Jordan Peterson's Message to the Christian Church

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, Jordan Peterson is the most Christian non-Christian that I’ve ever seen. He, as we know, has shared the platform with you, and has made quite an impact on contemporary culture, especially young men. He has a message to the Christian church, and we want to play some excerpts from that message^[1] and get you to interact. Here’s clip number one.

DR. PETERSON: I’ve been speaking to and watching and listening to audiences all over the Western world for the past four years in person and in virtual form, and I've learned a few things in consequence. It all started in some sense with the lectures I did on Genesis in 2017. My family and I took a risk and rented out a theater in Toronto on the off-chance that there might be an audience for what might be described as a psychological approach to our ancient stories. And lo and behold, and miracle of miracles, there was. I completed fifteen or so lectures walking through the first biblical book, sold out the theater, and attracted, surprisingly, millions of viewers – Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. And most of the people who attended live and the majority of those who watched online were young men. That is not a phenomenon that can be easily accounted for, but let me try.

KEVIN HARRIS: He lectures on a secular psychological approach to the stories in the Bible to explore the values that they have. Is that approach legitimate?

DR. CRAIG: I think it can be legitimate so long as one doesn't contradict the fundamental teaching of those narratives. These narratives were not written for the purpose of providing psychological insights, and yet, as literary compositions with literary characters, they are open to such an analysis. We want to know how realistically has the author portrayed this person's character? Is it consistent? Does the person act in character? These are questions that can be asked of any sort of novel whether it's pure fiction or not. Literary characters have their own sort of integrity that can be examined psychologically. So as long as he's not attempting to subvert the teaching of the passage, it seems to me that it's quite legitimate to do a sort of literary analysis of the psychology of the different characters that appear in the story.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to clip number two. I want to clarify up front a term that he uses that some people may not be familiar with. Anti-natalism. The anti-natalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation; that humanity should be allowed to die away for various reasons. That's the word you're hearing in this clip. Here's clip number two.

DR. PETERSON: Most of the people who attended live and the majority of those who watched online were young men. That is not a phenomenon that can be easily accounted for, but let me try. Now, in the West, because of the weight of historical guilt that is upon us (a variant of the sense of original sin in a very real sense) and because of a very real attempt by those possessed by what might be described as unhelpful ideas to weaponize that guilt, our young people face a demoralization that is perhaps unparalleled. This is particularly true of young men, although anything that devastates young men will eventually do the same to young women, and that in this era of anti-natalism and equally reprehensible nihilism is precisely the point.

DR. CRAIG: I think his focus on young men is so valuable. He is saying that young men are being stripped of their masculinity. They are being emasculated. They're being loaded with guilt for sins that they didn't personally commit but belong to the history of Western culture, and he's calling for manly men to stand up and to be counted. I think that this is a message that the Christian church needs to hear. Very often the church becomes feminized and matriarchal and its worship is very effeminate. The appeal is often to the affective side of the personality. I think the church would do well to listen to Peterson when he says we need to be appealing to manly men and building manly men because certainly Jesus of Nazareth was that kind of a man. It's his example that we should seek to emulate.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to clip number three. And let's just play the rest of these clips and you feel free to comment. Here's clip number three.

DR. PETERSON: When they are children, boys are hectored for their toy preferences, which often include toy weapons such as guns, and their more boisterous playing style, as boys require active rough and tumble play even more than girls for whom it is also a necessity. When in grade school, boys are admonished, shamed, and controlled in a very similar manner by those who think that play is unnecessary, particularly if it's competitive and who value a docile, harmless obedience above all, shades of Dolores Umbridge. Following all that, because that's not enough even when pursued assiduously for total demoralization, is the inculcation of an extremely damaging ideology which essentially consists of three accusations. Number one, human culture particularly in the West is best construed as an oppressive patriarchy motivated by the desire, willingness, and ability to use power (defined as the compulsion of others against their will) to attain what are purely selfish and self-serving ends. This is true at every level of analysis. Marriage is akin to slavery, friendship to exploitation, political disagreement to war, and business arrangements to deception and theft. And this is true, not only of the current social arrangements that characterize our culture, particularly in the West, but also the fundamental reality of history itself.

