Witch-hunts and Scape-goats

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
12 February 2023, 11.00am

 
Alice Nutter, Pendle Witch

Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

Revelation 14.2-5, 14-16  

A few years ago, Liz and I went on the trail of the Pendle witches.

            It was a story I knew I’d heard of, but I didn’t know the details.

On the Witch Trial trail (which is harder to say than you might think),

            we discovered a fascinating tale of murder and dark deeds in deepest Lancashire.

 

In brief, 400 years ago, in the shadow of Pendle Hill,

            amid the pretty villages and sleepy fields,

suspicion started to grow that something wasn’t right

            with some of the people who lived there.

 

Some women, probably medicine-women with skills in herbal healing,

            were accused of witchcraft.

 

It’s possible that these women had actually come to believe

            that they had the power to curse people,

                        and to access strange powers,

            so there may at one level have been some truth in the accusation.

 

However, others got caught up in the accusations,

            and in the end, twelve people were charged

            with using witchcraft to commit multiple murder.

 

After a trial at Lancaster Castle, ten people were led outside and hanged.

 

The Pendle witches weren’t the only people charged with witchcraft in this period,

            and the best estimate is that during the middle ages

            approximately 500 people were executed for witchcraft.

 

This context of suspicion, which led to the ‘rooting out’ of the witches,

            gives us the phrase ‘witch-hunt’,

which we continue to use to describe any such attempt to rid society

            of those who represent a specific and feared practice or ideology.

 

From the Spanish Inquisition, which apparently no-one expected;

            to the Salem Witch Trials of Massachusetts;

                        to the omniscient thought control of George Orwell’s fictional ‘Big Brother’;

            to the McCarthyite ‘reds under the bed’ fears of the Cold War period;

                        to ongoing discrimination

                                    against people from other countries,

                        and violence against those with black or brown skin;

 - the tendency seems to be for us to reinvent the witch-hunt for each new generation.

 

Today is Racial Justice Sunday,

            and this year marks the 30^th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence,

            who was killed because he was black.

 

His mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, tells the story:

 

Racial Justice Sunday began in 1995,

            two years after my son Stephen Lawrence

was murdered by a group of racist men

            at a bus stop in London on 22 April 1993.

 

While much has changed in the 30 years since Stephen’s death,

            too many things have not.

Too many young people still struggle to succeed

            because they are disadvantaged by factors beyond their control,

and too many of the institutions upon which they should be able to rely,

            are still infected with institutional racism

            and the structures of bias and discrimination that uphold it.

 

She goes on…

 

The most profound social justice issues of our time

            demand a collective response.

We must come together in coalition with brothers and sisters

            from across the Christian community and beyond,

to ensure that the church itself is reflective

            of the society we hope to build for future generations,

working together to end racism and discrimination in all its forms.

 

In Pendle in Lancashire, 400 years ago,

            a largely rural culture took its worst fears, paranoia, and guilt,

            and focused these on targeted individuals who were declared guilty

                        of a crime that they had not committed.

 

The structures of racism in our own world follow a similar pattern,

            as people declare the minority guilty without cause

even as they declare themselves innocent

            of demonstrable collusion in structures of oppression.

 

I found it particularly interesting that one of the guide books to the Pendle witch trials

            says that "The evidence against them

                        was based on memories, hearsay and superstition."

 

In other words, whilst it appears to be important that the rule of law is followed,

            actually the most important thing is to make the so-called guilty pay.

 

The role of the legal process becomes less about

            establishing truth beyond reasonable doubt,

and more about allowing society to believe

            that the witch-hunt has not taken it beyond the bounds of normal process.

 

This is why we end up with institutionalised racism

            in those very structures in our society

            that should be there to protect the vulnerable.

 

One of the characteristics of legal processes in a witch-hunt scenario

            is that once accused, someone is popularly presumed guilty until proven innocent,

            rather than the other way around.

 

The philosopher Rene Girard suggests that what we encounter

            in situations such as the Pendle Witch Trials

            is an example of a social phenomenon known as scape-goating.

 

The term scape-goat has its origins in the Old Testament,

            in the book of Leviticus (16.21-22),

            where we find a ritual described which has as its purpose the purification of society.

 

In this special ritual, the sins of the people

            were symbolically laden on the head of a goat,

            which was then driven away into the wilderness. [1]

 

This goat has become known as the ‘scape-goat’,

            because it is sacrificed to atone for the sins of the whole population.

 

In modern language, we still speak of a scape-goat,

            usually as a human victim, who is identified as an easy target

            on which to discharge the accumulated hatreds of a community. [2]

 

Rene Girard says that the act of scape-goating isn’t simply a religious ritual,

            but that it is rather an example of a universal human tendency.

