical openness and the lack of any exclusive attachment to religious identity” (183, Douglas’s italics).

I find this Daoist, Spinozist interpretation of late Girard to be both bracingly radical and surprisingly practical. Other approaches to what is often called positive mimesis, a term Douglas does not use, are liable, just by identifying something as positive, to slip back into a desire for identity as this or that sort of person—the good kind. Even friendship, which I am always going on about, too easily gets stuck on looking for another self (a phrase from Aristotle). On the other hand, as Douglas writes (echoing a point about true friendship made by Simone Weil), “When we stop looking for ourselves in others, we will see them as they really are. I believe that we have barely begun to live in the world together” (193-4).

This last strikes me as a thoroughly Girardian sentiment and an important counterpoint to the bleaker aspects of Girard’s apocalypticism. Douglas’s book is full of brief, insightful discussions of other thinkers, texts, and familiar experiences that I have not touched on. As a book for a general audience, it does not engage with much secondary literature on Girard, but it is a worthy addition to it and a good entry point to Girard’s thought.

The attraction of Girard’s work for all sorts of readers has been its economy, its parsimony, in accordance with the principle of Ockham’s razor, namely, to explain much with little, to engage with complexity with reference to a single unifying term. Mimesis is detectable among all sorts of animal behavior, but among humans there are no instinctual breaks to its spread. Mimesis is how we learn anything, but it leads to conflict when desires converge on objects that cannot be shared, whence an internecine violence that is unique to our species and appears these days to threaten our existence altogether. 

Ebrahimian’s clear and thoughtful reasoning abounds with tell-tale examples. His scholarly and professional experience in theatre and cinema bear fruit in welcome additions to the inventory of artistic works where mimetic desire and conflict are thematically explored. His deft readings of O’Neil, Shepard, Beckett, Shaffer (Amadeus), Golding, Kubrick, and Kurosawa serve to widen the angle for Girard’s insights and should instigate yet further inquiry in drama, film, and popular culture. 

Jonathan Sacks’s Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (2017) is a companion volume to Ebrahimian’s reading of biblical episodes (Noah, Babel, Joseph, Psalm 22, Hosea). Thoroughly grounded in Hebrew philology, Sacks’s exegesis is attuned to Violence and the Sacred. Ebrahimian escorts his readers through the Passion narratives with special attention to the forces of crowd contagion even among Jesus’ disciples, who at the last supper effectively imitate, in fact rival with, Peter’s ardent denial of betrayal, a mimetic process among them that is rarely discussed elsewhere. Peter’s repeated, increasingly violent denials subsequently take on dramatic force, and indeed epistemic significance in the understanding of mimetic pressures. Denial of what we know to be true—of what, as the philosophers minimally formulate it, “is the case”—becomes available henceforth to anthropological and historical inquiry into humans’ habitual “blindness to contagion” (113). Viewed in this light, true freedom is redefined, as of the pages of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, as a conversion experience that, writes Ebrahimian, “involves a reorientation of one’s whole being… that involves being able to see and name negative, destructive mimetic desire in a way you couldn’t before, and repentance for participating in it…. We have the freedom to choose once we see what we are doing” (130). “True conversion,” as Girard wrote in his first book, “engenders a new relationship to others and to oneself” (294). That is the self-knowledge that Girard claims for the literary masterpieces he examines, whether their authors are believers (Dostoyevsky, Madame de Lafayette) or not (Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust). 

