Mimetic Rivalry

Mimetic rivalry is the conflict-producing extension of René Girard’s Mimetic Desire: when people imitate each other’s wants, they end up competing for the same objects and become locked in rivalry. In Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century, the concept is borrowed to diagnose the church: “In a classic case of what the scholar René Girard called ‘mimetic rivalry,’ we began to imitate our rivals, adopting their own tools, techniques, and blueprints in order to build our own supposedly impregnable fortress church.” Here the framework names a self-defeating dynamic — that imitating one’s adversaries to defeat them makes one resemble them.

Context: Mimetic rivalry is the second movement of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire: because borrowed desire converges multiple parties on the same object, imitation tends to escalate into rivalry and, in Girard’s account, eventually scapegoating violence — which is why he urged vigilance against it.

Where this appears

• Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century — uses Girard’s “mimetic rivalry” to frame how the church came to imitate its rivals’ tools and blueprints.