Fr. Robert Barron, producer of last year’s much-touted Catholicism series, offers some thoughts on the popularity of the Hunger Games over at the Corner. His reflections won’t, perhaps, be terribly novel to those with a solid religious background, but as that represents a shrinking demographic in our country, he says, we shouldn’t be surprised to see pop culture begin investigating or dabbling with the allure of human sacrifice:
The really interesting question is this: Why has this motif of the sacrificial victim played such a large role in the human imagination for so long? Why do we keep acting out this scenario, both in reality and in our literature? The contemporary literary theorist Rene Girard has speculated that practically every human community is grounded in what he calls “the scapegoating mechanism.” [. . .]
He found that Christianity was the one religion, philosophy, or ideology that both unmasked this scapegoat mechanism and showed a way out. For at the heart of Christian revelation is God’s utter identification, not with the perpetrators of violence, but with the scapegoated victim. The crucified Jesus is hence the undermining of the dynamic that has undergirded most civilizations and that continues to beguile the human imagination to this day. [. . .]
Human sacrifice flourished in the midst of some of the most sophisticated and intellectually advanced civilizations in history. It is demonstrably the case, and not just a matter of speculation, that what brought it to an end in both the Roman and Aztec contexts was nothing other than the influence of Christianity, the religion centered on a crucified Lord.
What haunted me as I watched The Hunger Games was that the instinct for human sacrifice is never far from the surface and that it could easily exist alongside of tremendous cultural and technological sophistication.
Alarmism isn’t quite the right response here since, as he notes, not only does the film’s plot move in a direction which eventually calls into question the macabre ritual, but the source of the contemporary American public’s interest in the movie may well be “due to our at least implicitly Christian formation.” In other words, we want to see this non-redemptive sacrifice, get our money’s worth for a good half-hour of death without the Cross–and then reject it, reawakening both our disgust and our higher sense of compassion alongside the story’s main characters. Is this a voyeuristic arrangement on the public’s part? Maybe. But perhaps we should be thankful it’s not an endorsement.
March 28th, 2012 | 10:56 am
Here’s an interesting comparison over at NPR of Hunger Games and a Japanese book and film named Battle Royale. I think both works (which I have neither read nor seen) were intended to show the horrors of war), but unfortunately there is something deep down in human nature that loves war, and the dangers of presenting the horrors of war is that people will be thrilled rather than horrified.
Fr. Barron has seen Hunger Games and I have not (yet), but I wonder if the emphasis on human sacrifice is correct. I think perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of sending our young people off to war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Without the draft, these volunteers (many of them reluctant, especially when it comes to their second, third, and fourth deployments) can be sent into war again and again, while the rest of us sit safely at home watching them on television, if we bother to watch at all. I think both Hunger Games and Battle Royale are not so much about dystopian futures where “human sacrifice” is practiced, but our present penchant for being too ready to fight wars that require no sacrifice except from those in the military.
March 28th, 2012 | 11:37 am
Having read Hunger Games and seen the movie and now reading the second of the three books (Catching FIre), I think Fr. Barron’s mention of Girard’s scapegoat thesis is apropos as a context. The movie, which I appreciated, is not able to communicate what the book does so well. The book is in the first person and provides the perspective of one of the ‘sacrifices’ – she remains in a sense a sacrifice even though she doesn’t die. There is an anti-war message underlying the book, but there is also a strong criticism of our consumerist, voyeuristic culture as well as warning that affluence and might can blind people to the humanity of the less fortunate and the vanquished. And in addition to the Japanese antecedent Battle Royale, one of my teenaged sons mentioned another parallel in the story, that of Theseus and the Minotaur. All that to say, I don’t think the book encourages us in the direction of human sacrifice as much as, wittingly or unwittingly, alerts to the continued presence of scapegoating in our society today.
March 28th, 2012 | 1:18 pm
David Nickol I wonder if the emphasis on human sacrifice is correct. I think perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of sending our young people off to war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, we have a volunteer army, while the people in The Hunger Games are selected by lottery (i.e., not volunteers). So I think that’s a problem.
If not, then I don’t see why it has to be either/or; you’re identifying a special case of his general principle.
