CHAPTER 2: THE NEW CONVERSATION ON GOD

IT WAS JANUARY 2018, and it all seemed to be going smoothly. Could I book Jordan Peterson for an interview about his new book? “Yes,” said the publicist. “He’ll be in the UK soon, and his diary is fairly free.”

However, as the date approached, my allotted time began to be whittled down. The publicist couldn’t quite believe how much interest there seemed to be in the relatively unknown Canadian psychology professor and his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Numerous media outlets were vying for his time, and two hastily booked lectures at a thousand-seat London venue sold out within hours. The events were packed out —not by crusty academics but by young male professionals.

I still managed to bag an hour with the increasingly in-demand author in the form of a recording for my discussion show The Big Conversation opposite atheist psychologist Susan Blackmore.

However, one of the next appointments in Peterson’s diary turned out to be an interview with Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman, whose inquisitorial style often leaves politicians flustered. But when she challenged Peterson over his views on the gender pay gap, the psychologist’s cool dismantling of her arguments meant the interview soon went viral, and Peterson was launched into the celebrity stratosphere.

The interview spawned a multitude of blogs, opinion pieces, and other interviews interrogating his newfound fame and the ideas he brings with him. His series of debates with Sam Harris in Vancouver and London filled two major arenas four times over. A two-year speaking tour saw him address hundreds of thousands in sold-out auditoriums across the globe. His podcasts and YouTube videos reached millions.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared from the public eye. The combination of a grueling schedule, his wife Tammy’s shock cancer diagnosis, and an unwitting addiction to anti-anxiety medication left him a shadow of his former self. Gradually, over the course of a year of “absolute hell,”[1] with the help of his daughter, Mikhaila, he was able to detox from the medication and build his strength back again.

Despite the lengthy hiatus, the Jordan Peterson phenomenon did not go away. With a sequel to 12 Rules now published, there are still millions of people, especially young men, who are following his podcasts, videos, and lectures. He remains an often controversial figure who divides opinion, yet his influence continues to endure. The New York Times has described him as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.”[2]

But how did Jordan B. Peterson become the rock star of public intellectuals? And why are so many young men following him? His story and influence provide important perspective for understanding the changing dynamics of the conversation on faith.

THE JORDAN PETERSON PHENOMENON

Peterson first entered public consciousness in 2016. A psychology lecturer at the University of Toronto, he was popular with his students but relatively unknown beyond the confines of academia. However, when Canada proposed and later enshrined new laws which potentially criminalized anyone who refused to address transgender persons by their preferred pronouns, Peterson objected in the strongest terms.

The professor said it wasn’t about being anti-transgender rights. His concern was about the state criminalizing the use of language —the first step towards, in Peterson’s eyes, an Orwellian-style tyranny.

His public protest (delivered via YouTube) landed him in trouble with university authorities and campus protest groups. Videos circulated of Peterson being shouted down by angry students who accused him of being a stooge of the alt-right.

Yet Peterson has always disavowed any association with the fascism of the alt-right. He says he’s defending the classic liberal values of academic liberty and freedom of speech but sees the growing popularity of identity politics among groups defining themselves by sexuality, gender, and race as a form of “cultural Marxism.”[3]

But Peterson isn’t the only public intellectual taking aim at the progressive left and drawing a crowd in the process. Since New Atheism got stuck in its rut, he has become the standard bearer for a new conversation among a collective of thinkers sometimes loosely labeled the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW). It consists of a band of secular journalists, psychologists, academics, historians, and scientists who share Peterson’s concerns about the direction of academia and culture and who aren’t afraid to declare that the emperor has no clothes.

Ostensibly there’s plenty of overlap between the IDW and the New Atheist tribe that preceded them. Sam Harris is included in their number, and they look very similar in terms of gender and skin color —primarily male and pale.

