The modern scapegoat concept stems from radical Protestant theology, not ritual history.

Evidence

Furthermore, the scapegoat was not— as Franz Steiner makes clear—a stand-in for a legal culprit (someone who had himself failed to be adequately responsible), nor an expression of a primitive belief in taboo, but the ritual expulsion of evil from the renewed community. The landlord is made responsible to society of which he is a member; the scapegoat’s function is to be outside it. It is precisely the radicalized Protestant idea that “true religion” requires belief in “individual responsibility” and that ritual practices occupy the domain in which magic and superstition also flourish that gives us our oversimplified secular sense of the “scapegoat” as a person who is blamed for the misdeeds of others. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 472

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Claims that a Protestant theological frame actively generated our secular-ish understanding of the scapegoat — the ‘secular’ concept turns out to be secretly theological in origin.
• XREF: Echoes the book’s broader thesis (and Asad generally) that the secular is not a neutral residual category but itself a construct with religious genealogy; connects to Girard’s scapegoat theory as contrast.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the secular scapegoat’ — how a Protestant assumption smuggled itself into everyday political language as a putatively neutral concept.