Richard Dawkins thinks Jordan Peterson is “drunk on symbols.” And there is a certain resemblance between an inebriated man and Peterson’s rambling, associative, imaginative style in his recent speaking and new book—We Who Wrestle With God. The man who used to tell you to just “grow the hell up” is now explaining “the biological reality of a dragon,” how we must “assume that in the combat with the eternal predator an eternal treasure might be found,” and how this all relates back to the bronze serpent in Numbers 21.
While this sort of metaphorical reading has some merit, it leaves a materialist like Dawkins cold. He wants to know whether Peterson actually believes in the Bible, and Peterson’s answer is: “It’s the wrong question.” He’s concerned with Christianity’s instrumental and explanatory value from a psychological, Jungian perspective—whether it’s true or not “doesn’t matter.” In other words, “aiming up,” and taking up your cross is the important part, not whether the Son of God died on one. “Live as if God is real,” not I believe in God, the Father the Almighty.
Why should you do that? Because the Bible, “for better or worse, [is] the story on which our western psyches and cultures are now somewhat fragilely founded.” It is “the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated—the foundation of the West, plain and simple.” If this strikes you as a rather utilitarian, even backwards, approach, it is for confessing Christians. But Peterson’s goal isn’t the return of belief. It’s the revitalization of “the West.” Christianity is just a tool.
Thus, his book is really about rehabilitating the Bible’s reputation for those who have dismissed the simplistic, Sunday School version of it. He piles up clauses and allusions to impress the reader and show how, for instance, the story of Moses in the court of the Pharoah isn’t really about a staff miraculously transformed into a serpent, it’s about how the staff represents:
The tree that the ancient shamans climbed in their ritual attempts to attain the wisdom of the gods. It is the cosmic axis that stretches upward to the North Star ... It is the beanstalk of Jack and the Beanstalk … It is the midst of the city, the point of a ziggurat or pyramid, the dome of a cathedral, the spire of a church. It is the stabilizing effect of the spirit of the ancients on what could all too-rapidly become the demented consensus of the present.
We Who Wrestle With God is a fine study supplement with some interesting asides, but it’s hollow at the core. For all his wordplay and erudition, the fact remains that his view is completely foreign to actual Christians. Christianity spread because people actually believed Jesus was their Lord and Savior. They believed in miracles not metaphors. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” as Tertullian famously said, not “the aiming upwards of the culture warriors.”
Nevertheless, when Peterson speaks on tour and in interviews, his vagueness allows listeners to take what they like. With Bill Maher or Joe Rogan, they’re intrigued by the idea that the crucifixion isn’t just about Jesus dying for our sins (how passé). It’s really about the archetypal tragedy and the importance of sacrificing for the community. In some ways, anti-woke non-Christians are most impressed by Peterson’s ability to salvage something from a book they view as important but archaic.
On the Catholic podcast Pints with Aquinas, Matt Fradd can find fruitful threads in discussing the shortcomings of New Atheism, nihilism, and wokeness, even though Peterson’s definition of God and faith is squishy. Indeed, despite rejecting basic ideas like faith in Jesus being key to salvation, Peterson seems to see not only himself as a good Christian, he claims all sorts of people are “Christian without knowing it”: Niall Ferguson, Richard Dawkins, Joe Rogan.
When Fradd is surprised to hear Rogan’s name, Peterson replies, “Joe figured it out.” Meanwhile, in Peterson’s actual conversation with Rogan, Rogan spends about ten minutes affirming the “stoned ape” theory, which basically makes psychedelics into the “God” behind all world religions and intellectual breakthroughs. But, yes, “Joe figured it out” because he thinks Christianity has some helpful ideas contra wokeness.
Likewise, despite all the hubbub about Dawkins being a “cultural Christian,” Dawkins doesn’t care for Peterson’s characterization of him as a “Christian without knowing it.” In fact, as their conversation goes on, it turns out Peterson is closer to an atheist without knowing it than Dawkins a Christian.
Peterson was willing to concede that the biblical corpus is likely just the Darwinian victor in the contest of religious stories. Those who followed these principles would be the most effective in life, and thus through sexual selection, these stories became appealing at a cultural and even genetic level. The Bible, to Peterson, is only “divinely inspired” in the sense that it offers the most refined, potent versions of instructive moral tales. And the Church is just an institution with its roots in the “dead, but still often wise, past” that we’ll need to fix up for our 21st century cultural conflicts.
In Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Erasmus Lecture on this topic of Christianity and Western civilization, he critiqued Peterson’s misbegotten attempt at establishing a civilizational church as “a cultural institution [to fight] back against the woke and the bloody Gaia worshippers and the feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. [This church] sees life as a catastrophe and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants in other words is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson.”
Instead, Kingsnorth agrees with the religious artist Hilary White: “Christian civilisation is the secondary fruit of Christian mysticism.” He went on to say that prayer and Christ are the heart of the matter, and “without the heart, there’s no body. Trying to work backwards, trying to build a body, as it were, with no heart is an impossibility. The notion of pretending to believe in Christianity because you approve of its fruits and you want somehow to see them return is a dead end.”
He points to the decidedly unpragmatic, apolitical approach of St. Seraphim of Sarov, “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved,” or St. Anthony the Great, who gave up his riches to live in a cave for decades. Whatever impact they had, it wasn’t through political, civilizational machinations. As C.S. Lewis said:
Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to “sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation,” do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the “World” are those who really transform it.
Peterson thinks his religious quest is “rescuing his dead father from the belly of the beast and restoring him to life,” but I worry that Kingsnorth is right, and Peterson is actually doing something more akin to Dr. Frankenstein: attempting to usurp God’s role with the potential for catastrophic consequences.
We will see. I will pray.
Image credit: Moretto da Brescia, “Christ in the Wilderness” (c.1515-1520) via Wikimedia Commons
While I’m not a huge Peterson fan, the same question always arises in my mind when I read this sort of critique of him: How is it that he gets a huge hearing when numerous Christian would-be spokesmen do not? Where’s the actual believer who’s willing and able to step up to the plate and take the flak that Peterson has and still move forward? He’s saying things that need saying — I for one am glad that somebody is.
All I know is, God does not like to be “used” for some other purpose.
And he will refuse to be “used”.