DIONYSIOS, THE CRUCIFIED, AND “CHRISTOFASCISM”
On February 28, President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. In the middle of what were supposed to be peace talks, Vance pounced on Zelenskyy, lecturing the embattled leader on his lack of gratitude for US aid before Trump swooped in to complete the ambush.
Commentators Will Saletan and Greg Sargent described the scene:
They sandbag him . . . They accuse him of being ungrateful . . . [Trump] knows the cameras are running [and he] says, “I let this go on because I wanted people to see this.” . . . That scene was created by Trump and Vance in order to make [Zelenskyy] look bad, [like a] submissive, groveling figure, [in] an effort to condition the American people . . . To change American public opinion to move with [Trump and Vance], to make it look like Ukraine was the bad guys. [1]
Note that Zelenskyy is not here framed as an aggressor. Instead, Trump and Vance framed him as “submissive and groveling,” a leech “emboldened” by US generosity who ought to accept that he is outgunned and make a deal with Russian invaders. Zelenskyy’s great act of disrespect, we are told, was in recognizing his own neediness—how little he had to offer—and yet still pleading the Ukrainian people’s case to the nations in the name of justice alone.
To plead one’s case as a victim of injustice: Trump and Vance want Americans to see this as contemptible behavior. As a new and caustically “Christian” rhetoric puts it, they want us to see “empathy” with such victims as a sin. But I believe the goal goes deeper: they and their allies want to consolidate their power in the public eye by stigmatizing “victimhood” as a whole.
How does this work? Well, their argument goes, if one magnanimously extends charity outside the orbits of common tribe, beliefs, and values, they should expect their feelings to be manipulated by “nasty,” sinful people: people who claim to be “victimized” by the wise justice of the United States or even by God’s own perfect moral order. But, if God is perfect, and we are God’s chosen people, how could anyone truly be victimized by the systems we ordain? Compelling as the passion of the “marginalized” might be, Christians must guard their feelings against the seductions of their unwarranted griefing. [2]
Much as Trump tried to tell the world through his ambush of Zelenskyy, this segment of Christian culture tells us that, in a fallen world, there is nothing particularly special or entitling about being a victim of injustice. The common good requires “pain” in an inevitably uneven distribution. We are thus told to look away when college students are disappeared and to shut up when our parents don’t receive their social security checks. Don’t stoop to being a “victim,” the regime says; it just makes you look like a criminal. [3]
Fundamentalist Christians and political pundits go out of their way to justify these claims with some kind of authority. Vice President Vance, for example, drew attention for torturedly articulating Thomas Aquinas’s ordo amorisin a way that left room for—well, torture. [4] He is also, if not a close reader, then at least an insipid “fan” of the French-American scholar René Girard, who wrote on the dangers of politics driven by “victimology.” [5] One can certainly find anxieties about proto-identity politics or “wokeism” in Girard’s warnings about a “Nietzschean heritage” descended from Stalinism: a concern for victims so fierce that it “out-Christians” Christian charity, and on that basis justifies indiscriminate revolutionary violence. [6]
But Girard also claims the Nietzschean heritage is twofold: If one branch descends from Stalin, the other descends from Hitler. If the leftmost branch of this heritage is prone to “out-Christianing” Christianity’s moral fervor, the rightmost branch is more interested in discrediting the victims of injustice altogether. This project, Girard says, is the root logic of fascism. [7]
Girard defines the “Nietzschean heritage” as the ideology developed and passed down from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his rivalry with Christianity. Against the virility and creativity he perceived in classical pagan religions, Nietzsche called Christianity a religion of “ressentiment” and “slave morality,” a religion which coddles the poor and the weak and promises them a distant cosmic victory over the strong. Against “the Crucified,” Nietzsche celebrated the Greek god Dionysios as a symbol of strength and of the “will to power.”
