The first was that he was gay.

The second was that his life would never be the same.

"I did know immediately that basically, I was lost," he tells ABC RN's Soul Search.

"I lost my parents' world, their political world, their religious world."

As a queer person in a religious environment, he felt alienated, an experience he'd spend the next few decades trying to understand.

His journey led him to religious orders in South America, to the forefront of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and to the work of a groundbreaking French philosopher, who helped him understand why some people scapegoat others.

Love could be real'

Dr Alison grew up in the UK with parents who were "hardline evangelicals" in the Anglican Church.

The family was also politically conservative; his father was a conservative member of the British Parliament and a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government.

"[That's] not a safe place to be if you're a gay kid growing up, realising that you're not fit for purpose in that world," Dr Alison says.

At 18, after reading the biography of Italian Catholic priest and Saint Padre Pio, he found that Catholicism offered a different interpretation of the bible.

It made him feel able to accept both his sexuality and his relationship with God.

He converted to Catholicism, and four years later he joined a religious order in Mexico, where he began training to become a Catholic priest.

Part of his training involved pastoral work with people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in the UK and Brazil, as the illness swept through queer communities across the world in the mid-1980s.

But while Catholicism had made him feel he could accept his own queerness, he saw serious shortcomings in the Church's response to the AIDS crisis.

"At that time, the official language in the Catholic Church around gay love [described it as] hedonistic and self-centred," Dr Alison says.

It didn't align with the reality he'd observed.

He knew, from working with and counselling queer people facing serious health prognoses, that "[gay] love could be real" and, indeed, that it could be "stronger than death".

Dr Alison felt queer people were being targeted with the language of fear, but he couldn't quite understand why.

The scapegoat

In the late 1980s, as Dr Alison continued his theological studies, he stumbled upon the work of French philosopher René Girard, known for his seminal work on the "scapegoat mechanism".

Girard identified scapegoating as an important part of human adaptation.

Dr Alison, who went on to become an expert in the works of Girard, explains why:

"In situations of pressure, a group which is fighting amongst itself [and] which is full of rivalry, will mysteriously be able to move from an all-against-all to an all-against-one," he says.

Girard's theory is that the scapegoat is a "wrongly accused victim", cast out "for the convenience of the group", he says.

Girard argues that the result of that is increased group cohesion and a better chance at survival.

Dr Alison says it's an age-old practice.

"The celebration of the survival of the group at the expense of a 'wicked other' has been absolutely part of human survival techniques and at the basis of so many mythologies all over the world," he explains.

Indeed many scholars have identified this behaviour across cultures and even across species — studies have pointed to similar behaviour in primates.

Girard's explanation of scapegoating behaviour had a profound impact on Dr Alison.

Suddenly, his own experiences and those he'd heard from the queer community fell into place: they had been scapegoats.

"[Girard] was saying something basically true about me and about the world that I knew," he says.

A personal epiphany

The scapegoat concept can be traced back to the Bible.

In the Book of Leviticus, God instructs Aaron, the brother of Moses, to lay the sins of the Israelites on the head of a goat, then drive it "into the wilderness" to atone for their sins.

Even earlier in history, records of Ancient Greek and Middle Eastern rituals make mention of scapegoating, when a single individual — usually a slave, criminal or pauper — would be sacrificed or cast out in response to a societal ill.

For Dr Alison, the concept "turns on its head the old-fashioned [understanding] … of the death of Christ".

Rather than seeing Jesus Christ's death as a sacrifice to a wrathful God, Girard's interpretation sees Christ as a scapegoat "created by us at our worst" — that is, the judgement and wrath comes from us, not God.

This understanding sees God as loving and compassionate, as he has self-sacrificially given over Christ as a way to meet our demand for violence once and for all.

Dr Alison believes understanding how and why we scapegoat allows us to empathise with minorities, rather than attack them. It also gives us power to push back against the status quo.

"It's a fantastic piece of learning [to] automatically think, 'Well, if the majority says it ... then [they] must be right'."

The psychology of scapegoating

Australian National University's Benjamin Jones, an expert on the social psychology of scapegoating, says at its core scapegoating is a group response to a threat.

That threat can be real, like a food shortage or health crisis, or symbolic, like a threatened sense of group identity or nationalism.

Dr Jones says it's about a group trying to determine and define their own identity.

"Once you exclude a particular [person or group], that does serve to intensify this understanding of what you're like and who you are," he says.

While scapegoating is a deeply ingrained "adaptive" human behaviour, he says it can also be co-opted for evil.

"The classic example is the Holocaust, [which saw] a subgroup being blamed for something without any evidence, and that being used to leverage a particular political interest."

Plenty of minority groups have been subject to scapegoating in recent history, says Enqi Weng, a research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University.

From post-9/11 Islamophobia to anti-Asian sentiment through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Weng says there's "a lot of overlap" between scapegoating and prejudice in Australian society. Continue reading

• Anna Levy has worked as a journalist and producer for news, local radio, television and national programs at ABC Brisbane. She is the deputy digital editor for Radio National.
• Rohan Salmond is a producer and presenter with ABC RN's Religion and Ethics Unit.