But there’s a big difference in the questions they are asking and the solutions they are proposing. Whereas New Atheism held religion up as a problem that the world needed to be rid of, the IDW is asking whether we can live without God at all. In the case of Peterson, the answer will include the qualifier “What do you mean by God?”[4]

The psychologist’s own beliefs about the divine have been notoriously difficult to pin down, but they are a million miles from the anti-religion of his atheistic peers. However, Peterson is just one among a number of secular thinkers reconsidering the value of atheism and religion, including some who were once as dogmatically anti-religious as they come.

A CONVERT OF SORTS

If I had ever needed hard evidence that New Atheism was in full-blown retreat, it was confirmed in an email I received a few years ago from Peter Boghossian. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

Until his departure in 2021, Boghossian was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and for a time he had been one of the most vociferous atheist voices in the blogosphere. His book A Manual for Creating Atheists is exactly what the title suggests —a set of strategies to help atheists persuade people to abandon their religious delusions. Boghossian was known as a champion of “street epistemology,” a sort of reverse street evangelism in which skeptics would talk flustered religious people out of their faith through a series of questions. When Boghossian joined me on my show to debate his book, he even went so far as to suggest that faith beliefs should be officially categorized as mental disorders.

Yet just a few years later, his tone had changed dramatically. I had contacted him about the possibility of a public dialogue on Christianity and atheism. His response stunned me. He graciously turned down the invitation, telling me that he was finished with attacking God and faith and that I might be surprised at his new attitude towards Christianity. Ironically, he now frequently found himself on the side of Christians against his fellow secularists.

What had effected this remarkable change? Apparently, Boghossian had decided that Christianity was not the enemy of evidence-based thinking he had once imagined it to be. Instead, something far more pernicious was already rampant in culture and threatening to derail rational thinking from within the academy. He had turned his full attention to this new threat. I was told that all would become clear a few months hence.

And so it did. It emerged that Boghossian, along with coconspirators James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, was at the center of an audacious academic hoax. They had become troubled by the rise of so-called “grievance studies” —university courses and papers which placed critical theories about racial, gender, and sexual oppression at the center of every academic discipline.

This, they said, was going hand in hand with a woke cancel culture on campus that shamed into silence anyone who differed from the new, politically correct orthodoxy. Academic freedom was being suffocated by rapidly developing ideologies which, once published, became dogma.

Seeking to expose the perceived vacuous foundations for these academic arguments, Boghossian and his team submitted a series of bogus papers to various peer-reviewed academic journals. Before the ruse was exposed, they managed to see papers published on outlandish theories from dogs engaging in “rape culture” to why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters. They even managed to dress up segments from Hitler’s Mein Kampf with suitable-sounding academic language in a paper on intersectional feminism. The hoax was widely debated in mainstream media. The New York Times reported that the bogus scholarship had unleashed a “cascade of mockery” from like-minded critics.[5]

Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose describe themselves as left-wing academics, yet they concluded that the progressive liberal values they cherished were under threat by a culture “in which only certain conclusions are allowed” and which “put social grievances ahead of objective truth.”[6] This was the pernicious trend that had replaced religious faith as enemy number one in the eyes of Boghossian. In fact, he and those leading the pushback have become unlikely bedfellows with many Christians and people of faith who are similarly concerned by the dogmatism of identity politics and the curtailing of free speech.

Admittedly, Peter Boghossian has hardly had a Damascene conversion to Christianity. But he has undergone a remarkable change in his attitude towards the questions that matter and which battles to fight. The firebrand atheist is gone, replaced by someone deeply troubled by the direction that a post-Christian culture is traveling in. He, along with many of his peers, has begun to realize that the chickens are coming home to roost in the postmodern West.

THE STORY WE RECEIVED

Like Boghossian, other notable atheists such as Sam Harris seem to have lost interest altogether in haranguing Christians. They may even be realizing that the loss of Christianity’s cultural dominance might be a significant part of the problem.

To understand this shift from dogmatic New Atheism to a renewed appreciation of what we may be losing in our post-Christian West, a brief history lesson is in order.

