René Girard (1923–2015) — a French literary critic and anthropologist — develops a comprehensive theory of human violence and its relationship to religion and the cross. Mimetic desire: humans imitate each other’s desires, leading to rivalry and violence. Societies manage this violence through the scapegoat mechanism — transferring collective aggression onto a victim, whose killing produces a temporary peace and is then sacralized as sacrifice. Girard argues that this mechanism underlies all archaic religion. The Hebrew Bible progressively subverts it — the prophets increasingly take the side of the victim. The Gospels expose the scapegoat mechanism completely: Christ is the innocent victim who reveals the founding violence of human culture. His resurrection vindicates the victim, definitively exposing the lie of sacred violence. Girard’s theory is not primarily a theory of how God’s wrath is appeased but of how God in Christ exposes and ends the cycle of sacred violence. The cross is the event that makes the scapegoat mechanism visible and thus, in principle, inoperable. Girard’s work has been enormously influential in theology, anthropology, and literary criticism.