DR. CRAIG: This is part and parcel of critical theory that you analyze society and societal structures in terms of power struggles between dominant groups and subservient groups. The notion is that differences in power are inherently corrupting and inherently inequitable. From a Christian perspective, this is clearly mistaken because there is no greater difference in power between God and ourselves, and yet that does not mean that God is therefore a tyrannical, evil, dominating person. Rather, he is a loving Father who seeks to bring benefit and goodness into our lives. So while I agree that we should as Christians be counter-cultural – I think that as Christians we don't just go along with the culture; we do recognize where there are corruptions and how it's been distorted and twisted by sin. Nevertheless, we don't simply blame that on differences in power. We are all sinful, and we need to bring that into the obedience and the transforming power of God through confession and moral transformation by the Holy Spirit.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip he continues lamenting the aggressive global warming crowd. Here's clip number four.

DR. PETERSON: Accusation number two: human activity, particularly that undertaken in the West, is fundamentally a planet-despoiling enterprise. The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us and that could hypothetically exist in our absence. We might well be construed even as a cancer that threatens the very viability of the complex systems that make up the ecosystem of the Earth that shelters and supports us. We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation, and we have to place extreme limits on our wants – even our needs – so that survival itself, even in a much reduced form, can be guaranteed.

DR. CRAIG: I'm not qualified to speak to the scientific credibility of global warming. I think that we're all concerned about the environment and that Christians do have a sound basis for an environmental ethic in that God has given us a stewardship to care for and nurture the Earth. But this doesn't imply the sort of anti-human rhetoric that I think Peterson decries here – the sort of anti-natalism that human beings are a poison on the Earth and it would almost be better if our species went extinct and the ecosystem turned back to simply sub-human forms of life. Because, on the Christian view again, humanity is created in the image of God and therefore intrinsically valuable. It is God-like in a way that the rest of creation is not. But that doesn't sanction an abuse of creation or the environment; rather, we are stewards of the world that God has entrusted to us. Unfortunately, the Scriptures also teach that we are terribly fallen, and therefore we do abuse the beautiful creation that God has given us. Christianity – it's such a wonderful worldview in that it sees honestly the problems identified by the critics on the left: human sinfulness and tyrannical patriarchy and illegitimate use of power. But at the same time it recognizes human beings as intrinsically valuable and good and provides a means of forgiveness, redemption, and transformation that just isn't available apart from God himself.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip.

DR. PETERSON: Accusation number three: the prime contributor both to the tyranny that makes up the oppressive patriarchy and structures all of our social interactions past and present and the unforgivable disspoiling of our beloved Mother Earth is damnable male ambition, competitive and dominating power – mad, selfish, exploitative, raping, and pillaging. You might think that I'm overstating the case. Think again, sunshine. We in the West are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the phallogocentric conceptual structure of civilization itself. To take that apart, that's a society centered on the encouraging, adventurous, masculine spirit, and that privileges (that hated word of all things) the divine Logos. What should we worship and celebrate properly other than that, deconstructionists? The words of that mass murderer Karl Marx? It is precisely those young men who are deeply conscientious, capable of guilt and regret, who have come to believe in pain that every deep impulse that moves them out into the world for the adventure of their life, even that impulse drawing them to women, is nothing but the manifestation of a spirit that is essentially satanic in nature. This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically, and scientifically, it is literally anti-true. It's not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality – a minor conceptual error – but something that literally could not be farther from the truth, and something that distant from the truth comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from hell.