Despite the encroachment of secularism from the Enlightenment onwards, until the middle of the twentieth century, Christianity had remained the dominant cultural force in the West and had shaped the psychology of generations of people and their societies. For nearly two millennia, Christendom had given people a story to live their lives by. Regardless of whether the story itself was literally true (which we’ll return to later), and even if those living within it were only dimly aware of the details, it had nevertheless provided a narrative about reality with a clear beginning, present, and future.

It could be summarized in five acts:

At a simple level, that story involves several key assumptions: Each human life is here by design rather than by accident. Every life, whether male or female, is created in the image of God and therefore has value. Evil and suffering are facts of our present existence but will one day be vanquished when justice is done in the world. And every person, whatever their profession, background, or station in life, is called to work towards creating a world shaped by the teachings and character of Jesus.

Doubtless, the Christian story was often abused by Christendom’s gatekeepers or used as an “opium of the masses,” as Karl Marx described it. For many centuries the threat of hell was wielded by those in authority to keep people in their place, just as much as the love of God taught them to remember their value. Likewise, for long periods Christianity’s defining principles of justice and human value were often deployed with massive inconsistency (the “equal” value of men, women, and people of color being one obvious example).

And yet, for all its faults, the grand story of Creation, Fall, Israel, Redemption, and New Creation helped to frame people’s day-to-day existence for centuries.

The idea that each individual life was intended by God gave meaning to each person’s existence. That their troubles and afflictions had been the lot of Christ himself gave people the fortitude to bear their own suffering and to see it in the context of a greater, God-given purpose. Indeed, being part of a story that was cosmic in scale meant the humblest denizen of earth could yet be imbued with a sense of ultimate purpose. As the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert wrote, “A servant with this clause / makes drudgery divine.”[7]

It’s difficult to exaggerate the psychological difference that such a view made to the culture that fostered it. Much of the West was built on the back of a Christian vision of life and work that collectively drove society forwards. This vision was grounded in the idea that each person knew they had an identity as a servant of God and was called to model their life, work, hopes, and dreams in the pattern God had created and on the life exemplified in Jesus Christ. The narrative of Christianity gave people a story to be part of.

But as that story has faded in our communal consciousness, a shared existential question has come to replace it: What story are we now supposed to live by?

Psychologist John Vervaeke says, “With the Enlightenment and the move to a secular world, we lost a religious worldview that homed us and gave us access to wisdom.”[8] As this phenomenon reached its zenith in the twentieth century, it was Vervaeke who coined an apt phrase for it —“the meaning crisis.”

HOW THE STORY CHANGED

As well as giving us a story to live by, there is another concept which the Christian worldview gifted the modern world: objective truth. It placed this idea at the center of culture. Good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty, virtue, and purpose were real things that formed part of the fabric of reality. These were concrete facts about existence, not mere opinions. Such pivotal concepts are what the modern age of science, reason, and moral progress was founded on.

However, the dramatic social shifts following the First and Second World Wars and the flowering of the sixties counterculture gave rise to a postmodern age. The certainties of the past were called into question. We no longer held to outmoded concepts like “good” and “evil.” Morality was relative —just another evolutionary process adapting creatures to different times and cultures. In an age when all the old orthodoxies began to be questioned, the concept of truth became person-dependent. “You have your truth; I have mine” went the adage. What we each felt about something became as important as the actual facts about it. “All you need is love,” sang the Beatles. And love was, above all, a feeling.

In tandem with this sidelining of objective truth, the Christian vision of reality has been increasingly in retreat for the past sixty years. In many parts of the West, churchgoing is regarded as a quaint relic of the past, along with the morality that accompanied it. The “nones” (those who claim no religious affiliation) have been the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in society for some time and have embodied the spirit of our age —progressive, tech-savvy, and convinced that there is no preestablished script for life.

Across the board, the tried and tested narratives that informed our past are now viewed with suspicion. Rebelling against tradition is a given in most popular art and music. (In fact, it has become such a hackneyed trope of rock music that a deeply religious artist now cuts a more rebellious figure than one who gives the finger to the establishment.)