What Nietzsche really perceived in Dionysios’s “strength,” Girard says, was the sacrificial mechanism of archaic human religion. The “will to power” has nothing to do with creativity or individualism, and everything to do with unanimous violence organized against innocent victims. Such “power” does not liberate; it anxiously consolidates itself in the name of purity and survival, and it justifies every sacrifice deemed necessary for that survival. [8]
According to Old Testament scholar J. P. M. Walsh, this same Dionysian “strength” is framed as the enemy of God throughout the Biblical narrative as a whole. The difference between the Baalism of Canaan and the Yahwistic religion of early Israel, Walsh argues, lay in their priorities: For Baalism, “Bread,” or survival, was the highest good; the king was expected to work justice for the “widow and the orphan,” but often enough such justice was considered a luxury to be pursued after the granaries were stocked, the coffers full of plunder, and the king’s power secure and uncontestable. Until these goods were achieved, the victimization of Canaan’s neighbors and its poorest citizens was a divinely mandated necessity. [9]
I think many American “Christians” in 2025 would agree with these priorities. To them, the difference between Yahweh and Baal is a difference of pure power, as God inveighs against the worship of mere idols. God “has the say” by beating idol-worshipers into submission. But the Bible tells a different story, according to Walsh: Yahweh did not play by Baal’s rules. He established a covenant with Israel that inverted the Canaanite economy. He commanded his people to leave “Bread” up to their God, and to concern themselves chiefly with justice. In Yahweh’s eyes, the widow, the orphan and the stranger took priority over a well-supplied army.
Israel’s refusal of this difficult vocation caused them to choose a king over God (1 Sam 9), and it finally led them into exile. Meanwhile, it was the fulfillment of this vocation that marked Jesus of Nazareth not only as Israel’s Messiah, but as the singular representative of the One True God on earth. [10] And as God’s definitive statement to humanity, he also revealed the nakedness of the Dionysian “powers and principalities.” [11] He sided with the sacrifices and brought an end to sacrifice, destroying the mystique of the gods and establishing justpeace as the absolute law of the cosmos: the “one necessary thing.” [12]
Unable to accept this true meaning behind Christ’s “power made perfect in weakness,” Nietzsche finally said the quiet part out loud: Because of Christianity, Nietzsche lamented, “The individual was taken so seriously, he was posited as such an absolute principal, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species only survives thanks to human sacrifices . . .” [13] In other words, Nietzsche desired to return to a time when “survival” and “power” mattered more than “justice.” A time when the glorious need for sacrifice went unquestioned.
The Nazi perpetration of the Holocaust must be understood in this light, according to Girard. Its scale and intensity, even to the detriment of Nazi military strategy, was no mere act of scapegoating: It was an attempt to discredit, in the whole world’s eyes, the cries of all victims of injustice. It was to be a re-vindication of the archaic spirituality Nietzsche longed for, the religion not only of Dionysios but of Baal, which credibly achieved glory by sacrificing the weak. The resurrection of Germany as a superpower at the expense of the Jewish people was to mark a return to this old occultic order, and the death of Christian charity forever. [14]
Thankfully, this did not happen. The Christian concern for victims—imperfect and hypocritical as it has been in the history of the West—ultimately won the day against Nazism. If anything, this victory only entrenched Christian charity more deeply as the norming value of the 20th Century, animating the Civil Rights movements and anti-war activism of the following decades. This came as no surprise to Girard; though Christians themselves have struggled to get their heads and hearts around it, this relentless concern for the victims of injustice was always, to him, the compelling core of the whole Christian faith: God reveals Godself as on the side of victims, overthrowing the gods and scandalizing the “good people” who believe they follow a divine mandate by purging their communities of impurity. [15]
In our moment, too, Trump and Vance’s Hitlerian gambit seems to have backfired; after laying his snare to discredit Zelenskyy, a new Gallup poll showed that a record 46% of Americans believe we are “not doing enough” to help Ukraine. [16] Despite the best efforts of many “Christians” around us, we have not totally abandoned Christian charity.
Some may take issue with my use of scare quotes around “Christian.” Is impugning the faith of others really the right tack to take for this moment? If “us and them” thinking is a key ingredient of fundamentalism of all kinds, aren’t I guilty of the same here?
To that, I can only say—echoing a friend wiser than I am—that fundamentalist thinking does not come down to simply naming who is right and who is wrong. If we cannot name this, we cannot do any good in the world at all, cannot call the world to account or to a higher standard. The difference is that fundamentalism and fascism draw their distinctions from a place of pride and fear: pride in one’s place among the “righteous,” and fear of anything that might threaten that place. When we fight for the vulnerable to the point of “out-Christianing Christianity,” it’s because we do so from that same place of pride and fear (and I admit to writing from a place of fear right now). “The only difference between the just and the wicked,” Walsh writes, “is that the just do not have the illusion that they are just. They know their need. In this, that they do not separate themselves from the wicked, they live by the [justice] of Yahweh.” [17] We must be always returning to the well of faith that innoculates us against pride and fear and purifies the truth we hope to speak.