The comments were made from Wales by Professor Thomas O'Loughlin in "Scapegoating: The Church's fall from grace", a Flashes of Insight conversation with Dr Joe Grayland, Dr James Alison in Spain and Sande Ramage in Palmerston North.

This Flashes of Insight conversation considers the impact on the church's fall from paradise, whether the church is being scapegoated, how the Church is dealing with this crisis and asks about real reform and restorative justice. It is a four-part conversation.

Host Joe Grayland asks if the sex abuse crisis will reconcile the Church with itself and with society or will it be a lost opportunity?

James Alison is an English Roman Catholic priest and theologian noted for his application of René Girard's anthropological theory to Christian systematic theology.

Alison says we all know what scapegoating is - it's when everybody gets together and blames someone for something that is not in fact their fault.

When we say that someone is a scapegoat, we're effectively saying they are falsely accused.

However, Alison says understanding the scapegoat mechanism goes back to something much more ancient. It is the initial way groups create unity and a coming together instead of destroying themselves in a frenzied all against all.

Alison says the group mysteriously finds it came together against one of their own number whom they had thrown out, and then recognised they were right to do so.

He describes it as a basic human act and an effective way of creating unity.

"It works to a certain extent in as far as we all gang up together against someone and throw them out, we become united. We suddenly have peace for a fairly short time."

The people involved think they've done the right thing because 'they've got' the person responsible.

Alison says the difficulty in this process is what he calls the "single-victim mechanism" - everybody calling them guilty for their own interests.

He says we live in a world where the innocence of the victim has become commonplace; the notion that the crucified one turned out to be God is commonplace.

"People are quite unaware of how different our world is in relation to victimhood than the ancient world was, to such an extent that now one of the ways in a violent tussle you try to achieve power is by claiming victimhood. The last thing you would do in the ancient world would be to claim victimhood because everybody knew in the ancient world the victor won."

Alison says modern society uses the scapegoat mechanism to play games to try to get positions of power - to be, as it were, consecrated within the society.

"Is it possible that we've got to a point where Christianity has led us to the situation where victimisation or victims are the victors, and that if you're not a victim, you're obviously a loser," asks Grayland.

Alsion says that Nietzsche thought something like that.

Nietzsche thought that the triumph of victims was a sign of everything that was wrong and that we should go back to having Ubermensch, who would be able to stand firm and not put up with all this victim nonsense.

Alison clarified that Nietzsche's view is not one he agrees with.

He says the challenge for the Church is not to be reactive to real change as it goes through the revolution we are experiencing at the moment.

Alison says he's noticed that some church officials tend to double down on the silliest and worst of their possible positions and make themselves more sacred in response to things coming out.

"Actually, as they do that we all learn what isn't really sacred."

Alison said it is important for the Church to recognise it is not talking about a script, it is not talking about a text, but it is talking about how to interpret 'a book'.

"I sometimes wonder whether this is what Paul was talking about - the catechism, that which holds back the coming of the kingdom.

"Whether he (Paul) had in mind the sense that the church is actually part of how humanity gets over the lynching thing by religious figures playing into the role."

Alison says 'fake religion' is actually how the most positive form of secularism emerges, not the negative.

"The negative forms of secularism are of course very easy to imagine, but the positive form - in other words, the creation of goodness, the ability to see through mechanisms of deceit, hypocrisy, etc. come about as we learn the failed attempt of the church to play the sacred role."

In a strongly worded response to the question, O'Loughlin compares the abuse crisis to being conned by a used-car salesman.

"I don't want to make this sound trivial, but…

"Have you ever been taken in by a used car merchant?

"I was taken in over 20 years ago by one. And you know, even now, I still kick myself.

"Why did I not see through it?

"… And if I ... if I ever saw that guy again, I would just want to deliver…

"So I feel embittered that I have been conned."

O'Loughlin says the Church has for so long held itself up quite explicitly as a beacon to the nations saying the Church sets the moral standards.

"We set the moral agenda, and I feel the part of the attack on the church today is the horror of feeling yourself conned.

"I don't think you can tell people you're bearing witness to the truth. And then tell downright lies," he said.

Ramage suggests that in terms of her experience of the restorative justice process, people have mixed perspectives to a point where the participants sometimes don't know which role they are playing.

She calls it the tension of the opposites and draws inspiration from the Christian image of Christ on the Cross.

"The image of Jesus on the cross - probably most of us can get the idea of when we're crucified and cannot find our way and we are just feeling like a victim persecuted.

"But if we step back and see the whole picture, including the two thieves on either side, I think that's the most powerful one because this is the victim in the tension of opposites that is not integrated.

"So the thief on one side that sees an 'I can have a new way,' the thief on the other side who says, 'nah, I don't want a bar of it'."

Ramage says she thinks the crucifixion is the most powerful image and, as Christians, it is something we somehow have to fit within this crisis.

"The tension is we are both offender and victim," she says.

The Flashes of Insight conversation centred around the responses to the abuse of power by Catholic clergy and religious.

The background to the conversation is René Girard's view of scapegoating.