It’s no novel observation to say that the West has lost its way. Nietzsche warned that God was dead, but it took two centuries for his corpse to fall. Now it has flattened all that was good, true, and beautiful; all that we took for granted. We allocate inexpugnable sin on the basis of race and sex; butcher healthy bodies in a pseudo-Gnostic rite to liberate gendered souls; and throw orange paint at the maypole to control the weather. Despite Bertrand Russel’s boundless optimism, atheism did not produce a golden age of incontrovertible goods via scientific progress. Undermining the Christian foundations atop which common law, freedom of conscience, and the inviolable dignity of the innocent human person rests produced only new pagan deities of antiracism, transgenderism, and climate change.
And so, an archaeological dig for our shared moral traditions is underway. The nemeses of Wokeness — namely, heterosexual White men — are giving Christianity another go. Even the willfully blind New York Times has noticed that Generation Z are disproportionately driving the return to worship. This predictably produced scaremongering from the usual suspects: that the rosary is an extremist symbol, that America is on the precipice of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, and that men are secretly studying the Bible to bring about The Handmaid’s Tale… But, as President Trump’s decisive victory shows, men are bringing increasing shares of women and racial minorities along with them. When the cultural default is madness, anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity considers giving sanity a try.
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Jordan Peterson can claim substantial credit for this. The Canadian psychologist renewed a generation of young men’s interest in Christianity with his Biblical lecture series in 2017/2018. I am among them: a lapsed Catholic, whose damascene reversion wouldn’t have happened without encountering Dr. Peterson’s work. Since then, he has hosted seminars on Exodus; co-founded the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, to present a pro-Western narrative; and now released a new book, We Who Wrestle With God.
Dr. Peterson is very much a part of the ‘We’ in that title. He has famously evaded the question, “Do you believe in God?” But he has claimed that this book would “demolish the atheistic argument permanently”. Has he managed to slay the dragon of disbelief — most importantly, in himself?
Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning, investigated the common moral content of mythology across civilizations. All point to the archetype of a hero, usually the son of a king, who returns to the kingdom and makes personal sacrifices to redeem it. Christ fills this role in the canon of Western Christendom. Like C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Peterson performed a perennialist assessment of tradition per se, exploring how recurring elements indicate an objective human morality. But talk of how “a kingdom oriented around the wrong pole—that worships the wrong gods, so to speak—suffers psychologically or spiritually” in We Who Wrestle With God gives the reader the impression that Peterson is ready to stake his claim in a particular tradition.
What persuaded Peterson seems to be a belief in God as a conceptual governor of the possibility of an infinite number of interpretations of the universe. Nietzsche wrote in Will to Power that “facts are precisely what is lacking, all that exists consists of interpretations”. In recognizing this, “the world [becomes] ‘infinite’ to us: in so far we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations”. Each interpretation is a proxy for the subject’s “thirst for power”; and that “every great philosophy up till now [Nietzsche] consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator”. In essence, Nietzsche believed there was no truth but power. This potential for infinite interpretation is the due that Peterson has given the Devil of postmodernism — before noting that their skepticism of unifying narratives was praxis for smuggling in Marxism as a substitute. Rather than wrestling with God, it could be said that Peterson is tagging him in as a partner in his battle against the postmodernist abolition of narratives.
But what does Peterson believe in? His dodging the question with “Well, it depends what you mean by God” became an in-joke among fans. But in this new book, he provides a plethora of potential definitions, befitting a being irreducible to human comprehension.
In Genesis, God is that which guides perception in a hierarchical fashion toward the good, which demands sacrifice to be iterated across time, and for our family, community, congregation, and nation. To sin is to aim improperly — to miss the mark. For Cain and Abel, God is the paramount good for which proper sacrifices must be made. For Noah, God is the unexpected catastrophe which arises to test your character — for which you had better hope you had prepared by building an Ark. For the denizens of the Tower of Babel, God is a reminder of the limits of the Luciferian intellect, and of the Faustian spirit which seeks power through technology. For Abraham, God is the spirit which calls us to adventure: to leave our cave of infantile material comforts, and take up our cross. For Moses, God is the “uniting ultimate pinnacle” — being itself, which man must make a covenant with for the individual, family, congregation, and nation to thrive. He hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and feeds Jonah to the Whale, to test the resolve of His prophets. For the suffering Job, he is “The spirit within us that is eternally confident in our victory.”
The book focuses predominantly on the Old Testament. This is timely, given Hamas’ horrific attack on October 7th last year. Israel, meaning “those who wrestle with God”, was bestowed upon Jacob after grappling with an angel. In the year since, Israel has alerted complacent atheists to the revolutionary Islamic element imported into the US and Europe. With pro-Hamas marches in London, and Islamist pogroms in Amsterdam and Montreal, it seems secular liberalism is an insufficient antibody ideology against the hostile elements it imported. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted in her Oakeshott Lectures address last month, Jews and Christians have a shared ancestry to appeal to, which could overcome the mistrust engendered by the atrocities of the twentieth century. Dr. Peterson made this appeal, approaching the anniversary of October 7th: to “Wake up, my liberal Jewish friends. […] Those you thought were your allies are the very vultures waiting hungrily for your carcasses to appear dead in the street”. The host populations of the US and Europe returning to Christianity can only be a good thing — including for their non-believing atheist citizens, and Jews both at home and in Israel.