Trusting in that well, and knowing myself a persecutor, I dare to say that the distinction between Christianity and “Christofascim” is strikingly clear: Do we proclaim our own glory as the glory of God, and that at the expense ofhuman dignity? Do we uphold the rights of “insiders” over “outsiders” to share in that glory, justifying whatever the insiders do in pursuit of their justly-deserved “Bread”? If so, we have not believed the Gospel at all. We have backslid into the occultism of idolatry—the might of Baal, the bloodthirst of Dionysios, the madness of Nietzsche and Hitler. We have put our faith in violence and “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (Rom 1:25). We are “antichrists” (Gal 1:8, 1 John 2).
The only alternative is to make peace with God (Is 27:5). And making peace with God means accepting that God’s is a wounded glory, haloing the poor and the vulnerable. His splendor draws attention to their splendor—but also to our own, bought at extravagant price. Ours is a needful solidarity, dead in sin yet risen in Christ. From within that solidarity, we will not grow tired of caring for each other (Gal 6:9), but we will peacefully leave survival and sufficiency up to the grace of our living, loving God who shepherds us towards a new heaven and earth. This is abundant life. This is Christianity (Jam 1:27).
Yet we still face a scandal that beggars the imagination: God’s wrath against oppressors also manifests as God’s “going beyond,” loving his enemies, “preparing a place” for victim and victimizer alike. In Christ, God saves the oppressed from the oppressors—but, in his charity, he also saves the oppressors from themselves. His wrath misses no mark, and his love leaves no one behind. [18] This, too, is the justice of Yahweh: Hidden, but more efficacious than ours. [19]
[1] Greg Sargent and Will Saletan. "Trump's Fury at Canada Boils Over on Fox--and Polls Now Show a Backlash." The Daily Blast, March 20, 2025. Podcast, The New Republic
[2] Key texts on the “sin of empathy” include Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Moscow: Canon Press, 2025) and Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (New York: Sentinel, 2024). For further rebuttal, see also Michael C. Rea, “Empathy isn’t a sin. It’s a risk.” Religion News Service, March 12, 2025: https://religionnews.com/2025/03/12/empathy-isnt-a-sin-its-a-risk/(Accessed March 28, 2025).
[3] “Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick suggested . . . that only ‘fraudsters’ would complain about missing a monthly Social Security check, and that most people wouldn't mind if the government simply skipped a payment.” Emily Peck, “Seniors won’t complain if they miss a Social Security check, Lutnick says.” Axios, March 21, 2025: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/social-security-lutnick-doge-checks (Accessed March 28, 2025).
[4] Stephen J. Pope, “The problem with JD Vance’s theology of ‘ordo amoris’—and its impact on policy.” America Magazine, February 13, 2025: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/02/13/ordo-amoris-stephen-pope-vance-249926 (Accessed March 28, 2025)
[5] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance.” The Lamp, Issue 27. April 1, 2020: https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance (Accessed March 28, 2025)
[6] René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (New York: Orbis Books, 2000).
[7] Girard, I See Satan . . .
[8] Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche.” All Desire is Desire for Being, ed. Cynthia Haven (London: Penguin Classics, 2023): 21-40.
[9] J. P. M. Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones: Power in the Biblical Tradition (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1987): 25-28.
[10] Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones, 148ff
[11] Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones, 152ff. See also Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: University Press, 1978): 190ff
[12] cf. Girard, I See Satan . . .
[13] Quoted in Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” 39.
[14] Girard, I See Satan . . .
[15] cf. Girard, Things Hidden . . . , 219. Also Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones, 167.
[16] Megan Brenan, “Support for Greater U.S. Role in Ukraine Climbs to 46% High.” Gallup, March 18, 2025: https://news.gallup.com/poll/658193/support-greater-role-ukraine-climbs-high.aspx (Accessed March 28, 2025)
[17] Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones, 177.
[18] Walsh, The Mighty From Their Thrones, 176.
[19] Walsh,The Mighty From Their Thrones,178