Mimetic or Imitative Theory is an explanation of human behavior and human culture. Human beings imitate each other in everything, including desire. As a result they choose the same objects and compete for them. Paradoxically, therefore, the same imitative force as brings people together, pulls them apart. The mimetic theory claims that this misunderstood phenomenon is the most important cause of human violence, and that vengeance is the most important form it takes. Vengeance is the first characteristically human institution. We call this first insight the moment of mimetic desire or mimetic rivalry.

Limitless vengeance will destroy the species unless some antidote appears. Paradoxically the antidote originates in the same mimetic impulses as cause the problem in the first place. The mimetic reciprocity of vengeance is deflected upon a single victim, which mimetically attracts all the violence to itself. This is the process the Greeks called Katharsis, which means the purifications of violence through one solemn, sacrificial death. We call this second insight the moment of the scapegoat.

Archaic religion is essentially the ritualized repetition of this sacrificial death, in order to renew is efficacy. We call this third insight the moment of religion.

Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

The Gospels not only disclose the hidden scapegoat mechanism of human cultures, but witness to the God, who stands with the Innocent Victim and is revealed through him.

The most important of these we find in the Gospel of Luke, the famous prayer of Jesus during the Crucifixion: "Father, forgive them because they don't know what they are doing". Here, as with all the sayings of Jesus, it is crucial to avoid emptying what he says of its basic sense by reducing it to a rhetorical formula, to a kind of sentimental exaggeration, for example. We should always take Jesus at his word. He expresses the powerlessness of those caught up in the mimetic snowballing process to see what moves and compels them. Persecutors think they are doing good, the right thing; they believe they are working for justice and truth; they believe they are saving their community.

So what does Peter do?, he wants to show he is one of them, and the only way to show you are part of the crowd is to join in scapegoating, If I have the same enemy you have, I am one of yours.

Is it necessary to refuse this mimetic anthropology in the name of a given theology? Is it necessary to see in the gathering against Jesus the work of God the Father, who would move humankind to act against his Son in order to exact from him the ransom that they themselves could not provide? To me this interpretation appears contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the Gospels. There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion is enough. Those responsible for the Passion are the human participants themselves, incapable of resisting the violent contagion that affects them all when a mimetic snowballing comes within their range.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

Christ took away humanity’s sacrificial crutches and left us a terrible choice: either believe in violence or not.