Postmodern intellectual fragmentation increasingly challenges all efforts to integrate psychology and Christianity. The work of the literary and cultural theorist René Girard, nevertheless, suggests new opportunities for developing a Christian social science within the present cultural context. According to Girard, humans learn to desire specific objects through a process of imitation that he calls mimesis. Mimetic desire leads inexorably to violence. In theory, human communities were established when this violent desire was discharged in the murder of an innocent human scapegoat. This process is evident in primitive religion and myth and continues to operate within the structures of all human society. The Bible is centrally important in unmasking this bloodshed, and Girard's thought reveals why a peaceful postmodernity absolutely requires foundations in a mimesis of that which is modeled by Christ.
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