Last week I made my first visit, or pilgrimage even, to a Jordan Peterson rally in Oklahoma in the United States. I and my YouTube colleagues from “Catholic Unscripted” had been invited to a behind-the-stage event following his appearance.
Although I had once been invited to take part in an academic seminar probing Peterson’s ideas with him in person, and followed him assiduously on YouTube, I had never seen him in live “amphitheatre-action-mode” before.
Within a few days of my visit, the Internet was awash with a hit piece in the US Catholic publication Crisis Magazine by Scott Ventureyra denouncing Peterson as a dangerous phenomenon to Christians. This article was designed to make Christians anxious about Peterson and mistrust him. You can tell the difference between a hit piece and a reasoned analysis: the former tells only one half of the story; the latter both sides.
My own analysis based on the rally in Oklahoma was wholly different.
However, not everything was straight-forward. The structure of the Oklahoma evening struck me as a little odd. Peterson began by announcing to his audience that he would be talking about reality and truth. But as one might expect from most academics and philosophers, he didn’t then offer to define his terms.
He tapped into peoples’ experiences, offered some very useful pop-psychology, re-packaging some useful Freud (to rapturous applause),but then leapt into a very pointed discursion into the metaphysical reality of evil.
In fact, he was so stark about the dangers of evil that he talked in terms a Pentecostal pastor or a Catholic exorcist might have used.
Konstantin Kisin, the satirist and commentator, has been invited to join Peterson on the tour – titled “We Who Wrestle With God Tour” – and to act as a reflective conversationalist partner. In Oklahoma, he pressed Peterson helpfully on a number of points, but the one that the audience had been waiting for was the one to do with the question Peterson is besieged with daily: “Do you believe in God.” To which he has for some time sensibly replied “it depends on what you mean by ‘believe’ and ‘God’.”
But since his wife was received into the Catholic Church at Easter and he has been interviewed several times with her, rejoicing on her behalf, that line of prevarication is no longer open to him. So his response was eagerly expected in Oklahoma. Kisin presented the question (obviously by prearrangement) as “Do you believe in the Resurrection?”
Peterson replied “It seems the simplest explanation.” This combined a degree of ambiguity along with what is a carefully a coded response. At face value, the effect that the phrase “it seems the simplest explanation” has, and is intended to have, is to displace all the other objections to the Resurrection, suggesting that they are redundant.
It implies belief without stating it explicitly. This looks like this is going to be Peterson’s next expression of supportive agnosticism when it comes to the Faith. Some people will welcome it, as being as close an ally of the Faith as he can come by, and others will see it as inadequate.
But It may be that there are two aspects to Peterson’s presently staged agnosticism which are supported by this modified ambiguity.
The first is that he will be aware that the majority of his vast numbers of followers are not yet Christians. Once again, in talking about his wife’s newfound Catholic Faith, he has retained a delicately balanced ambiguity. He speaks carefully about how they each have their own journey, their own vocation.
It seems very likely that at least one element in his reluctance to commit himself further to belief is that he will lose access to those millions of his supporters who are open to his psychological apologias for the Biblical truth, but would find them too hard to access if he took them from the arena of psychological truth to metaphysical truth.
If he came out clearly as a Christian he might lose the uncommitted followers that his studied agnosticism made possible. It might even be a reasonable hypothesis that he may be sacrificing his own desire to come out as a public believer in order to continue to act as a conduit for what we might call the natural theology of the Faith, or in his case the natural psychology that the Faith constitutes, for those whom creedal allegiance is a step too far.
Near the end of his performance, he offered what I thought to be an astonishingly prescient insight about paedophilia in the Catholic Church.
“Imagine”, he said, that there is a force of intelligent evil and it plans to corrupt at the level of all that is most sacred. What would its strategy be? It might turn to corrupt innocence, in which case it would go after children. It would use a potent and highly damaging form of corruption and so chose perhaps sex. It would seek to pervert the most trusted of occupations, let’s say that of a priest, and do it within the most important spiritual and ethical organisation in world history: the Catholic Church.
If this strategy succeeded it would have the effect of soiling the reputation and value of the Catholic Church across generations to come. But who or what is to blame here? There is nothing intrinsically evil in either the priesthood or the Catholic Church – in fact the opposite is true: they are intrinsically sacred. What is to blame is evil – and in particular evil spirits that gain access for this strategy of despoliation.
But do people blame this source of evil ? No. Instead they blame the Church and so the act of despoliation of children is doubly effective.
Does this imply that the Church and the clergy bear no responsibility for the evil done through them? Certainly not. Nothing excuses either the perverted and beyond reprehensible clerical abuse of children, or the indefensible cover up of abusers that senior clergy have perpetuated to this day, and at the highest levels of the Vatican.
But it invites the listener to engage in an act of discernment and trace the ethical conflict one stage further back to its origin, which is the campaign of evil itself to corrupt and destroy.
In other words, it shifts part of the analytical gaze of discernment one step back from the instruments of corruption (the organisation) to the cause of corruption, which is evil itself. And, by implication, this points out the unhelpfulness of attacking the one body – the Catholic Church – that has the unique capacity for resisting and defeating evil, only because as part of its struggle it has suffered the intermittent defeat of some corrupted clergy, as one might expect.
Whatever the limitations (or lack of them) of Peterson’s public performances, there are very few voices of intellectual competence who are qualified or willing to raise the public gaze of a confused and metaphysically incompetent society to the arena of the cosmic fight between Good and Evil.
And since the clergy are often reluctant to talk in terms of the reality of heaven and hell, and the fight for the salvation of the soul, we can be grateful that Jordan Peterson does – with conviction, clarity, competence and courage.
Photo: Screenshot of Jordan Peterson from www.jordanbpeterson.com.
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