The Gospel According to Jordan

Michael Ledger-Lomas reviews Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine.”

By Michael Ledger-LomasDecember 1, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

FOR SUCH A PROSAIC country, Canada produces its fair share of sages. From Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye to Charles Taylor, its northern oracles have promised to decode the phantasmagoria of modern life. Jordan B. Peterson would like to be the latest addition to their number, even though he has thrived off combat rather than uplift. His rise from mere professor to celebrity began in 2016, when he refused to use the preferred pronouns of trans students at the University of Toronto and spoke against Bill C-16, federal legislation that added “gender identity or expression” to the categories protected against discrimination or hate crimes under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Peterson has been tireless in seeking out clashes with the institutions that believe in what he calls “compelled speech.” In 2022, he contemptuously surrendered his professorship at Toronto, then went to court with the College of Psychologists of Ontario over their attempts to discipline his social media activity. And yet, he has sold himself as a healer as well as a fighter, who draws on his practice as a clinical psychologist specializing in addiction to help people find their place in intimate relationships and in the world. His 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and its sequel, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021) were probably more bought—in many millions of copies—than read. As self-help books, essentially, they seemed to give plangent expression to the emotional and spiritual disorientation of many youngish men. Their dense summaries of academic research were cut with such simple bits of advice as “clean your room.”

Peterson developed a cartoonish machismo that suited his public ministry to men. He threatened to slap the critic Pankaj Mishra for poking fun at 12 Rules in The New York Review of Books. He adopted an all-meat diet. He clothed his increasingly gaunt frame in dandyish outfits (arousing the pained displeasure of Derek Guy, Twitter’s menswear guru). Peterson took this persona on the road, with a series of North American stadium tours, and online, with a podcast and YouTube channel that pitch him into rambling discussion with an eclectic selection of guests, almost all on the far right. He now makes sulfurous interventions into British and Canadian politics: his op-eds for The Daily Telegraph have denounced everyone from Justin Trudeau to the “sanctimonious psychopaths” on the left who “support” Hamas.

We Who Wrestle with God sees the philosopher and strolling agitator try to become a preacher. In publishing a voluminous study of the Bible, Peterson is pitching himself to anxious believers as well as fragile bros. He has shifted his literary register from the clinical to the Christian. Peterson once understood his philosophy of life to be founded on the life sciences. He defiantly stated what evolutionary psychologists had supposedly “established” about human nature: women’s drive to reproduce pushes them toward strong men while men want nubile but continent women. He claimed that humans flourish when they simply follow what they have evolved to be under pressure of sexual selection.

Peterson’s pivot to an openly theistic mode reflects a combination of market forces and changes in his personal life. His wife Tammy credited her recovery from a terminal cancer diagnosis to praying the Rosary and was confirmed into the Roman Catholic church this past Easter Sunday. She duly uploaded a video of the ceremony to her YouTube channel. As people all over the world have started to practice and affirm their faith online, podcasters like the Petersons have seized the commercial opportunities. Peterson has offered numerous online seminars and lectures on scripture, often while wearing a blazer gaudily decorated with paintings of the saints. This coat of many colors captures a basic ambiguity in his new persona: has he really embraced religion or merely camouflaged his stark sociobiology in God talk?

If you’re looking for an answer to that question, his latest book is a test of patience. For long stretches, it feels not so much written as generated. Paired, alliterative phrases give its prose the metronomic beat of ChatGPT: “Sometimes the new parasitizes and poisons, and sometimes it restores and renews.” A bad husband is “feckless and faithless,” and hell is the “dread domain.” Chatty digressions and tirades against everything from Foucault’s thought to Communist China punctuate the later sections of the book, where an editor perhaps feared to tread.

The gospel according to Jordan is simple enough, despite its erratic presentation. The West is enduring a crisis of meaning. Even those who have a scientific understanding of the human condition struggle to move from “facts” to “acts”: we know how to master ourselves and improve our relationships but lack the motivation to do so. Only narrative can revivify science. The most powerful stories in our culture contain archetypes or “tropes”—terms loosely borrowed from Carl Jung and Northrop Frye—which capture psychological truths. They tell of what the folklorist Joseph Campbell called the “hero with a thousand faces,” who must rebel against “the father,” then confront the “mother of chaos” and old night before getting the girl. Although all “ancient stories” contain such archetypes, the Bible’s just happen to be ours. It is the “compilation of drama that sits at the base of our culture”—by “our” he means Western, of course—and is therefore the “frame through which the world of facts reveals itself.”