Commenting on the Gospel narratives, Ebrahimian writes, “Girard’s interpretation of the Gospel narratives gives us hope and a new perspective impossible before. It becomes possible not only to see scapegoating for what it is but to choose to live a different way entirely” (125). Not incidentally, “the way” is how post-resurrection followers of Jesus identified their beliefs and practices before getting tagged as “Christian.” Paul prescribed this way of living as “mimetes Christou” (1Cor 11.1). I have emphasized hope, for that is just what so much neo-Nietzschean debunking, so attractive among our dazzling theorists, does not afford. It is an abiding feature of Girard’s notion of “intimate mediation” amidst his otherwise bleak prognostic for our future as forecast in Battling to the End. Among the theological virtues, hope is the only one that survives in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason. In Susan Neimann’s summation (Left is not Woke, 2024), “We cannot act morally without hope.” This is not, she writes, to be confused with optimism, which, as Voltaire definitively demonstrated, is “a refusal to face facts,” a strategy of denial. The facts about the multifarious seductions of scapegoating, rashly looking for an available “fall guy” (Ebrahimian 53) rather than looking out for our neighbor’s well-being, are patiently unveiled in this concise and user-friendly volume, updating Maimonides as “guide for the perplexed” in our fraught moment. 

John McDowell also wrote about Star Wars, focusing his analysis on 2015’s The Force Awakens (episode VII). McDowell points out a fascinating difference between The Force Awakens and the George Lucas-directed originals: the genre of “post 9/11 cinema” (27). The Force Awakens, more so than its predecessors, scapegoats an evil “other” (the First Order) and “makes it less obvious that redemption consists in anything other than the utter annihilation of the threat” (37). McDowell connects this to the U.S.’s move towards black-and-white, good-vs.-evil thinking post-9/11. McDowell’s analysis looks at the cultural context of the U.S. as well as this specific instance of American cinema, ultimately finding both to be disturbingly inhospitable. His chapter leans into the most valuable aspect of pop culture: its reflection of societal mores and attitudes. In analyzing works of popular culture, Girardians also have an opportunity to examine the society that those works reflect.

Duns, one of the book’s editors, does an excellent job reflecting on society in his own chapter on the TV show Hoarders. Duns begins by writing about the desire of hoarders included on the show; many of them have experienced divorce, death, or loss of some kind. As a result, they are bereft of the mediator of their desire. They have no model. For this reason, their desire lashes out in harmful ways. The hoarders featured on the show amass large amounts of animals, trash, and even human feces (Duns 77). After exploring the dysregulated desire of the hoarders, Duns flips the script onto the viewers, who participate in the scapegoating of the hoarders. The hoarders featured on the show are already disconnected from social structures and outcast from society. The show exploits its subjects for views, and viewers become complicit in alienating the hoarders. Viewing the show is not an innocent action. It is one steeped in Girardian scapegoating and exclusion.

While I enjoyed reading chapters about pop culture that I was already familiar with, I also appreciated the introduction to media that was new to me. Daniel DeForest London contributed a chapter about Will Eisner’s Contract with God trilogy, one of the first graphic novels ever written. I was so intrigued by the chapter that I checked the book out from a local library. In reading the story, I was struck by God’s role as a scapegoat in the book. The main character blames God for the problems in his life, putting all the tragedies he faces on God’s account. London interpreted the graphic novel slightly differently, writing about the main character’s mimetic imitation of God, who he envisions to be an unjust landlord. After reading both the graphic novel and London’s chapter about it, I was left with many ideas and questions that were barely covered in the chapter. In his limited space, London only scratched the surface of interpretations in this incredibly complex story—there is potential for Girardians to think more deeply about this book and, perhaps, graphic novels in general.

Overall, René Girard, Theology, and Pop Culture is a concise introduction to the possibilities of applying the theory of René Girard to works of popular culture that are often overlooked by serious academics. The most valuable lesson of the book, for me, came in its expansion of pop culture critiques to include the complicity of the viewers in the creation and consumption of the work. Pop culture is a reflection of society. In analyzing works of pop culture, Girardians are able to more fully understand society’s scapegoating mechanisms and cycles of violence—gaining insight into how to end these cycles and live as members of a more peaceful and just society.

