Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist, bestselling creator and champion of manhood, strode backwards and forwards across the stage on the historic Providence Performing Arts Center in early February, matching the theater’s ornate decoration with certainly one of his characteristically flamboyant suits — a color-blocked navy, white and orange number with yellow lining.
As he paced, his speech sometimes resembled an altar call, other times borrowed the mental heft of a Catholic college lecture, and at one point offered a secular, pop psychological argument for the existence of God.
Nonbelievers, he told the gang in Providence, wrestle with God as believers do: once they’re morally outraged at suffering on the earth. “That’s an emotional argument,” he said. “And it is the form of emotional argument that you simply would mount against someone that you simply are in relationship with.”
Peterson was on the town to kick off his 51-city “We Who Wrestle With God” tour, prematurely of his latest book of the identical name. The “we” within the tour’s title is the closest the previous University of Toronto psychology professor and YouTube star has come to admitting his own belief within the God of the Bible.
The query of his faith is a very important one to a lot of his fans. In 2018 the Canadian magazine Maclean’s called them “self-help junkies trying to find meaning and order in a rapidly evolving age,” but many are traditionally religious, while others have been inspired by his vacillating but consistent affinity for Christianity.
Several commentators have even identified the Jordan Peterson Effect: a path of religiously unaffiliated people listening to Peterson lectures, then looking for a church to attend and converting.
“I read online comments from many atheists who said that before listening to his YouTube lectures on the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories: Genesis, they thought the Bible was a ridiculous old book that had nothing to show the trendy mind,” Christopher Kaczor, Catholic co-author of “Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity,” told Religion News Service. “But after they listened to his lectures, they concluded that the Book of Genesis, indeed the Bible as a complete, is an immensely wealthy and profound storehouse of wisdom for living today.”
A Catholic priest who attended the Providence show confirmed that “a good number” of recent converts he’s encountered at Mass said they got here to the religion after listening to Peterson.
These fans have increasing hope that Peterson will announce his own conversion from agnosticism.
Religion has at all times been a central concern for Peterson. After becoming a viral sensation discussing Genesis on YouTube in 2017, he published “12 Rules for Life,” a series of essays with such prosaic titles as “Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back,” and “Tell the Truth — Or at Least Don’t Lie,” but which declared “The Bible is, for higher or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization, of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of fine and evil.”
At the identical time, “12 Rules” credits Friedrich Nietzsche with delivering a “devastating critique” of the church.
Since resuming his public life after a bout of addiction to an anxiety drug in 2021, Peterson has hewed closer to the church, advising young people to attend church and criticizing atheism’s influence on society. His stances on gender identity, his insistence that humans are tasked with creating order in a chaotic universe and his concern for young men’s character have also endeared him to conservative Christians.
Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, himself a web heavyweight because of his Word on Fire ministry, has called Peterson “an indication of hope” for the church and “one of the crucial influential figures on the cultural scene today.”
Kenneth E. Frantz, a University of Oklahoma doctoral student, and Samuel L. Perry, assistant professor of sociology and spiritual studies on the university, have called Peterson “the brand new Driscoll,” referring to the evangelical Christian pastor Mark Driscoll, who drew young white evangelical men specifically within the mid-2000s to his brand of muscular Christianity. (Driscoll was eventually forged out of his Mars Hill Church in Seattle after being accused of making an abusive environment there.)
“There’s a marketplace for secular men promoting traditional masculinity — think Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan,” Frantz told RNS, though admitting that “Peterson probably comes across as softer and more of an mental than either of those men.”
Peterson recently concluded a 17-part series on the Book of Exodus for The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media company, and has appeared in recent months on social media touring ancient churches in Rome, Jerusalem and Mount Athos with outstanding Catholic and Orthodox Christians, including the Canadian Orthodox iconographer and podcaster Jonathan Pageau. In March 2023, Peterson was spotted filming an episode for The Daily Wire with Barron in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.
“We Who Wrestle With God,” the brand new book and lecture series, builds on “12 Rules,” in addition to its 2021 follow-up, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” though religion has clearly develop into more personal than philosophical. Peterson’s wife, Tammy, who recently announced she is going to finish a conversion to Roman Catholicism at Easter this 12 months, opened for her husband, talking candidly about her cancer and about suffering, praying and grieving her father’s death.
“She said, I would like to reestablish my relationship with what’s highest,” Peterson said of Tammy. “I would like to realign my aim away from bitterness and resentment towards only that which is optimally good. That’s the definition of God.”
Peterson himself was noncommittal in answering questions on faith submitted online and voted on by the audience. One of the preferred asked how we are able to know if we’re wrestling with God or with ourselves. Peterson answered with maxims like, “if you happen to’re serious about yourself, you are wrestling with yourself in misery.”
But his secular approach to questions of the divine is an element of his appeal, said Benjamin Howard, a disaffected Peterson fan in Vancouver who’s launching a web site called JordanPetersonIsWrong.com. Agnostics and atheists like considering Christian values without the knowledge of a fireplace and brimstone preacher. “In his view, if you happen to acted like God existed, then you definitely will live a greater life,” Howard said. “In his mind, that is enough to simply ignore whether he’s real or not.”
Vandy D. Chhoeun Jr. got here to the show along with his girlfriend, who attested that he has develop into “a greater person” after discovering Peterson’s YouTube videos in 2022. “I actually needed to, like, sit myself down and be, like, you are a horrible person, it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that,” he said, saying that Peterson helped him shift from feeling that each one of life is meaningless to finding motivation to work toward goals.
Wrestling with God when he is not sure God exists, Chhoeun said, means aiming for the most effective in all situations. “To be an optimist, mainly.”
Others in the gang had similar stories of modified lives, without involving God. Matt Johnston, who attends the Church of Christ, said he was drawn to Peterson for “his authenticity and saying things that I feel loads of people feel like they cannot say on this society.”
Johnston weighed 400 kilos when he first got here across Peterson’s lectures. Now he’s right down to 200. “I lived a method for thus long. I assumed that is all, that was it. That’s all I could do,” he said. “Every little decision, you understand, adds as much as a greater life.”
The biggest surprise in Providence for Peterson observers can have been that almost half of the audience was women. Frantz attributed this to Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, who has develop into a fixture in alternative food plan circles and traditional femininity circles.
Another audience query asked Peterson, who often talks in regards to the ideal masculine, how he would define the best feminine. He recalled a recent trip to the Vatican, where he saw Michelangelo’s Pieta of the Virgin Mary holding the broken body of Jesus.
“That’s the feminine crucifixion,” he said. “What’s the very best possible offering to God? Child and self. … The woman who does nothing but protects her child destroys her child. The woman who offers her child to God receives her child back and that story is the core of the divinity of femininity and each mother value her salt knows that.”
Alba Sanz, a teacher from Spain who’s understanding her beliefs about Catholicism, said she isn’t sure about that definition of the archetypal feminine.
“I assumed it was really interesting but additionally made me take into consideration women who cannot be a mom or don’t desire to be a mom,” said Sanz, who got here together with her boyfriend. “I actually have friends who do not feel the necessity. So, what about them?”
© Religion News Service
