Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
There are some things that Christians could learn about how Jordan Peterson engages so successfully with his audience. First, lean into reenchantment. This is a big reason why the Eastern Orthodox church has such an appeal today. Hyper-rationalistic Protestant theology or the emotion laden evangelical style don’t speak to this longing to reconnect with an enchanted world. I do believe in our modern, scientific era, we’ve lost parts of the genuine Christian life and experience. People who dismiss reenchantment will miss out on opportunities for evangelism. The symbolism in scripture is a good place to start.
Jordan Peterson first became a viral YouTube sensation because of his lecture series on Genesis. The Bible is a subject he’s continued returning to, adding an Exodus series, and next a forthcoming book called We Who Wrestle With God.
Peterson is doing a national tour on the theme of wrestling with God, which I attended last week in Indianapolis. He sold out a 2,500 seat theater with a minimum ticket price of over $100, so he’s still a big draw. I’d say the median audience age was 35-40, with lots of couples attending.
He first used the failures of Google’s Gemini AI to launch into an hour long discussion of the nature of language, ideas, and symbolic structures, positioning the Bible as “the oldest collection of stories by the oldest people that survived.” To him, this makes it a bulwark against the societal equivalent of AI hallucinations (e.g., fascism) and thus worth studying. His take here is similar to Nassim Taleb’s “Lindy Effect.”
He then gave a much shorter presentation of the call of Abraham from the start of Genesis 12. The presentation was clearly unbalanced with too much preamble and not enough actual Bible analysis. This was very different from what Jake Meador saw from Peterson in Omaha.
Peterson views the Bible as myth and symbol (in the good sense), and deploys it therapeutically.
He talked about how he analyzes things like the Bible through multiple lenses: psychology, evolutionary biology, etc. Referring to his first book Maps of Meaning, he said that he only includes what all the perspectives agree on. Notably, orthodoxy theology is not one of his lenses.
The best way to view Jordan Peterson’s religious perspective is as New Age. That is, he believes in a sort of vague spirituality that has implications for how we are supposed to live our lives. It’s about an encounter with spiritual truth and the spiritual voice within. Or perhaps an understanding of the deep structure of reality and the human condition. This spirituality is esoteric, and apprehended indirectly and partially through a symbolic understanding of the world.
Peterson deploys this approach therapeutically. When God calls Abram, it’s the voice within telling him to get out of mom and dad’s house and go out in the world to make something of himself. But it’s not just a call to “Man up!” but also, critically, a call to adventure.
When Abram builds an altar to the Lord, his sacrifices are the giving up of the parts of himself that interfere with his becoming who he is called to be and achieving his destiny. The fire in the burning bush is also interpreted that way, as a sort of refining fire.
Last year I noted the turn towards a reenchanted world. One way to understand the appeal of Peterson is the way that his ideas are aligned with this way of thinking. Unearthing the Jungian collective unconscious and such are not unlike what people are seeking when they go to South America for an ayahuasca trip. Both are about looking for spiritual meaning and a spiritual encounter without an actual God or a real religion. Both are also a quest for therapeutic personal transformation – the quest for self-actualization – without sanctification.
The draw of an enchanted world is part of what is drawing people to Eastern Orthodoxy, as I also noted.