Horan’s study is timely because changing demographics in the mainline denominations are contributing to the troubling issues clergy women in her study faced. Mainline parishioner demographics show that most are Baby Boomers or older; indeed, 65% of mainline Protestants are aged 55 or older. Member losses in the last decade are significant, e.g., 58% loss among Presbyterians, 52% among United Church of Christ, and 41% among Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Church finances and member identity and sense of community are affected by these changes. Mainline clergy demographics show that, for the first time, millennial women clergy are assuming high-level pastoral leadership positions at a young age. Their youthfulness contrasts with previous generations of clergy women who came to the ministry at midlife, having raised children or pursued a non-ministerial first career. These demographics affected the clergy women in Horan’s research study. The importance of her study is confirmed by one other demographic: A 2021 study shows that 46% of pastors under the age of 45 are considering leaving the ministry, with young women clergy showing the highest levels of attrition. 

When Horan coded the interviews with clergy women who had left the ministry, two distinct profiles emerged. One profile, more prominent among women who entered the ministry in their mid-thirties, presented as an early success story. These women held senior positions, quickly established boundaries around the pastoral role, were decisive in their communication styles, and emphasized collaborative leadership. With significant success as a pastor, each was stunned to find herself targeted in her church by a small group of disaffected parishioners with rigid gender expectations. The other profile belonged to clergy women in their twenties in associate or youth pastor roles. They had reduced positional power and demonstrated less well developed skills in boundary setting. They also were collaborative but relied on trusted parishioner allies for support in the absence of experience and standing with their parishioners. These women left as a consequence of psychological abuse from senior pastors and complicit church or denominational leaders. 

Some features of a problematic work environment described by the clergy women Horan interviewed are found in multiple work settings. For example, not only young clergy women but also other young women in responsible positions (e.g., university professors, physicians, and attorneys) are infantilized. Notwithstanding that the clergy women had earned seminary degrees, their knowledge and competence on all aspects of church leadership were challenged. Many reported an obsessive interest by parishioners in their bodily presentation. Not only did they receive comments on their hair and dress, but also they were quizzed about plans for children and, if they already had a child, on plans to give that child a brother or sister. 

Other features of a problematic work environment were specific to a church culture. For example, the clergy women described conflicts about pastoral leadership when issues converged around a servanthood model of pastoral leadership and gender role expectations. While they were growing up in the church, they were encouraged to follow models of self-sacrificial women. Pastoral servanthood became part of their seminary education. Yet, in their clergy roles, servanthood rendered them invisible. They were expected to take up little space, restrict their voice, and embody humility while ceding agency and authority to others. They also found themselves under pressure to absorb others’ emotions as consummate “people pleasers” and to be gentle, soft, and non-confrontational. When they encountered situations in which they felt threatened (e.g., a male parishioner was stalking one pastor; the husband of a woman who was receiving counseling from the pastor for domestic abuse threatened to kill the pastor), senior pastors and parishioners did not support them, indicating that enduring suffering and a “sacrificial embrace” were part of servant leadership. In these ways, a model of leadership that has much to commend it becomes problematic for women when gendered narratives of power and societal expectations for the self-sacrificial woman prevent clergy women from successfully leading their congregations. 

Most intriguing among Horan’s descriptions of problematic interactions were conflicts she described as fitting a “mother-daughter” pattern. Women parishioners between the ages of 60-75 became immersed in conflict with the young clergy women because of generational asymmetry (i.e., the young women’s professional opportunities were closed to the older women when they were in their 20s), internalized sexism, and distinct gender identity narratives. To be sure, these “mother-daughter” conflicts are present in other work settings. Women physicians may have conflicts with nurses aged 55+ who would have gone to medical school if that option had been as viable when they were twenty as it is now; women in corporate or university leadership positions may have conflicts with women staff-aged 55+ who might have earned an MBA or PhD if those options had been viable when they were 20. However, the intensity of relationships within a church “family” can make the mother/daughter dynamic more fraught. 

