What Christians Can Learn from Jordan Peterson (It’s Not What You Think)
Jordan Peterson photo by Gage Skidmore
Jordan Peterson is one of those public intellectuals who invariably evokes strong reactions. He first became a widely known public figure for his opposition to the Canadian Bill C-16. This bill made gender identity a protected category and expanded laws related to genocide and hate speech to include speech considered harmful or offensive to LGBTQ+ people. Peterson argued that he would not necessarily use preferred pronouns of students and faculty members because these policies represented compelled speech. A controversial public figure was thus born.
In 2018 Peterson published Twelve Rules for Life (Random House Canada). This book has since sold over 5 million copies. It seems to have been particularly popular among younger men. Peterson is an unlikely candidate for celebrity, and yet here he is. How has this wonky, eccentric, deeply intellectual Canadian psychology professor become a fixture of social media, culture wars, and public intellectual life? What is the source of his appeal to young men in particular? What can we in the church learn from his popular appeal? I wanted to know, so I read the book.
As with every book I read, I found myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with this one. Peterson is a deep thinker and skilled writer. In his better moments he is downright compelling. At times he challenged me to think more deeply and reassess my own positions. That’s what intelligent and competent writers do. They push us to become more profound and careful thinkers. They help us to refine the categories according to which we view the world.
In this short essay, though, I’m not going to provide a content review of the book. Perhaps I’ll write one later. What I want to get at here is how challenging that content is. It is challenging in terms of the advice it offers, and likewise in terms of its tone and complexity. Rule 1, for example, is “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back.” Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not. After a rather lengthy discussion of the neurochemistry and behavioral patterns of lobsters (yes, you read that correctly), Peterson remarks,
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and morality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in ancient language).
To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means casting dead, rigid, and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated; it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and productive order (27).
Rule 1 is not about posture. It is about existential courage. It is a call to maturity and responsibility. Peterson is not giving shallow advice to do what makes you happy or follow your heart. He is asking readers to become better people, and he is telling them that this will require self-sacrifice, and, at times, real pain. We do not flee life’s difficulties. We face them head-on, even when it’s hard, or, more accurately, especially when it’s hard. Peterson asks a lot of readers, and he has found an audience that actually wants someone to make such demands of them. They intuitively know that this is what they need. In an increasingly rootless society, Peterson calls his audience back to rootedness in values that used to be taken for granted. In so doing, he has touched a cultural nerve.
Because of its widespread popularity, before I began to read this book I expected a relatively simple text. I have been told over and over as an author that popular books and articles are easy to read. Peterson didn’t get the memo. Granted, this book is written for non-specialists. In other words, you don’t need a PhD in psychology to read it. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Peterson makes his reader work for the payoff. Some parts require a second or third reading.
The book is not only challenging in what it asks of readers, but in the tone and complexity of the writing. It is a complex work of psychology, bolstered by a healthy dose of Peterson’s archetypal readings of religious myth. Peterson is known for reading the stories of the Bible not necessarily as divine revelation, but as expressions of common human experience over time. Because they are archetypal, similar expressions occur across cultures. He deals in the same way with the religious literature of various traditions.
Peterson moves deftly from psychology to religion to philosophy. In one place he writes, “Nietzsche described himself, with no serious overstatement, as philosophizing with a hammer. His devastating critique of Christianity—already weakened by its conflicts with the very science to which it had given rise—involved two main lines of attack” (188). Statements such as this one might require readers to go and learn a bit more about Nietzsche. Why is he important? What does it mean to “philosophize with a hammer”? Five million readers have been undeterred. It seems they did not want to be spoon-fed pablum written at a grade-school level, but rather they wished for writing that would challenge them and elevate their thinking.
