The Twitter account of Pope Francis is almost certainly run by well-meaning officials who post well-meaning tweets in his name, intended to inspire his followers without causing trouble. But one in particular last month set off an energised conversation when it irked Professor Jordan Peterson.
“#SocialJustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.” To which Peterson replied: “There is nothing Christian about #SocialJustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.” This began a series of colourful conversations about the fuzzy boundaries between salvation, Catholic social teaching and socialism.
Decades of Catholic social teaching have been deeply effective as a way of expressing the Church’s mandate to love our neighbours. But one phenomenon of the last century has been the way in which, as the reach of the state has grown and the more socialist its orientation, the greater its ambition has become to replace the Church in the domain of social care.
From hospices to hospitals, schools to universities, homeless shelters to adoption agencies, the more a state values its socialist credentials, the more determined or pleased it seems to elbow the Catholic Church out of the public square.
Recently, in the UK, the state would rather close down adoption agencies, leaving children without resources to find homes and families, than allow the Catholic Church the choice of placing desperately needy children with mothers and fathers, instead of mono-gender gay couples.
Peterson has warned about the ambitions of the state and its threat to both the Church and democracy in his public dialogues. He also warns the Church that its role is to supersede, not mimic, politics: “Religion is not politics – it is the structure that contains politics, it’s far deeper.”
Following his Twitter spat with the Pope, many public commentators mocked him and asked what where his expertise in understanding the faith lay. The perfectly reasonable answer from his supporters was that he had captured the imagination and respect of an audience of over four million previous non-believers through his unique psychological expositions of the Book of Genesis on YouTube.
It is often asked how it is that Peterson, an agnostic psychologist, can evoke a hunger to read and understand the Bible, when so many priests in the Church fail to achieve this.
Part of the reason for the difference is that Peterson is wholly convinced of the authority of the biblical accounts for describing psychological reality at a profound level, even while he remains unconvinced theologically.
It is paradoxical that the Church has been so beaten down by theological liberalism that it has lost faith in the authority and integrity of its biblical inheritance – and has to be called back to a greater confidence by an agnostic psychologist. Peterson appears to be acknowledging the Ashenden rule of inverse metaphysical proportionality, which states that the less a Christian is metaphysically aware, the more they are inclined to express theological premises as political ones.
Now that Peterson’s wife has begun to pray the Rosary, there is intense speculation about his own allegiance. But he is impatient with Christians who want him to join “their club”. When asked, “Do you believe in God”, he complains that each word in that question requires a degree of intellectual and philosophical enquiry that his interrogators are too careless to acknowledge. Even the two most substantial words, “believe” and “God”, have layers of complex depths, before a psychologist goes anywhere near what aspect of the “you” interacts with hypothesised divinity beyond the grasp of imagination or comprehension.
But all this intellectual sabre-rattling is shorthand for the signal that Peterson is not ready to surrender. Conversion takes encounter as well as thought.
Another famous intellectual, Blaise Pascal, charted his own journey into faith and described his encounter with the living God:
“The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, feast of St Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology. Vigil of St Chrysogonus, martyr, and others. From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight, FIRE.
“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your God will be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God. He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel. Grandeur of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.”
Enticing as politics is, it can only be a symptom, not the cause, of piety.
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