The Bible here mainly means the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, plus the Book of Job (we are promised a sequel on the gospels). Peterson studies what he sees as the Torah’s most significant episodes and characters, from creation to Moses. Like Richard Dawkins, whose virulent atheism he gently reproves, he approaches the scriptures with the breezy amateurism of a man of science. Both are confident that it takes no special linguistic or text-critical skills to interpret them. Although Peterson gingerly parses the odd Hebrew word, the question of what the Bible’s authors meant does not interest him. He does not so much study passages as Google them, reproducing chunks of exegesis from the Victorian pulpit commentaries digitized by the website Bible Hub.

Peterson takes from such texts the typological framework in which it makes sense to see Jacob or Job as prefiguring the life of Christ. He also shares their determination to understand the Christian Old Testament as a Sunday School collection of moral exemplars. Fixated on biography, he cannot make much of Deuteronomy or Numbers, both of which detail God’s law rather than spinning yarns. The Torah’s folkloric twists puzzle his efforts to make psychological sense of its narratives. Not once but twice, Abraham poses as his wife’s brother so he can loan her to randy visitors—in fairness, she was his half sister. Sodomites want to “gang-rape” the angels who traveled with Lot “and in the most inhospitable and unproductive manner possible.”

According to Peterson, these untoward events should not deflect our focus from the “sovereign” individuals who refused the convenient lies of their decadent societies and accepted the “eternal challenge of shaping” reality into a better order. Noah is the “genuine leader” prepared to “wayfind” his family a new home. So, too, are Abraham and Moses, who “sojourn forward” through deserts of “possibility” to better lands. They are incarnations of “the Logos” with a commitment to the power of positive thinking that a tech VC might envy.

Peterson also takes this opportunity to reinforce his understanding of the role women play in the world. Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib establishes women as supporting actors in this patriarchal epic. They complete men, but cannot match their adventures, because they need to have and care for children. Peterson does condemn men who whine or falter—it was low of Adam to blame the Fall on Eve. Yet he reserves his fiercest contempt for women who refuse to marry the right kind of guy. “[W]hy would anyone with any sense not want their sexual relationship consecrated?” Women who pass over the “approximation of paradise” (marriage) to make themselves available for “short term sexual access” succumb to “the worst sort of men” and end up with nobody to father their children.

This is the sexual code of the 1950s, not of the polygamous Hebrews. It is revealing that the footnotes to Peterson’s puritan sermons take us to articles in psychology journals. It is not so much a case of Thou Shalt Not as Studies Show: women must not do what runs against their evolutionary interests. If scripture’s purpose is just to illustrate scientific truth, then wouldn’t other stories do just as well? Peterson concedes the point by embedding his biblical “tropes” in a multiverse of pop culture references. The Lion King (1994) looms as large as Leviticus. Jiminy Cricket speaks as eloquently to Pinocchio as God did to Moses from the burning bush (and shares his initials with Jesus Christ). Moses’s staff could just as well be Dumbledore’s wand or the lightsaber of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Peterson takes his book’s title from a line by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Just as Jacob unknowingly wrestled with an angel at dead of night, so the poet pictures himself as a “wretch” who “lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.” But this book allows for no such mysteries: in it, we wrestle only with ourselves. Peterson rightly observes that to believe in God is not to say that He is a thing that exists in the world in the way that a table does, but that He somehow undergirds or is reality itself. Yet this insight swiftly enables the liberal Protestant reduction of God to a synonym for personal or social “optimization.” Matthew Arnold, a contemporary of Hopkins, called God “a tendency, which is not ourselves, but which appears in our consciousness, by which we and other things fulfil the real law of our being.” Peterson similarly calls God the “spirit of the ultimate up.” This “upward thrust” sounds divine enough, but it merely recaps how an organism attains its biological goal: when Peterson’s biblical heroes procreate, they demonstrate the “harmony from instinct to heaven.” When Moses received the law on Mount Sinai, he had a profound insight into how to reorder his people, just as a chimpanzee might remake his troop or a wolf his pack. The notion hit him with the “force of a divine revelation,” but it was not one. It was merely an intellectual leap that resembled a “fundamental biological mutation.”

Christian thought and devotion have often relied on the selective or unscholarly reading of the scriptures. “[W]hatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in outlining his capricious art of biblical criticism. The real problem with Peterson’s book is not its lack of rigor (though there’s plenty of that) but its lack of spirit: inverting Coleridge’s method, it finds in the scriptures only our peculiarly clenched, isolated, and competitive selves.