At what point did the sacrificial subject stop needing to be innocent—and did that shift happen in theology or in political theory first?

The previous dispatch traced sacrifice from bribery to epidemic. The dangling question—when did the sacrificial subject stop needing to be innocent—has a precise Girardian answer, and it's worse than either option. The Cross didn't replace innocent victims with guilty ones; it created a world that *hunts the hunters*, where identifying someone as a persecutor makes them the new scapegoat, wrapped in enough moral certainty that the violence becomes invisible to itself. Girard calls this the "super-victimary machine": the concern for victims becomes competitive, mimetic, and finally sacrificial again, but now the offering travels laterally—victim groups sacrifice their persecutors with the same unanimity archaic mobs sacrificed the stranger, except the modern version is almost impossible to criticize because it speaks the language of compassion. Charles Taylor nails the terminal logic: "Claiming victimhood is an assertion of our purity… hence we have a right to do terrible things, which others have not." So the shift didn't happen in theology *or* political theory first. It happened in the gap between them—the Christian revelation dismantled the old machine, and political modernity built a new one from the parts, keeping the absolute (the victim's innocence) while rotating the blade toward whoever can be credibly labeled a victimizer. The sacrificial subject doesn't need to be innocent anymore. It needs to be *guilty enough that no one notices the sacrifice*.