Is Girard saying that Christianity destroyed scapegoating and mythologized violence? Or simply archaic virtue? Because I can think of loads of scapegoating all over the Eurasian landmass, from 300 years of the Spanish Inquisition, to pogroms ordered by the Tsars, the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks, and the White Army.
Despite his later religious appeals, Girard’s original argument is more anthropological with regard to the emergence of various monotheistic traditions. Archaic virtues and religions were about hiding the nature of sacrilized violence, specifically the fact that the victim/scapegoat had no real power to dispel whatever crisis predicated their victimization. This becomes fully exposed for the first time in the Christian mythos, but had orthodox and heterodox precedents in almost every world religion,and especially Judaism, as Girard’s work itself engages with. Overtime, the effect of this mythos is to undermine the efficacy of sacrificial logics, such that we now, in modern society, more often than not, identify with the victims vs. the victimizers. This is a complete inversion of the archaic social order, as Nietzsche railed against in his notion of Dionysus vs. the Crucified. The impact of the Christian mythos obviously also extends into other world religions (e.g. Islam and its two billion adherents, where the Christ figure also holds special status) as well as into various secular moral philosophies that derive their origins from Abrahamic traditions.