All around we can see the signs of a postmodern age in which the certainties of the past are being questioned and turned on their heads: The irony of a piece of Banksy street art that juxtaposes beauty and violence, or his widely publicized painting that automatically shredded itself the moment after being purchased at auction. The rise of atonal forms of music and poetry that refuse to play by the typical rules of melody and structure. Even Hollywood resists the once familiar good vs. evil tropes of fairy stories like Sleeping Beauty. Now, in Disney films like Maleficent, the tale is inverted to tell the story from the perspective of the villain.

In fact, Disney has partly been responsible for this social shift. Walt famously declared, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” and we have embraced that message en masse. For decades our music, films, books, and art have told us that we need to throw off the shackles of conventional morality and identity and just “follow our dreams.”

This loss of a common story that binds us all together is part of the wider phenomenon of the rise of the self in society versus the communal identity that often used to define people. Our current time in history is unique. We live in an era of options, when we have fifty different choices for how our coffee is served in Starbucks and can have music delivered to us according to our individual preferences via Spotify. Likewise, we are the first generation at liberty to invent our own meaning, define our own identity, and create our own story. As that most succinct Gen Z slogan puts it: “You do you.”

This postmodern trend, in which we broker our own identity rather than have it handed down to us, has gathered pace in recent years, thanks especially to the advent of social media.

The LGBT movement in particular, which fought long and hard for the rights and recognition of gay and lesbian people in past decades, has since spawned an array of additional sexual and gender identities that people choose to adopt. While critics may roll their eyes at the LGBTQIA+ “alphabet soup” this sometimes results in, those who embrace these identities nevertheless usually regard them as sacrosanct. Meanwhile, other forms of identity such as gender, race, class, and disability have become ever-more distinctive markers of who we are and of our place in society.

Many on the progressive left of culture have come to categorize these identities in terms of the privilege or oppression that often accrues with being Black, white, male, female, straight, gay, trans, etc. Critics often use phrases like “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” or “wokeness” as pejorative labels for this new cultural phenomenon. But such phrases do at least capture the claim that it is the overlap (or intersection) of these identities that describes just how oppressed or privileged any individual is in relation to others in society. To be “woke” is to be aware of such inequalities and willing to fight their cause. The progressive left’s calls for justice are usually radical and nonnegotiable, requiring the dismantling of oppressive systems of patriarchy, racism, or heteronormativity.

While these overarching systems of oppression are viewed as objectively evil, the concept of truth has often become deeply subjective in the process. An individual’s lived experience may effectively trump the views of someone who does not share the markers of their identity. Slogans like “my body, my choice” in the abortion debate, “love is love” in the same-sex marriage debate, or “transwomen are women” in the transgender debate reveal that personal experience is now key.

In turn, the conservative right wing of culture tends to react with an equal measure of scorn at the new lexicon of terms and identities, along with anger at the cancellation of those who critique the chosen ideologies. Yet many conservatives are just as prone to discarding the concept of objective truth when it suits them too.

In the United States it has been demonstrated by the almost cult-like devotion to Donald Trump that has gripped so many on the right, along with a willingness to blindly swallow all manner of alternative facts, conspiracy theories, and claims about “stolen elections.” The meaning crisis has corroded the core values that many conservatives stood for —truth, integrity, and respect for the rule of law. The Christian identity that once grounded these values has often been replaced by a cynical political power grab in which the ends supposedly justify the means. Meanwhile, those on the right who question the ethical direction of conservative politics are vilified as quislings and “RINOs” (Republicans in name only). Facts, nuance, and reality are discarded in the process.

Social media and clickbait culture have only served to intensify these culture wars as those who shout the loudest gain the most exposure. But the politicization of identity at both ends of the left and right has left many in the “exhausted middle,” either afraid to speak out or unable to make their voices heard.

The changing contours of the political landscape have also meant that the traditional battle lines between conservatives on the right and liberals on the left are now far more diffuse. It means liberal academics like Boghossian, old-school feminists like Germaine Greer, authors like J. K. Rowling, and comedians like Monty Python star John Cleese have often found themselves in unlikely alliances with more moderate conservative and religious voices in their concerns over politically correct culture and free speech.