In Horan’s study, clergy women were perceived by women parishioners to have “stepped out of line.” Women on committees tracked every move they made to make sure they were being done correctly. They were defensive and protective of their authority on church committees and in religious education. Hostility toward their pastor’s maternity leave also characterized the “mother/daughter” relationship. Horan labels the entire dynamic “the mother-daughter wound.” It is prevalent in societies in which young women exercise significantly greater autonomy and self-differentiation than women of previous generations. Where there is less symmetry in mirroring between mothers and adult daughters (actual daughters or pastoral “daughters”), older women may respond with resentment, anger, and frustration. 

Horan notes that some clergy women were perceived as “emasculating disruptors” by older men in the congregation. This typically was associated with social and economic insecurity among the men. Its key behaviors were aggression, humiliation of the pastor, and actions to delegitimize their clergywoman’s leadership. 

At some point in the interviewees’ church experience, they became “lightning rods” for negative perceptions and criticism. The term is derived from family systems theory and points to a phenomenon in which highly differentiated individuals within a social system become a focal point of anxiety, ultimately absorbing or becoming the target for others’ unresolved conflicts. During Horan’s open-ended interviewing, women used other terms for this phenomenon: “things were going downhill,” “I was swept up,” “a firestorm of resistance,” and “a downward spiral.” Further, once they became the focus of conflict, although few used the word “scapegoat,” their descriptions suggest scapegoating: “bonded together against me,” “Paschal lamb,” “whipping girl,” “whole system bought in,” and “turned me into the bad guy.” At this point, there were moves to oust them, sabotage their success, sideline and exile them, or remove them. The clergy women in the study left the ministry in order, as many reported, to “save their lives.”

Given the intensity of the experiences reported to Horan and similarities among the reports, Girard’s theory of scapegoating provided a robust analytical framework. None of the clergy women in Horan’s study were familiar with Girard’s theory as an explanatory nexus for their experience. Horan lays out the connections in detail, creating a revelatory experience for her prime reading audience: clergy women who have let the ministry because of scapegoating or who are struggling currently with congregational issues for which they have no name. 

On the surface, parishioners identified issues—finances, management style, mental instability—as pastoral failings. But these complaints were inconsistent with the clergy women’s leadership styles and previous successful work in their congregations. Horan’s attention to the “mother-daughter” wound and to male insecurity (senior pastors and some parishioners) offers some insights. She also notes other factors in play: loyalty to a senior pastor, the familial nature of a church community in which members of long acquaintance were wary of divisive conflict, denominational leaders unwilling to undermine colleagues, congregational resistance to confronting church financial problems (the pastor’s salary is the largest expenditure), and conflict over social justice issues. In these settings, there was an odd woman out: the young, clergy woman in their midst. Moreover, the mother-daughter wound put intense mimetic rivalry into play. 

Citing Vern Redekop’s work, Horan identifies scapegoat qualities shared by the clergy women in her research: perceived differences from their congregation (age, gender, leadership style) that were threatening; positional power that was considered illegitimate given gender expectations; vulnerability due to an absence of structures of accountability; a complacent denominational leadership; and no judicial buffers. Citing my scholarship, Horan also identifies a “lack of being” among the clergy women’s older, female opponents that contributed to threatening similarities, intensifying mimetic rivalries that spiraled into scapegoating. Horan suggests that mimetic theory is a vital intervention that will expose to the light scapegoating in denominational settings and offer insights for clergy women caught in these situations. The book closes with recommendations for denominational and church leaders as well as for clergy women. 

Lucidly argued and deeply researched, Horan’s book gives voice to Gen-X/Millennial clergy women who have left the ministry. With a deft application of concepts of gendered scapegoating and mimetic rivalry, Horan exposes problematic social dynamics that harm clergy women. This is a highly revelatory book for young clergy women, their mentors, and the congregations that have called them. Information on Horan’s ongoing work in support of clergy women is available at her website.