Intellectual Respectability

For close to three centuries, in all institutions of higher learning, it has not been intellectually respectable to deal with the [Gospel] text except as an object of demystification, and every time we mention it we must take the ritual precaution of insulting it and reviling it in order to demonstrate that our attitude is the proper one, that we truly belong to the mimetic consensus of the modern intelligentsia.

René Girard