MEANING CRISIS

So we find ourselves in the modern twenty-first century. The Christian narrative of the past that once gave people a sense of common purpose and their place in the created order has been overthrown or forgotten. Now a “be whoever you want to be” culture is in ascendancy as people search for a “true” inner identity —their “authentic self.” This phenomenon is known as “expressive individualism,” a term coined by sociologist Robert Bellah and popularized by Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who describes our modern era as “the Age of Authenticity.”[9]

Graham Tomlin, the bishop of Kensington and author of the book Why Being Yourself Is a Bad Idea, writes, “In the West, we have largely lost our belief in God or any sense of a given cosmic order. As a result, there is no longer any overarching ‘sacred structure’ that holds the world together. So we are left on our own as individuals in a world without any predetermined order that tells us who we are in that world, or that gives us a sense of security and ‘fit’ within a wider scheme of things.”[10]

I believe that this loss of shared identity is part of the reason for the modern mental health crisis. This is the great irony of our age. We live in a more materially prosperous time than any other. Life expectancy is at an all-time high, and we have constant and ubiquitous access to the kind of technology that our ancestors would have considered nothing short of magical. Yet statistics tell us that we are more unhappy than we ever have been, and that’s especially true of young people.

The prevalence of mental health problems has skyrocketed in recent years with nearly one-third of young women in the UK reporting anxiety and depression.[11] According to official statistics, in 2017, “the rate of US adolescents and young adults dying of suicide . . . reached its highest level in nearly two decades,” with “47 percent more suicides among people aged 15 to 19 than in the year 2000.” Suicide was the “second-leading cause of death for people in that age group,” second only to road deaths.[12]

Multiple studies have linked the rise in anxiety and depression to the rise of social media and smartphone addiction. Social media is engineered to be addictive. That’s why advertising revenues are so lucrative to the tech giants who own the platforms. But the constant distraction, scrolling, and clickbait material are breeding an inability to concentrate or even sleep properly. The never-ending stream of flawless selfies and Instagram influencers, along with a lack of face-to-face engagement, have contributed to this modern mental health crisis.[13]

Social media has gone hand in hand with the pursuit of the self. Indeed, the selfie has become more than a mere self-portrait on a smartphone. It is part of the increasingly intolerable pressure upon young people to create and maintain a personal brand that can compete with their peers.

Again, Tomlin writes, “An increasing number of studies, especially during the enforced isolation of the pandemic, tell us that happiness and wellbeing are found not in isolated individuality but in social connection. It is through strong relationships with family, friends and community that we truly flourish. . . . In other words, focusing upon my own unique individuality is the wrong place to look.”[14]

All of this helps to explain why young people are experiencing a crisis of meaning. A UK survey revealed the scale of the problem. Nine in ten young Brits aged 16 to 29 responded that their life lacks purpose or meaning.[15] What explains this massive change for the worse?

I would argue that it’s not just that our brains are being rewired by technology. It’s deeper than that. The stories we have been told for the last half century about discovering our “true selves” have reached a crescendo in the age of social media, yet most of us are not mentally or spiritually equipped to navigate this brave new world.

INNATELY RELIGIOUS

New Atheism sought to tear down the last vestiges of the Christian narrative that once gave shape to people’s lives. But what has been erected in its place? The hopes of secularism have fallen flat. The rapid advance of science and technology has turned out to be incapable of delivering on its promise of a flourishing, connected, and happier future. Indeed, the reverse is true. Technology and social media have only contributed to the meaning crisis.

Yet we are innately meaning-seeking creatures. Indeed, I would argue that we are innately religious. And if one set of religious beliefs is taken away, it will only be replaced by another set of quasi-religious beliefs. Indeed, while churchgoing has been in steady decline in the West, the consequent rise of the “nones” does not necessarily mean people are becoming more atheistic.