Has Peterson done enough to persuade them? Well, the definitions he provides are to prove God’s utility as a concept in our self-definitive, secular culture.
If the concept of God as Personality works, so to speak, in the time-tested manner—in the pragmatic manner—why is that model not aptly regarded as most accurate?
But is a utilitarian argument enough? For example, Peterson makes the case for Imago Dei: that “the idea of man as an image of God […] is perhaps the greatest idea ever revealed […] something that must be established as a cornerstone before any society whatsoever can appear; something that must be accepted “in faith” as a necessary rule before the game can even begin.”
If society loses all respect for the integrity of the person and degenerates into a consequent nihilism, or hedonism, or striving for dominance, then the “social contract” will immediately become unsustainable—in a word, moot.
I agree with him, of course, but to argue it is true because it is useful causes Peterson to fall afoul of the same question Socrates asked Euthyphro: “Is the pious pious because it is loved by the gods or is it loved by the gods because it is pious?” He suggests that the recurring motifs in mythology, like the warring brothers Cain and Abel, are “an attempt by the collective human imagination to distill, transmit, and remember the essentials of good and bad into a single narrative.”
How did we come to undertake this effort? One answer would be “divine inspiration,” and that is a good answer, at a very high-order level of analysis. Another (in truth, a variant of the first answer) is that people have been telling each other stories forever—acting them out, perhaps, even before that—and that some of the stories were more pointed, interesting, and memorable than others. Particular instances of what is good and bad drew attention and were remembered. These were then distilled into something approximating their central tendency or essence. The greatest stories, told by the best storytellers, gripped people’s attention in an unforgettable manner and burned themselves into imagination and concept, collective and personal.
This is plausible; but in instrumentalizing the story, the truth-claims of the Bible remain one of many options from the buffet of plausible interpretations of the world.
I am not trying to nudge Dr. Peterson into professing his belief before he is good and ready. I am simply suggesting that We Who Wrestle With God is an interesting intellectual study of the Old Testament in relation to evolutionary psychology and mythology, rather than being an act of apologetics.
Any criticism of Peterson’s work feels a bit like being ungrateful for a Christmas gift from your grandfather. But, in the Biblical spirit of truth, I must make two. The first is that the book’s enduring relevance may have benefited from a reduction of pop-culture references – Harry Potter is mentioned frequently – and adverbial viscerality, as per
It is also the engineers who have built the systems that bring the modern whores of Babylon and their delectable but untouchable succubus delights to the sticky laptops of the basement-dwelling techno-incels.
The second is that, like Nietzsche, Peterson pays less attention to the Book of Revelation. He has an insightful analysis of the aforementioned Whore of Babylon as an avatar of feminine sin; but doesn’t use Christ, as the soldier of God, to conscript young men into being crusaders for truth and justice against unrepentant evildoers. The easiest way to rebut the youth-pastor version of Christianity, presented by Nietzscheans as a “slave morality” which constrains the vitalist potential of the West, is to reference Christ and St Michael’s war against the forces of Satan during the apocalypse.
Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.’
Vanquishing remorseless demons is a forgone conclusion in the Christian account of history. There isn’t much room for meekness and mildness in these verses. This prevents Christianity proper from being pathologically compassionate — which its detractors accuse of being proto-Woke. As Don Felix Sarda Salvany wrote in 1884,
Pope [Leo XIII] recommends moderation and charity to Catholic writers as a means of preserving peace and mutual union. Clearly, this peace and union is between Catholics and not between Catholics and their enemies. Therefore, the moderation and charity recommended by the Pope to Catholic writers applies only to Catholic polemics between Catholics on free questions.
It is this muscular, unapologetic aspect of traditional Christianity — present strongest in Catholicism and Orthodox denominations — which persuaded men back into the pews. Peter Thiel once told me, in a discussion on eschatology, that we need “more Emperor Constantine, less Mother Theresa”. (Or, more crusader, less youth pastor.) Because none knows neither the hour nor day that the Son of Man will return to marshal his troops, all men must be in a constant state of preparation for the final test of their moral mettle. (As Peterson was, when an attempted cancellation propelled him to stardom in 2016.) I anticipate Peterson’s forthcoming promised book on Jesus and Job.
Despite wrestling with God, readers will remain unsure as to whether or not Peterson believes in Him, beyond being a useful concept. He sets the standard high, at being willing “to sacrifice everything to”, making it “the ultimate relationship, not the mere description of some state of affairs”. Is belief in God as a myth which gestures at an “implicit moral order” enough to reawaken a much-needed Christian feeling in the West? Despite Peterson making a convincing case, entrenched atheists like Richard Dawkins may remain unconvinced.
Even if Jordan Peterson cannot singlehandedly dig God out of His cultural grave, the good thing about Christianity is that, eventually, He resurrects.
You can purchase We Who Wrestle With God here.