Girard argues that at the base of human society is a drive, or instinct,

            to imitate, to copy, to want to be like another person,

            or to have what another person has.

 

This desire to imitate creates rivalries between people

            that then have to be contained,

and Girard suggests that the rules of society

            are attempts to contain the rivalries that would otherwise lead to violence.

 

Think of the child who has not yet learned to say ‘please’

            – if they want something, they will attempt to just take it.

 

Eventually, and hopefully before they are strong enough to take it by force,

            they will learn to say ‘please’,

                        and they will learn the rules of sharing,

            and that sometimes you don’t always get what the other person has,

                        no matter how much you want it.

 

In other words, they learn the rules of society.

 

However, the rules just contain the desire, they don’t make it go away.

            This is why capitalism is such an addictive ideology – but I digress.

 

The rules of society don’t banish the capacity for acquisitive violence

                        that lies within each human soul,

            they just contain it,

                        and allow it to be exercised at a societal rather than individual level.

 

If I kill you because I want your stuff, society judges me guilty.

            But if we all agree, as a nation,

                        that we want the land currently occupied by another group,

            we justify together our military action to take it.

 

Which is why Palestine and Ukraine remain in our newspapers,

            but again, I digress.

 

By this way of looking at things,

            violence between two people   

                        – me using violence to take what I want from you –

            is contained.

 

But violence exercised on behalf of the many against the individual is sanctioned,

            and even necessitated, as the legal system asserts its communal rule of law.

 

By the same token, violence exercised by the many

            against another societal grouping is also justified.

 

In other words, if enough of us agree that it’s OK to go to war, then it’s OK.

            And also, interestingly, if we do go to war,

                        there is then huge propaganda pressure to conform to that decision,

                        to cheer on and support ‘our boys at the front’.

            But again, I digress.

 

Girard goes on, and takes his argument one stage further,

            and this is where he starts to shed light on the language of the scape-goat,

                        on the practice of the witch-hunt.

 

Sometimes, he says, the conflicts within a society

            cannot be contained by the civilising rules

            that the community has developed.

 

An atmosphere develops of fear, suspicion, and distrust

            between members of the society.

Mob rule threatens, and riot is just below the surface.

 

Eventually two or more individuals converge on the same adversary,

                        and then others mimic them in this,

            so that in the end everybody gets drawn into a united hatred

                        of the targeted adversary.

 

As Stephen Finamore puts it,

            ‘The undifferentiated and unified mob converges

            on one arbitrarily selected individual.’ [3]

 

Violence against the one, or possibly the few,

            acts as a catharsis for the wider society,

                        expelling hostile and violent emotions from the group,

            and producing a sense of calm, harmony, and peace.

 

The group agrees that the scape-goat must die,

            the group enacts the sacrifice,

                        and the group feels better as a result.

 

By this understanding, the scapegoating of the few

            serves a wider sociological function,

            by assuaging the guilt of the many.

 

And so there is an inbuilt human tendency to scapegoat,

            to witch-hunt, to name certain people as ‘other’, as ‘evil’,

                        and to take collective action against them.

 

            Because if we all unite in hating them,

                        maybe we won’t hate each other as much, at least today.

 

And so we love to root out the evil,

            to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to rid society

                        of the ones we have deemed unrighteous.

 

We embark on a crusade, we condemn them to hell,

            because by doing so we rid ourselves

            of that which makes us most afraid.

 

There is a certain type of religious person

            who longs to root out evil in all its forms,

            and to establish the rule and reign of the righteous on the earth.

 

They have always existed, and they probably always will.

And the current zealous campaigning
            against the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in church life
is the latest damaging incarnation of an ancient tendency
            to vilify and exclude the minority
by declaring them guilty of sin in such a way
            that the majority can then declare themselves not guilty of their sins.
 

The parable of the wheat and the weeds,

                        or the wheat and the tares as it is more traditionally known,

            has its origin in a society that knew all about such religious extremism.

 

From the Zealots, eager to rid the land of the polluting and corrupting Romans;

            to the Pharisees, eager to fight against pagans on the one hand,

                        and against compromised Jews on the other,

            there were plenty of people around in Jesus’ day

                        who were desperate to rid society of evil.

 

In the parable of the wheat and the weeds,

            Jesus offers a direct challenge to the mindset of scapegoating,

                        to the practice of the witch-hunt.

 

There’s no point, says Jesus, in trying to root out all evil from within human society,

            because it can’t be done.