In the UK, this was brought home by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The loss of such an institutional icon (and a woman of deep Christian faith) seemed to cause a latent spirituality to surface in the general public. People paid their respects at cathedrals and parish churches in great numbers. Hundreds of thousands queued for long hours to see her lying in state. As they faced the coffin, many searched for an appropriate sign of reverence —a solemn bow, hands held in the position of prayer, or a whispered “thank you.” In an age when most people have forgotten the ceremonies of religious tradition, many still grasped for ways to mark the meaningfulness and mystery of this moment.

To a large extent, the signs and sacraments of traditional religion have been replaced in our culture by a heightened interest in amorphous forms of new age spirituality, primarily focused on mindfulness and meditation. These are often practiced by those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” At the same time, priests who offer rites of exorcism in the Catholic church say they have seen a significant spike in requests in recent years,[16] a phenomenon they say is linked to the increasing numbers of people who are dabbling in the occult.

Meanwhile, social media has become a breeding ground for QAnon and other conspiracy claims —from political pedophile rings in pizza parlor basements to Bill Gates taking over the world through microchips in COVID-19 vaccines. Likewise, flat-earthers and pseudoscientific medical practices still have a surprising amount of currency in our supposedly more rational age. Perhaps most worryingly, religious extremism continues to find fertile soil in the minds of the disaffected young men and women who are preyed upon by Islamic extremists, turning even apparently “normal” people into ISIS fighters and suicide bombers.

Whether the objects of faith appear mild or extreme, a willingness to believe in something beyond the confines of science and reason seems to be built into our species. In a 2005 commencement speech, the bestselling author David Foster Wallace said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”[17] Tragically, Wallace, who struggled with depression, took his own life three years later.

Whether we think of ourselves as religious or not, it seems there is always some ultimate reality to which we give our allegiance. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody,” sang Bob Dylan. And it’s true.

When it comes to new forms of quasi-religious belief, the emergence of multiple new forms of sexual and gender categories is a case in point. They are often defended with religious fervor by those who champion them. Like any fundamentalist movement, there are in-groups, out-groups, heretics, holy texts, and witch hunts. But at the center of it is a belief in an internal identity that cannot be questioned.

Writing in response to the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria among young people, biblical scholar N. T. Wright likened it to the religious gnosticism (from the Greek for “secret knowledge”) of the early centuries:

The confusion about gender identity is a modern, and now internet-fueled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows,” has discovered the secret of “who I really am,” behind the deceptive outward appearance. . . . This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.[18]

Whether it be gender or the multiplicity of other political or social causes that describe the identity of individuals today, there exists a plethora of ways we can choose to define our lives, our purposes, and indeed our very selves. However, like the child who has only ever had to choose between vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry and now stands transfixed in an ice cream parlor with a hundred different flavors on offer, overwhelming choice has given rise to a sort of paralysis.

In a world which no longer provides any road map to follow and where the choices for self-actualization are potentially endless, we may frequently find ourselves driving down dead-end streets or simply immobilized by the myriad options on offer.

In that sense, the meaning crisis identified earlier is also an identity crisis. Who am I supposed to emulate when traditional role models are outmoded? To which causes must I signal my allegiance to earn the approval of my peers? And when identity is a free-floating concept, how do I decide on my own?

It turns out that losing the Christian narrative that once formed our decisions, purpose, and identity comes at a cost. And I believe we are only just beginning to see the effects it may have across the world.

SCRATCHING THE ITCH

Perhaps this crisis of meaning explains why Jordan Peterson has drawn such a following. Battling political correctness may have earned Peterson an audience, but his continuing connection with them still needs explanation. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is his admiration for the power of religion and his fascination with the Bible.

Any reader expecting a secular approach to psychology in Peterson’s bestselling book 12 Rules for Life would have been surprised by his constant references to the Bible and Christian beliefs in the search for meaning and purpose. Equally, they might not expect a set of public lectures on the psychological significance of biblical stories to draw a sell-out crowd, but when Peterson books a theater for that purpose, it’s standing room only.

