Lefebure identified "Violence and the Sacred" as part of a body of work that led Girard to conclude that "the Christian revelation unveils the patterns of violence and provides the divine response." He noted that, "Having become convinced that the gospel alone reveals the full truth of the human condition, Girard entered the Catholic Church", and that Girard's subsequent work "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World" expressed a "Christian perspective". Scruton, who has compared "Violence and the Sacred" to works by authors such as Nietzsche and Bataille, as well as to those of the composer Richard Wagner, the theologian Rudolf Otto, and the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, concluded that, despite its merits, Girard's "imaginative" theory fails to explain the sacred. He also suggested that the theory could be viewed as being in part a "Christian apologetic".