DR. CRAIG: Wow! Strong words. Notice that Peterson doesn't deny that there have been terrible abuses, tyranny, oppression, slavery, exploitation. He doesn't deny all of that. But what he's denying is that this is uniquely male; that there's somehow some sort of a connection between this and being male as opposed to female. There I think he's absolutely correct. There's no reason whatsoever to say that the abuses that have been perpetrated by men who have been leaders of countries and so forth are due to their being male. That seems to be quite unprovable and wrong. Then he also draws attention to the good things that the male spirit has connected with it – adventure, exploration, great exploits and daring. Those are aspects of, I think, the masculine character that are worth celebrating. Now, again, you look at this from a Christian perspective and it's so different. From a Christian perspective, Adam, created male, is in the image of God, and Eve, created female, is in the image of God. God made them as complements to one another. Just as the woman is suitable to fulfill the man's needs, so the man is there to love and protect the woman. In a Christian marriage relationship, it's not one of domineering tyranny. It is a relationship in which the husband loves his wife and gives of himself for her on the model of the way Jesus Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. So it's a completely different model of the relationship between the sexes based upon the character of God and the example of Jesus Christ who was after all a male and exhibited the kind of courage and strength and fortitude that is associated with masculinity but without the sort of abusive power impositions that are rightly decried by the left. The left often is able to identify the problems but without the proper solutions, it seems.

KEVIN HARRIS: Two more clips, and he really gets down to the message on this.

DR. PETERSON: The Christian church is there to remind people (young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost) that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear. Invite the young men back. Say literally to those young men, “You are welcome here. If no one else wants what you have to offer, we do. We want to call you to the highest purpose of your life. We want your time and energy and effort and your will and your good will. We want to work with you to make things better, to produce life more abundant for you and for your wife and children and for your community and your country and the world. And we have our problems in the Christian church. We are more abundant, sometimes far too often corrupt, and sometimes deeply so. We're outdated as are all institutions with their roots in the dead, but still often wise past. So join us. We'll help fix you up, and you can help fix us up. And together we'll aim up.” And here is a message to those young men skeptical about such things. What else do you have? You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief. You can say to yourself narcissistically and solipsistically, “The church does not express what I believe properly.” Who cares what you believe? Why is this about you? Do you even want it to be about you? What if it was about others? What if it was about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present? What if it was incumbent upon you and vital to your health and willingness even to live to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast where he has always resided and to restore him to life?

DR. CRAIG: This is a prophetic voice to the church in our day. He is calling young men back to the church, and I think that this is exactly the message that we need to hear today. We need to be targeting young men with the Gospel and with the vision of a life serving Christ and undertaking great exploits and great adventures in his service. So I say amen to what Jordan Peterson is saying here. I have to say that it's been our experience in our Defenders class teaching in the local church on Christian doctrine and apologetics appealing more to the head than simply to the emotions (the heart) that it has been young men who have responded so well to this. Our Defenders class has many of these young men who naturally gravitate toward this approach. I'm gratified that we are doing and attracting just that audience that Jordan Peterson says needs to be brought back to faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's a final clip.

DR. PETERSON: Once again to the churches – Protestant (you're the worst at the moment), Catholic, Orthodox – invite young men. Put up a billboard. Say, “Young men are welcome here.” Print some flyers and put them in a box by the billboard. Signal the existence of those flyers with an arrow with the words, “More information about attending here.” Tell those who have never been in a church exactly what to do, how to dress, when to show up, who to contact, and most importantly what they can do. Ask more, not less, of those you are inviting. Ask more of them than anyone ever has. Remind them who they are in the deepest sense, and help them become that. You’re churches, for God's sake. Quit fighting for social justice. Quit saving the bloody planet. Attend to some souls. That's what you're supposed to do. That's your holy duty. Do it now before it's too late! The hour is nigh!

KEVIN HARRIS: Ask more of young men; more than anybody else is asking.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, ask more. Again, this is a prophetic voice – almost eschatological – in saying the time is nigh. Do it now before it is too late. I think we all need to listen seriously to this, and as churches we need to think of ways in which we can bring in and minister to more young men and stop the feminization of Christianity that is so rampant in evangelical churches.^[2]