Evidently the psychologist has exposed an existential spiritual itch among millennials and Gen Z and is scratching it for all it’s worth. A generation of young men searching for significance and unsure of their identity have latched on to him as a surrogate father figure to help them find their way in life. Jaded by the unfulfilled promises of Dawkins, Hitchens, and the New Atheist intellectuals, they believe that perhaps it is Peterson who has the words of life.

Peterson’s life lessons are couched in the language of biology, psychology, and theology, yet are also disarmingly simple. For instance, he may draw on the emotional significance of the Genesis account of Cain and Abel (a story so deep he describes it as having “no bottom”[19]), but the instructions dispensed are still “clean up your room, bucko” and “put the things you can control in order.”[20]

Such advice may not seem radically new, but it has galvanized his followers. It’s not unusual for the psychologist to be greeted on the street by men who say, “You’ve changed my life.” Even once-ardent atheists have reported a new respect for religion. Multiple threads about Peterson on Reddit with titles such as “Atheist here, on the edge of conversion to Christianity!”[21] bear witness to the effect his writings and talks on faith are having.

No wonder so many Christian leaders have taken notice of Peterson and his overtures towards Christian faith. Young males are precisely the demographic most absent in churches, and Peterson’s ability to draw them with a message that often resonates with the story of Christianity has led to endless blogs about the “Peterson phenomenon” as well as feverish speculation about his own personal beliefs.

JOURNALISTS, PUNDITS, AND PERSONALITIES

While Peterson may be the most prominent public thinker to be reexamining the value of Christianity in the modern world, he is certainly not alone.

After interviewing him, I became increasingly aware of numerous other high-profile secular public voices who seemed to be saying similar things about where society may drift in the absence of a prevailing Judeo-Christian worldview.

Take, for instance, Douglas Murray, the associate editor of The Spectator, whose bestselling book The Madness of Crowds is a stinging critique of the fragmentation of culture into warring interest groups based around identities of gender, sexuality, and race. Murray is an agnostic, gay journalist who lost his public-school faith by his midtwenties and became friends with Christopher Hitchens and his co-horsemen during the heyday of New Atheism.

However, when I asked Murray for his thoughts on their legacy, his response was devastatingly critical: “New Atheism made claims that were self-confessedly wrong. The claim, for instance, that morality was obvious, was obviously wrong. The claim that the basic ethics that we might share are self-evident, is self-evidently not the case. You don’t have to be an ethicist to know that, you just need to travel.”[22]

Murray went on to describe how, in the absence of the shared narrative and identity that Christianity gave us, Western culture is in danger of unraveling in the face of the endless competing narratives and identities that look increasingly fundamentalist in nature. His book warns of the religious pharisaism of the new wave of identity politics and its heresy hunters who leave no room for grace or forgiveness.

Meanwhile, Murray finds himself haunted by the faith he once held, saying, “I’m now in the self-confessedly conflicted and complex situation of being, among other things, an uncomfortable agnostic who recognizes the values and the virtues that the Christian faith has brought.”[23]

YouTube host Dave Rubin told a remarkably similar story when I sat down with him. As the face of the million-plus subscriber channel The Rubin Report, he’s well known for having undergone a political transformation, from being a comedian on the progressive left in his younger years to becoming a right-leaning conservative pundit. However, our conversation revealed that a spiritual journey had also been underway in recent years.

Having once been enamored with the promises of New Atheism, he told me why he now no longer describes himself as an atheist and was starting to reconnect with his Jewish roots and even explore the claims of Christianity. It turned out that Jordan Peterson, who had become something of a mentor to Rubin, was part of the reason. “I just don’t like the word atheist —it doesn’t fit what I believe,” he said. “I think Jordan has gone a long way toward articulating the type of thing that I believe in.”[24]

