Scapegoats

I had the misfortune of catching a few political ads this past week. Luckily, I watch little television and so I miss most of this superficial and ugly nonsense. Alas, I do read the newspaper the look at internet news sites, so I don’t avoid the nastiness of our political process altogether.

This political season got me to thinking about all the political scapegoating I have witnessed in my life. Early on there were the communists. The commies were this vast, evil, clever and devious international conspiracy. Worse, the communists were all around us, infiltrating our institutions. They were taking over Hollywood, our schools and the State Department. Of course, communism was real. The old Soviet Union was a threat that needed to be contained. But the communism of our fears was far worse than the communism that really existed. In this country the communists were a tiny, powerless and insignificant group. I suspect that a lot communist meetings had as many FBI agents attending as real commies. The irrational paranoia about the communist threat led us to do all manner of harm in Latin America, Africa and in Vietnam. Our hysteria about communists allowed Senator Joe McCarthy to hurt scores of innocent people.

With the melting away of the communist threat, our political culture needed new scapegoats. Suddenly we found ourselves threatened by the insidious horrors of “the gay agenda.” Gays and lesbians were portrayed, much as the communists were, as this vast conspiracy plotting to take over our institutions, destroy the traditional nuclear family and lure millions of children into the “gay lifestyle.” A town I lived in in Oregon endured an awful, divisive campaign to amend the city charter so that the city could give no “special rights” (that was the term of art) to homosexuals. It was crazy and ugly. I was publisher of the newspaper. The truth was that, even had it wanted to, the city had no special rights to grant. If it hadn’t been so ugly, the campaign would have been funny. What was the city going to do, forgive your library fine if you were gay? Fix your parking ticket? Indeed, no one ever suggested that the city had ever given a special right or even contemplated giving a special right to a homosexual. Yet the hysteria was palpable. The measure passed by a large margin. And, of course, it had no effect. Nothing in the city changed. Library fines and parking tickets continued to be given regardless of sexual orientation. The courts eventually threw out the charter amendment.

The hysteria about gays and lesbians is very much still with us, of course. It works, just like the fear of commies worked.

Now we have added immigrants to our list of scapegoats. (Heaven help you if you are a gay Spanish speaking immigrant in America today!) Again, there is a real social problem with the recent surge in immigration. We need some change and reform. Paranoia, however, only makes it worse. A third of the pear crop in northern California went to waste this year because migrants were afraid to come pick it. We are about to spend untold millions of dollars on a modern version of the Great Wall of China. Like all such walls, whether in Arizona or Berlin or China, it will live as a monument to fear and ignorance. Alas, I doubt our border fence will become a world class tourist attraction as time passes.

After the attacks of 9/11, Arabs and Muslims are under constant suspicion.

And look back at our history. We have always needed some kind of scapegoat. In Salem, Massachusetts, people hanged their neighbors because they thought they were witches in league with the devil. At one time or other different groups were seen as a threat to America: Jews, Germans, Italians, Irish, Chinese, African Americans. We created what were essentially refugee camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War. And, of course, that war saw the murder of millions of Jews in Europe and well as tens of thousands of homosexuals and gypsies. Creating scapegoats to vilify is a human weakness, not an American one.

What is it that makes us so susceptible to scare tactics? Why can demagogues so easily persuade us to act like monsters? And what can we do about this terrible flaw in the human psyche? How can we move beyond fear and prejudice that lead to injustice, and even murder? Ultimately, I believe it is our collective fears and our ignorance that allow us to turn other human beings into scapegoats.

As our reading from Leviticus shows, the practice of having a scapegoat goes back to a religious celebration. The celebration was the Day of Atonement. The practice of sending a scapegoat into the wilderness was a clever visual symbol for beginning again, for leaving the wrongs of the past behind us. The sins of the people were symbolically heaped upon the goat that did not get sacrificed. The goat was then led away into the “wilderness.” The wilderness must have meant the unfarmed hills surrounding the city. All in all, being the scapegoat looks like a pretty good fate for the goat lucky enough to be chosen.

What a wonderful ritual! Every year we take all our collective shortcomings, put them on the head of some bewildered goat, and then essentially set the goat free. We start over. No grudges. All the bad stuff goes out with the goat.

