It feels like an age ago that I was finding my niche as a culture writer with think-pieces about the rise of Jordan Peterson. Not long afterwards, I was pleased to see some of that work between covers in a Lexham Press anthology of essays edited by Ron Dart. (You can read an excerpt from that essay here.) I now feel like I’m coming full circle with a forthcoming contribution in a new Peterson-themed anthology from Carus Books, as part of their “Critical Responses” series, available for pre-order here. Because I signed my contract before making the choice to uncloak my real name, I will be appearing once again in print as “Esther O’Reilly,” quite possibly for the last time. It’s a quirky, yet perhaps fitting period for this whirlwind opening chapter of my modest little writing career. I like to think I’ve also contributed some interesting ideas having nothing to do with Jordan Peterson in the interim, but it’s good to be back in this space.
For my topic, I chose to try and take a fresh look at Peterson’s cultural impact as a foil for New Atheism. Not exactly a new topic of discussion, but I wanted to probe it in a way that wouldn’t feel like “yet another Christian evaluation of Jordan Peterson,” which has always been my goal with my Peterson takes. I’ve never had simply or primarily a Christian apologist’s interest in Peterson. I would say from the beginning I’ve had a writer’s interest—not even so much as a culture-watcher, more like a people-watcher. I don’t think one gets to be a real writer without finding people interesting. So, when I take in a cultural product, to the greatest extent possible I try to get to know the producer—whatever “know” means across a status gulf. If this is my brand, then hopefully this newest essay is a worthy continuation of it.
The essay is long, about the length of a small book chapter. So I thought rather than carve out an excerpt whole, I’d take some of the more memorable bits and reconstitute them as a unique, self-contained preview. I tease out several different threads in the full piece, which will be available with the rest of the anthology in about another week. However, since I have a box full of author copies sitting on my desk, I’ve decided to give some of them away to the first three readers who sign up for an annual subscription. It’s about a $25 value, so you’ll get that thrown in on top of access to all my paid-tier archives and the next year’s paid exclusives. (Of course, if you’d rather skip the book and keep your mailing address private, you’re welcome to become a subscriber just for the Stack’s sake!)
[Update: The three copies have been claimed! Thank you.]
Besides me, the anthology features an eclectic array of academics, including David Ramsay Steele, Stephen Hicks, and many more. I also recognized a few names among the endorsers, including James Orr, Rob Henderson, and Wilfred Reilly. The essays are grouped into several categories, each of which explores a different Petersonian archetype: The Culture Warrior, The Storyteller, The Truth Seeker, and The Philosopher. At my suggestion, mine was placed under “The Truth Seeker.” My thanks to Sandra Woien for being an enthusiastic and encouraging editor.
And now, please enjoy this preview!
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Detroit, Michigan, May 6, 2018: I am sitting with a friend in the Fillmore Theater. In honor of her birthday, we have splurged on good tickets to see an unusual speaker. He’s an academic, but he’s also a political lightning rod. He’s a non-Christian, but he’s also a lover of the Bible. He’s a thinker, but he’s also a preacher.
He’s Jordan Peterson, of course, and we are seeing him at the top of his first wave, before that wave crashed. Before, indeed, everything crashed. He paces and speaks comfortably in front of a large, mixed crowd—old and young, men and women, couples and singles. His focus for the night is Rule 6 from his hit book 12 Rules for Life. He warns us that we’re going to get a dark lecture, because this is probably the darkest of the rules: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” He then proceeds to weave one of his customarily grim webs around this theme, ranging from the Columbine killers to the Nazi prison guards to the story of Cain and Abel. He invites us inside Cain’s mind, exposing the raw nerve of his jealous resentment. When your best offerings have been rejected, your best efforts to earn favor ignored, what do you do? “You take a rock,” Peterson says, “and you kill your brother.”
Just then, I hear a young woman who’s been listening with enthusiasm from behind me. She seems either slightly drunk or slightly high. At this moment, she whispers distinctly, “That’s what I would do.”
It’s what Peterson would do, too. He’s said so himself, when people like Dennis Prager try to introduce him to the crowds as a good man. If they only knew, he thinks. If they could only have seen how “terrified” his younger self was of “how terrible [he] could be.” The only way he managed not to become terrible was that he tried to follow his own rules: Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. As Gandalf says, stay on the path. Keep to the old roads. None of this made him “good,” he stresses. But perhaps there was something in it all which might “approximate good.” And so when people ask him, “Do you believe in God?” and he answers, “I act as if God exists,” this is what he means. In his mind, it’s not a dodge. It’s the best answer he can come up with, for a question he’s still trying to understand.
But if “dodging” is uncharitable, we could at least say Peterson has always shied from the question, after the fashion of a typical modern man. He resists questions around his own personal faith the way a man might resist questions around his bedroom habits. Classic Christian apologists seem to leave him as unsatisfied as New Atheists. He refuses to give the straight “No” answer Sam Harris is fishing for when asked on stage if he thinks Jesus rose bodily from the dead. But in a different staged debate, he chafes against William Lane Craig’s argument that life has no ultimate meaning unless God exists. Didn’t men and women find meaning in the symphony at the Berlin Wall on December 25, 1989, even though of course they knew the symphony would end? Does a parent not find meaning in nursing a suffering child? The nihilist says, “Ah, but it won’t matter a million years from now.” Peterson insists that this is irrelevant. The symphony is playing now. The sick child is in your arms now. So how will you act now?
