What God Is Jordan Peterson Wrestling With?

Jordan Peterson knows something about reaching people in our age that the church can learn from

Jordan Peterson first became a viral YouTube sensation because of his lecture series on Genesis. The Bible is a subject he’s continued returning to, adding an Exodus series, and next a forthcoming book called We Who Wrestle With God.

Peterson is doing a national tour on the theme of wrestling with God, which I attended last week in Indianapolis. He sold out a 2,500 seat theater with a minimum ticket price of over $100, so he’s still a big draw. I’d say the median audience age was 35-40, with lots of couples attending.

He first used the failures of Google’s Gemini AI to launch into an hour long discussion of the nature of language, ideas, and symbolic structures, positioning the Bible as “the oldest collection of stories by the oldest people that survived.” To him, this makes it a bulwark against the societal equivalent of AI hallucinations (e.g., fascism) and thus worth studying. His take here is similar to Nassim Taleb’s “Lindy Effect.”

He then gave a much shorter presentation of the call of Abraham from the start of Genesis 12. The presentation was clearly unbalanced with too much preamble and not enough actual Bible analysis. This was very different from what Jake Meador saw from Peterson in Omaha.

Peterson views the Bible as myth and symbol (in the good sense), and deploys it therapeutically.

He talked about how he analyzes things like the Bible through multiple lenses: psychology, evolutionary biology, etc. Referring to his first book Maps of Meaning, he said that he only includes what all the perspectives agree on. Notably, orthodoxy theology is not one of his lenses.

The best way to view Jordan Peterson’s religious perspective is as New Age. That is, he believes in a sort of vague spirituality that has implications for how we are supposed to live our lives. It’s about an encounter with spiritual truth and the spiritual voice within. Or perhaps an understanding of the deep structure of reality and the human condition. This spirituality is esoteric, and apprehended indirectly and partially through a symbolic understanding of the world.

Peterson deploys this approach therapeutically. When God calls Abram, it’s the voice within telling him to get out of mom and dad’s house and go out in the world to make something of himself. But it’s not just a call to “Man up!” but also, critically, a call to adventure.

When Abram builds an altar to the Lord, his sacrifices are the giving up of the parts of himself that interfere with his becoming who he is called to be and achieving his destiny. The fire in the burning bush is also interpreted that way, as a sort of refining fire.

Last year I noted the turn towards a reenchanted world. One way to understand the appeal of Peterson is the way that his ideas are aligned with this way of thinking. Unearthing the Jungian collective unconscious and such are not unlike what people are seeking when they go to South America for an ayahuasca trip. Both are about looking for spiritual meaning and a spiritual encounter without an actual God or a real religion. Both are also a quest for therapeutic personal transformation - the quest for self-actualization - without sanctification.

The draw of an enchanted world is part of what is drawing people to Eastern Orthodoxy, as I also noted. So it’s no surprise to see that Peterson resonates with Orthodox convert and icon painter Jonathan Pageau, who seems to be his main interlocutor with the Christian world.

What’s unique about Peterson is how he takes his New Age/therapeutic approach, and combines it with a view that how we live life is a matter of the utmost moral significance. This is something he clearly believes with an earnestness that unusual in our detached, ironic, cynical age.

For example, here is one of his recent tweets:

You’re Morally Obligated to Do Remarkable Things. Why?

Well, partly because life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have, the chances are very high that it will embitter you. And then you'll be a force for darkness. That’s not good.

Also, the fact that life is short and can be brutal can terrify you into hiding. But you can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in, you might as well take the adventurous risks. That's a very good thing to understand.

What is also useful to understand is that there isn't anything more adventurous than the truth. This is something that took me a long time to figure out. You can craft your words to get what you want.

If you're attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate, that's genuinely you. If you're trying to live in the truth, you have the force of reality behind you, and that seems like a good deal. You have the reality and the adventure.

So, why is that a moral obligation?

Well, if you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out—and you don't bring into the world what you could bring—you become cynical and bitter. Not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them.

That's the pathway to hell.

We see all the same themes here. The vague, New Age-y spirituality - living in the truth and aligning with the “force of reality.” It’s about letting what’s inside you out - the voice of God leading to self-actualization. It’s a call to adventure. It’s deployed therapeutically to avoid cynicism and bitterness. There’s something of the utmost moral seriousness at stake, not just for us but for the humanity and the world at large. (As it he put it in 12 Rules for Life, “You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.”) At the same time, there’s no reason to think that when Peterson talks about “hell” that he’s referring to the Christian hell. It’s most likely another symbolic reference.

If you go back to Peterson’s message to the Christian churches, you’ll see that one reason he feels confident delivering this condescending lecture is that his interpretations of the Bible have proven more compelling than theirs. It’s his Genesis lectures that went viral, not their sermons. It’s basically, “They are listening to me, not to you.”

There’s actually something to this.

There are some things that Christians could learn about how Jordan Peterson engages so successfully with his audience.

First, lean into reenchantment. This is a big reason why the Eastern Orthodox church has such an appeal today. Hyper-rationalistic Protestant theology or the emotion laden evangelical style don’t speak to this longing to reconnect with an enchanted world. I do believe in our modern, scientific era, we’ve lost parts of the genuine Christian life and experience. People who dismiss reenchantment will miss out on opportunities for evangelism. The symbolism in scripture is a good place to start.

Second, treat the Christian life as a grand adventure. Peterson’s mytho-symbolic treatments of scripture illuminate aspects of the story rarely discussed in church, ones that need not be incompatible with traditional theology. We could view creation as a drama of chaos and order, for example. Abram was called to an adventure - as were Paul and many others. Seeing the Christian life is a grand adventure is certainly a valid way to look at it. Particularly as our eternal destiny is secure.

Third, treat life as a morally serious enterprise. Again, I look at Paul and see a guy who treated his assignment as a matter of life or death for others. How often to do we treat out mission and our lives similarly?

I omit a point about speaking therapeutically because, for good or ill, the church already basically seems to do that. It’s almost impossible to escape after the proverbial “triumph of the therapeutic.”

Peterson has developed a way about talking about the world and life that is extremely relevant and compelling to millions of people - even if he is past his 2016-2018 peak.

Whether you think Peterson is a Christian or not - from what I’ve seen he’s better classified along New Age lines as “spiritual but not religious” - there’s a lot of we can learn from the way he engages with his audience.

Cover image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0