So… what does this have to do with the church? One thing we can learn from Peterson is that people want to be challenged. Hard concepts and complex ideas are not necessarily a deterrent to involvement with the church. On the contrary, they may draw people in. Inherently, most people understand that something has gone very wrong with the world. They also think there must be some kind of solution. As Christianity has receded in the West, they have turned to various ideologies and quasi-religious practices for both the diagnosis of the problem and its solution. But as Christians, we believe that God has taught us something true about the world that other people don’t quite grasp. The problem with life is sin. It is all the gone-wrongness in creation. Sin is not just something we do, but a corrosive spiritual acid that has seeped deeply into the pores of all creation. The problem is at its root spiritual, but so is the solution. God has come to us as a person, Jesus Christ, and has taken all of the sin of the world upon himself. He died as a result, but after three days rose again.
Working out that scenario of life’s greatest problem and its only true solution has been the work of theologians since the time of Paul. It draws us into complexities and mysteries. God commands us to love him with all our minds, and to do so is the work of a lifetime. We will never complete the contemplation of the divine, but we don’t have to. The very act of contemplation can draw us close to God.
To be justified before God is simple. We must put our whole trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation. But the life of faith is more than justification. It is one of growing ever closer to God, of being drawn more fully into the divine life. It involves relating the everyday circumstances of our lives to the revelation of God in Israel, in Jesus Christ, and through holy Scripture. Making these connections and understanding their implications isn’t always easy. The people in our churches don’t need skim milk. They need meat. They need the full meal, in fact. In this era of post-Christendom, we won’t draw people to the faith with overly simplistic teaching. People want something to which they can give their lives. They are desperate for depth. They know that life isn’t easy, and they don’t expect that any real way of confronting its problems will be, either. They are wrestling with vexing questions: How should I live? What happens after I die? What does it mean to be good?
Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has often implored believers not to “dumb down” the faith. A Catholic News Agency article relates a story he often tells about “a little girl he met while working in Chicago who presented to him a detailed account of George Lucas' ‘Star Wars’ movies. He said that kids' aptitude to memorize such complex plotlines and character names dispels the notion that they cannot understand the Bible.” In other words, we can learn highly complex matters if we really care about them. As Barron puts it, “This great, rollicking, complex, rich story that we have, full of weird names, yeah, but no weirder than Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? The kids have no trouble with that. Don't tell me they can't understand the Bible. And therefore don't tell me that they can't appreciate Jesus as the culmination of that great story.”
Perhaps this helps to explain why Barron’s evangelistic ministry, Word on Fire, has recently put out Socrates’ Children, a four-volume work on the one-hundred greatest philosophers throughout history. It begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers and works forward to modern times. The social and cultural challenges before us today did not come out of thin air. They took root centuries ago and have grown to maturity over time. Yet so did the answers to these challenges, and it behooves us as Christians to equip ourselves to confront the problems we face today. Word on Fire is a great example of a ministry that is helping believers to do so.
I thought about Barron’s story of the young girl recently as I prepared to teach a class at my church. My pastor asked me to teach three sessions on the topics, “What is the Bible?” “What is the church?” and “What is Methodism?” This is primarily a class for new members, though anyone can attend. I made a decision from the outset that I wasn’t going to take it easy on them. I was going to assume that the people in my class are smart, capable, and eager to learn. It doesn’t mean that I spoke using all the jargon I would in presenting during a Society of Biblical Literature meeting. Yes, I could confuse them with jargon, just as the engineer, lawyer, contractor, or coach could confound me with the “insider” terms of their own fields. But I dropped a lot of heavy content on them, and the response has been extremely positive.
We in the church have truth, goodness, and beauty at our fingertips, but we need to make the effort to convey these as fully and compellingly as we can. To do less is dereliction of duty. If we are afraid of offending people or of driving them away because the truths of our faith might be too difficult for them, we will end up doing the very thing we are trying to avoid. Our people deserve more. We don’t need to dumb down the faith. We need to challenge people in the church to the very depths of their hearts.
David F. Watson is Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He serves as lead editor of Firebrand.