 

All you will do is damage the good that is growing there alongside the evil,

            and the whole harvest will be lost.

 

So at one level, this is a parable that urges patience, forbearance, and perseverance.

            However frustrating it may feel

                        to have to continue living alongside the unrighteous,

                        it’s not our job as humans to purify society.

 

But at another level, the parable offers a deep insight

            into the nature of the human soul:

the reason we cannot root out evil from our midst

            is because the evil is not actually ‘out there’ at all.

It is within each one of us.

 

It’s not just society that’s a mixed field of wheat and weeds;

            it’s me, and you,

            and each and every complex person on this complex planet.

 

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it,

            ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human.’

 

The task of the religious extremist

            is shown by Jesus to be an impossible task,

because one cannot ultimately purify the human soul

            through the exercising of violence,

                        however apparently well intentioned,

                        and however legally mandated, that violence might be.

 

People keep trying, of course, because it seems so enticing;

            when we scape-goat the ‘other’, when we embark on a witch-hunt,

                        we feel so righteous;

            we know we are right and innocent,

                        and they, whoever they are, are guilty and deserve their fate.

 

And yet, of course, none of us are innocent.

            All of us desire that which belongs to the other,

                        all of us want what it not ours to have,

                        all of us long to reach out and take, by force if necessary,

                                    that which will make us complete.

 

And so the crusade doesn’t work.

            The inquisition doesn’t work.

                        The holy war doesn’t work.

There must be another way.

 

Well, says Jesus, there is.

            Let the wheat and the weeds grow side by side.

Don’t spoil the harvest by rooting it all out too early.

            Let God be the judge of what is of value and what has no value.

 

The thing about weeds and wheat is that,

            until the harvest is mature,

            it is very hard to tell the one from the other.

 

You get some wheat the looks like weeds,

            and you get some weeds that look like wheat.

So don’t judge others, lest you yourself be judged,

            as Jesus puts it earlier in the gospel (Matt. 7.1).

 

Each of us is a mixed bag of wheat and weeds.

            There are things in my life that have no eternal value,

                        and which need to be consigned to the flames for all eternity.

            There are things in my life that are pleasing to God,

                        and which he will hold safe in his eternal storehouse for evermore.

            I am weeds, and I am wheat.

                        As are we all.

 

The only purification of the human soul that carries eternal value

            is the judgment of God.

 

The only purification of the societies we construct

            that carries eternal value is the judgment of God.

 

And all human attempts to enact that judgment on God’s behalf

            become scapegoating and witch-hunting:

temporary fixes to assuage our guilt, that ultimately damage us all,

            as the weeding out of the few destroys the harvest of the many.

 

The only scapegoat that has the capacity to take the sins of us all,

            and remove them from us for all eternity,

is the sinless one who was sacrificed on the cross

            for the forgiveness of the many (Heb. 13.11-12).

 

And yet, still human society attempts to purify itself,

            to scapegoat the hated and feared ‘other’

            in a desire to unite against the common foe for the good of us all.

 

Some seek to purify humanity by planting bombs on planes and trains.

            Some by naming and shaming.

                        Some by manipulation.

 

Certain quarters of the press and media take great delight, it seems,

            in dwelling upon the sins of others;

all in the public interest, of course,

            for the good of the many.

 

Sometimes those who are scapegoated are entirely innocent.

            They have done nothing to deserve their denigration,

                        and they are simply declared guilty

                        in the absence of evidence of innocence.

 

The language of ‘illegal migrants’ is often used

            to describe those who have come to the UK as refugees to seek asylum.

 

And this designation of them as ‘illegal’ offers a justification for their incarceration,

            and for their inhumane or sub-human treatment

            through forced destitution, detention, and deportation. [4]

Similarly, the attempts to turn public opinion
            against those who are striking for fairer wages,
is another example of how blame can quickly become focussed
            on the very people who we ought to be valuing and protecting.
 

But as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans,

            ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:23).

 

Each of us is wheat and weeds.

            Each of us wants that which it is not ours to take.

                        Each of us is in need of mercy, and forgiveness, and grace.

 

Each of us has the capacity to join the mob,

            to assuage our guilt through the scapegoating of the few.

 

Yet each of us also receives forgiveness

            from the one who went to the cross for the sins of the many.

 

Each of us receives forgiveness

            from the only one who is in a position to judge us.

 

Each of us is touched by the grace of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,

            who has set us free from the law of sin and of death. (Rom. 8.2).

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[1] Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 114

[2] Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 115

[3] Finamore, God, Order and Chaos, p. 72

[4] http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2013/09/uk-media-needs-stop-referring-refugees-illegal-immigrants