March 28th, 2012 | 2:45 pm
Jack Perry,
I did not say Fr. Barron was wrong. I said I wonder if the emphasis on human sacrifice is correct.
I noted that we have a volunteer army, but I also noted: “[T]hese volunteers (many of them reluctant, especially when it comes to their second, third, and fourth deployments) can be sent into war again and again, while the rest of us sit safely at home watching them on television, if we bother to watch at all.” I know many men and women have volunteered to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I know many did not want to go, or having gone one or more times, did not want to go another.
I saw an interview with the author of The Hunger Games, and she said the idea formed in her head while she was switching channels back and forth between a reality show and coverage of the Iraq war.
It does seem to me that the examples of the Aztec warrior and The Lottery are fairly clear stories of sacrificial victims, but gladiators fighting to the death and The Hunger Games less so.
Fr. Barron says:
I think he is missing the point that “such things” are very much in our past and present and are not just potential dangers in some dystopian, post-Christian future. Christianity has not protected us from bloody wars and inhuman atrocities over the past two millennia. No one accused George Bush of being “post-Christian,” and he got us into two unnecessary wars (to which John Paul II and Benedict XVI strenuously objected).
March 28th, 2012 | 4:18 pm
An excellent essay. Girard is a reminder that there are still new insights to be drawn from a 2000-year old story.
Girard wrote: “In revealing the self-deception of those who engage in violence, the New Testament dispels the lie at the heart of their violence. It spells out everything we need to reject our own mythic view of ourselves, our belief in our own innocence.”
This belief in our innocence, what Niebuhr called “the easy conscience of modern man,” is a basic underpinning of both pre-Christian Classical and post-Christian secular thinking.
March 28th, 2012 | 4:55 pm
Sorry, I forgot the footnotes.
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Rene Girard, p. 127
The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr, p. 23 and ff.
March 29th, 2012 | 10:30 am
“The Hunger Games” is a very clear example of what much (but not all) human sacrifice has been about throughout history — a reminder to the subdued of their powerless status, and a spectacle for the masses. Even when the victims come from within the ruling society, as they do not in the story, it’s still a reminder of who’s boss and who calls the shots.
March 29th, 2012 | 12:09 pm
I am puzzled about how there can be a sacrifice without a God, or gods, or some power that the sacrifice is made to.
March 31st, 2012 | 7:53 am
I am puzzled about how there can be a sacrifice without a God, or gods, or some power that the sacrifice is made to.
Really? I always saw abortion as a sort of sacrifice to the false gods liberals worship.
But of course they would probably define what they serve very differently than how I see them. (And they would use a word other than “worship” or “serve”, because we disagree on what it means to “choose”…)
March 31st, 2012 | 7:55 am
I always saw
I misspoke: “always” is far too strong, and was meant rhetorically – it is not true literally.
(But then anyone reading probably already knew that.)
March 31st, 2012 | 6:55 pm
As a Gen-Xer looking at my peers of GenX and GenY, I think Fr Barron is dead-on in his assessment, regardless of nuances debated here. The danger of our morally-numbed, internally vacuous younger generations (thank God we have many who are emphatically the opposite as well, but certainly not the majority) getting into something this deadly, state-sponsored most likely, is more real than most of us would ever want to admit.
And I’m surprised that noone has mentioned the application of abortion. If you google “abortion sacrament” it is clear that abortion radicals have long seen the murder of unborn infants as human sacrifice on an altar of self and progress. And the world is horrifically involved in this, from the US and Europe to China.
Further, this human sacrifice concept, Aztec beating heart and all, is dramatically played out day after day in northwestern prisons of China, where the government harvests livers, kidneys, hearts and corneas from over 80,000 live prisoners to date. Yes you read that correctly: live. And most of them just caught up in sweeps of ethnic minorities, Christians and Falun Gong.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html
And don’t be fooled by the tame comments in the current newsmedia about “consent” and “phasing out” which has mercifully been announced in the last week. They’re still going to keep doing this for at least 5 years, or longer.
No speculation needed. Human sacrifice in our world is alive and kicking. All I can say is, Come, Lord Jesus – and fast and pray, as the Blessed Mother has told us will be the answer to all this unspeakable suffering.
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