Why Jordan Peterson is not about to become a Christian

I was made aware over the weekend of a video that has been made, chronicling the faith journey from 2017 to 2021 of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and unlikely intellectual phenomenon. The video is 22 minutes in length and so is a serious commitment – a highly able occupational psychologist told me once that people can’t passively listen for more than 15 minutes at a time and I have always stuck to this advice even when it’s proved a nuisance to my plans.

The video features a selection of clips, culminating in a now-viral clip in which, at a time of great personal crisis, Peterson breaks down discussing the resurrection of Christ.

It was this tearful, moving moment, that convinced many Christians who have enjoyed Peterson’s work, particularly on the Bible and its relationship to meaning, that they’ve finally got their man. This, they hope, is the much-awaited sign that this outsider whom they have admired is ready to make a declaration of his Christian faith. They are desperate to claim for the team the man who has done what no Christian leaders seem to be able to, by packing out theatres and getting young people to spend hours watching him just combing through the Bible and finding the life lessons in verse by verse exploration of stories that have gripped the imagination for thousands of years.

The creator of the video, with evident delight, tells us that “Jordan Peterson has had a developing revelation about Jesus Christ and these interviews show him goin from a pure intellectual understanding of Jesus (2017) to a more personal faith in Jesus which brings Jordan Peterson to cry talking about Jesus in 2021. A beautiful journey, let's pray that he fully embraces his faith in these coming times.”

Unfortunately, I think that this person has seriously missed the mark, first by trivialising Peterson’s early position, and second by conflating an emotional reaction with a shift in position. There is, frankly, something rather predatory about this, given that anyone who has followed the fortunes of Peterson with even passing interest knows of his recent anguish and suffering.

 

Though Peterson shows that he is consistently moved by the Christian idea, and regards it as the bedrock of Western civilisation, it remains the case that he is interested in it purely from the perspective of depth psychology, with Christ as the ultimate archetype. His mystical sense of awe seems to come from the belief that the Christ story goes to the very limits of human imagination. What would happen if we most fully manifested that spark of the divine within us? What gets closest to encapsulating the ultimate nature of being? It is Christ, the logos. And as for the Bible, if it is divine then for Peterson, that’s because it’s hard to believe human beings could have written this stuff.

What we’re talking about here is the power of narrative. We’re confronting how the Christian claim opens up the realm of the possible, not what is true in any historical, philosophical or theological sense. I get that temptation: I too am a psychologist and not a particularly competent theologian, but I understand perfectly well that theology is the language of religion and so I cannot call myself a Christian without having skin in that game. Peterson is as far away as ever from employing the evangelical language of Christ as his ‘personal saviour’ or getting into any argument about the finer theological points of Christian division such as transubstantiation (whether the Eucharist is symbolic or a miraculous transformation of wafer and wine into Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity).

 

It is precisely because Peterson’s attraction to Christianity stems from his view of it as, in a sense, the most compelling of stories, that he is led to a particularly strange argument, namely that the behaviour of those who profess belief in it somehow makes it harder for him to accept. One encounters this argument, typically, as a feeble excuse given by people who don’t want to think about or discuss the subject, but it’s rather weak from a serious thinker like Peterson.

But Peterson has failed to understand that, with Christianity, you can’t be half in and half out. By evaluating it purely in terms of its narrative power, Peterson falls into the trap of expecting almost superhuman followers because they have embraced a superhuman story. But those who accept Christianity do not do so because they seek self mastery, but because they come to believe that it is Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth and the life: the one who brought into being God’s unique solution to rescuing us from our sins. We are, of course, greatly improved by attempting to model a life on Christ’s example, but Christianity does not promise that we won’t still be weak, fragile, flawed people in need of God’s help.

But since Peterson is moved only by the functional power of the story, without recognising his own need to submit to it, he will continue to be unimpressed and disappointed by the sorry bunch calling themselves Christian. He may be seduced from the outside by the transcendent wonder of the Christian claim, but he comes at it as one who is moved by a beautiful song in a language he does not understand. For it is not in the lofty heights of intellectual enquiry that one understands what it really means to be a Christian, but on one’s knees, begging for mercy and the amazing grace necessary to save “a wretch like me!”