Sadly, we do just the opposite. We find some convenient group, preferably a defenseless minority like immigrants or gays, and heap all our fears and insecurities upon them. Then, rather than send our fear and bitterness away into the wilderness and begin again in love and understanding, we keep our scapegoats around the house. We feed them with our fears. They hang around as constant reminders of the meanest, darkest, most foul part of our spirits. People who want to play upon our fears only need to drag out our scapegoats to frighten us. At election time in America we herd up our scapegoats and scare ourselves. Scapegoats are dangerous. The belong in the wilderness. They make terrible pets.

The genius of the old Hebrew ritual is that it reflects a deep understanding of the human psyche. Our past mistakes, our anger, our fears, imprison us. What each of us needs is to let go of these things that hold us back. The Hebrew ritual transforms this collective spiritual need and dramatizes it. It is all about letting go. It is about driving away the demons that keep us from entering into a new future, a future of hope, of faith, of love.

I suspect we all keep a scapegoat or two around. What do you need to let go of today? What fear, what anger, what mistake, is holding you back today? I know I have mine. In this political season, I know my own anger about the twisted right wing “religious” values that drive our national agenda has become something I need to let go of. Oh, I don’t need to let go of my ideals. Nor do I want to let go of my critical thinking or my passion. But I could use to let go of my poisonous anger that leads me to create nasty caricatures of people of the religious right. I criticize them for creating scapegoats, but I do the same thing from time to time.

And I have some personal stuff I could let go of today. I would be better off without it.

Tell you what, let’s do what the Hebrews did. Let’s let go and begin again. You were given slips of paper when you came in. Jot down one or two things you really want to let go of in your life. No one is going to read it. Be honest. When you are done, fold the paper. We are going to create a good religious scapegoat here today. We are going to take two offerings today. This first offering is an offering of all the poisonous stuff we want to be rid of. Drop it in the basket. We are going to collect all our slips of paper and send them off into the wilderness of the recycling bin.

(A collection is taken slips of paper. We place them all into a recycle container.)

There. They’re gone. My bitterness is gone. Your regrets and screw ups  are gone. Our mistakes are gone. Our worry is gone. Our anger is gone. The arguments we had with our spouse, our partner, our children are all banished. Our fears, especially our fears, are gone!

Wow. Doesn’t it feel great!

Now, on the one hand, of course nothing has changed. On the other hand, if we take seriously letting go of our mistakes and our grudges, then everything changes.

Certainly, heaping a community’s sins on a scapegoat and then sending that scapegoat away did not objectively change anything. On the other hand, changing the community’s attitude changed everything. If we believe we can release our mistakes and our anger and begin again, our believing it makes it so. We really can begin again.

Writing down what we want to banish from our lives on a piece of paper and dropping that slip of paper in a basket can change our lives if, and only if, we allow it to.

We really can begin again in love and in hope. We really can. It all depends on whether we can let this modern scapegoat we have created do its thing.

The choice is ours. The choice is ours today and every day. We can make some class of people into a scapegoat. We can heap all of our fears and insecurities upon gays, upon Latinos, upon Muslims, upon everyone who has hurt us. We progressives can heap our anger and frustration upon the religious right. If we turn other human beings into scapegoats, we dehumanize them and we dehumanize ourselves. When we turn others into scapegoats we condemn ourselves to living in fear. When we turn other human beings into scapegoats, eventually we will do horrible things to them.

Or we can create a religious scapegoat, a scapegoat that draws upon the profound wisdom of an ancient tradition. We can choose to gather up our fears and our mistakes and send them where they belong: out into the wilderness. We can leave all of that behind if we so choose.

And when we send our religious scapegoat into the wilderness, we are suddenly free to begin again. Together we can imagine how we wish to live and make our best effort to be faithful to that image. We are free. We can dare to hope, and then let our hopes, not our fears, guide us.

The choice is ours. May we choose life. May we choose love. Let us choose hope. Let us send our anger and fear and mistakes into the wilderness.

Scapegoat, away with you.

Let us begin again today.

May it be so. Amen.