It’s a deeply humanist appeal, compelling and sincere. Yet, if pragmatism is a matter of human needs, then Chesterton reminds us that “one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” Jordan Peterson conceives of man’s search for God as the search for a moral gyroscope, a guiding ideal. But like the children playing hide-and-seek in C. S. Lewis’s illustration, we stop and hold our breath the moment we realize what exactly we have been chasing. In that moment, we know that we are not the seekers. We are the sought. We are the hunted.
For all that Sam Harris is a typical bullish New Atheist, his chivvying of Peterson in their debates had this function: It put a helpfully sharp point on this question of exactly what (who?) we’re talking about when we talk about God. Peterson’s rattled-off, depersonalized list of possible definitions (“God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence of an action of consciousness across time”; “God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values”; “God is the future to which we make sacrifices”), did nothing for Sam, who waved it all away with a “But Jordan, Jordan, what about the God who hears our prayers?”
Aye, there’s the rub. Though this was hardly intentional, in his own way Sam makes the same point C. S. Lewis makes in his fictional Letters to Malcolm, writing on the problem with trying to depersonalize God’s anger. Lewis’s hypothetical young correspondent suggests that we might reframe our experience of this anger as “what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power.” A live wire doesn’t feel angry when it shocks us, but we know we will be shocked if we brush up against it. But “My dear Malcolm,” Lewis writes, “what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can’t.”
But what would it mean to say not merely “I act as if,” but “I believe”? For Peterson, this is a terrifying thought. “Who would dare say that?” he asks Prager’s live audience, becoming emotional. It seems to him “an unbearable task.” And yet, what if you could bear it? What if you really could say those words, and mean them, and live them? Then, “God only knows what you’d be.” Peterson says it twice: “God only knows what you’d be if you believed.” For himself, he’ll go on trying to act as if. “But,” he adds, tears flowing, “I’d never claim that I manage it.” In 2021, we find him again in tears, telling Jonathan Pageau that he doesn’t “understand” his own belief. “It’s too hard,” he says, “because it’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed that.”
The contrast with the popular atheist script could not be starker. Peterson entered the arena with no swagger, no smug self-congratulation. Rather, he brought an honest attempt, however flawed and incomplete, to wrestle with that most unbearable of all tasks—the task of holiness. Where Stephen Fry was busy composing clever after-life confrontations with the Almighty, Peterson offered his version of Chesterton’s alleged two-word answer to the Times survey question “What’s wrong with the world?”: “I am.”
It seems paradoxical that such a severe message would have found such a willing audience. Who wants to be told he is what’s wrong with the world? Who wants to be told that Cain lurks inside his own heart? Who wants a good doctor to come poking and probing into the darkest corners of his soul, then deliver the bad news that if there were a God, he might have something to answer for? Apparently, many more people than Fry, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and their ilk bargained for.
“Banish God,” Fry blithely recommends in his viral RTE clip. Once you do, your life will be “simpler.” No doubt this would be Rule 1 in Stephen Fry’s 12 Rules for Life. But not all are so content. Not all are so satisfied as they wander in bare ruined choirs, picking aimlessly through the rubble, sensing inescapably that they still haven’t found it, whatever it is. They are the “we” in Dennis O’Driscoll’s poem “Missing God,” when he writes, “Yet, though we rebelled against Him/like adolescents, uplifted to see/an oppressive father banished—/a bearded hermit—to the desert,/ we confess to missing Him at times.” We may no longer call for His grace before meals. Our fish may multiply and our bread rise without His intercession. Even so, we miss Him—in the wedding conducted by registrar, in the funeral conducted without prayer. We miss Him in the gaunt Crucifixion hanging on a museum wall, eternally judging us for all we have done that we shouldn’t, all we haven’t done that we should.
And there is Jordan Peterson with us, the rogue professor picking through the rubble himself, himself confounded by the mystery. What does it all mean? Give him forty hours. Give him three years. No, give him a lifetime. He still won’t have an answer, or at least not an answer he is satisfied with. He looks at the hanging God, the empty tomb, and he knows what they represent. He knows the point in time and space they mark, that “the Christians insist” they have to mark, or else…what?
“And is it true?” asks John Betjeman in his poem “Christmas.” “And is it true/This most tremendous tale of all”? For if it is, no other tale, no other joy, no other truth can compare with this: “That God was man in Palestine/And lives today in Bread and Wine.”
I never tire of your writing on this topic. The New Atheism is the door through which I entered the "arena" so this is like coming back to a favourite album every so often (Songs In The Attic?). Harris, Fry et al have never been able to brush aside Peterson as easily as they think they can do with Christian apologists. Looking forward to checking out the book.