Like Murray, Rubin is also increasingly concerned by the aggression of activists in the secular sphere. Whereas he once might have considered evangelical Christians the intolerant ones, he now feels the opposite is true: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that generally believers right now, are more tolerant. Who are the most intolerant people in society right now? It’s the people that are constantly telling you how tolerant they are. That’s the irony —it’s the people that tell you you’re a bunch of racists and bigots and homophobes.”[25]

Another Jewish media personality, Bari Weiss, came to wide prominence in 2020 when she resigned her position as an op-ed writer and editor at the New York Times in protest at the curtailment of free thought within her profession. Weiss describes herself as liberal and center-left, but like many of those already mentioned, she found herself increasingly out of step with her progressive peers at the paper. In a widely shared resignation letter, she identified her concerns about the politically correct orthodoxies now being aggressively policed among journalists: “I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”[26]

Weiss, who has written extensively on the reemergence of anti-Semitism (she describes being called a “Nazi and a racist” by colleagues who disagreed with her politics[27]), is another example of a secular thinker who has begun to reembrace a traditional religious identity in the wake of the rise of the quasi-religious “woke” identities she is concerned by.

In an interview, she said that a “reckoning” of New Atheism was taking place, as it had prepared the ground for the meaning crisis:

When I look at the qualities of the people who have the strength and the fortitude to not go along with the crowd and to be willing to be slandered and to sacrifice for the sake of resisting this illiberalism, almost all of them are religious in some way or another. . . . Something deeper is rooting them. . . . One of the things that the atheist group maybe couldn’t have foreseen is that robbing people of that religious impulse would soften the ground for the rise of this deeply illiberal ideology that functions in many ways like a new religion. . . . It’s deeply connected to the rise of this new orthodoxy.[28]

Speaking of her return to Judaism, Weiss said, “The more deeply I connected to my own Judaism, Jewish history, the stronger my conviction has become. I am just extremely clear on who I am, what I’m about, and what I’m fighting for.”[29]

Russell Brand presents another interesting case study. The well-known TV personality, actor, and comedian has also been on a journey of self-discovery in recent years. Having once been a party animal in the alternative comedy scene with a serious addiction to sex and drugs, Brand has since engaged in a spiritual quest that led him to renounce his previous lifestyle. He says that he now believes in God and that the practice of meditation and prayer has brought stability and a sense of the transcendent into his life.

While his spirituality is more influenced by an Eastern universalist philosophy than Christianity (the tattoo of a crucified Christ on his right arm is balanced by tattoos from multiple other religions across his body), Brand welcomes conversations with Christian theologians and is frequently critical of an atheistic view of the world that reduces meaning and purpose to matter and brain chemistry.

Brand also seems to be concerned by the self-inward turn of culture in the absence of a unifying story. In an interview with atheist comedian Ricky Gervais, Brand said, “When people think there’s no purpose or meaning . . . it creates cultures that are oddly materialistic and nihilistic. And I feel like in the last twenty years we are seeing more and more worship of self, the worship of the individual.”[30]

PHILOSOPHERS, FEMINISTS, HISTORIANS, AND SCIENTISTS

It’s not just journalists, celebrities, and TV pundits who have moved in this direction. Secular philosophers such as John Gray and the late Roger Scruton have written at length about how New Atheism’s religion-less utopia has proved to be a pipe dream. Why? Firstly, because human nature is irreducibly religious, and secondly, because many modern atheists fail to recognize the degree to which their vision of the good life is a product of the Christian culture that preceded them.

To this end, historian Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, has repeatedly pointed out this blind spot among secular humanists. “Humanism” has become the label for atheism’s most recent incarnation as an ethical code for life. However, according to Holland, it is entirely constructed from the moral assumptions of the Christian West that it sprang from.

Telling how he came to this realization himself, Holland recounted to me the dawning of his own reevaluation of the Christianity he had left behind as a teenager. As a young historian he had presumed that the values of freedom, equality, and human dignity that he and his secular peers cherished were the natural product of any civilized society. However, his study of the ancient world quickly led him to recognize just how little he had in common with civilizations of the past. “I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I am a Christian.”[31]

The rise of new orthodoxies and their attendant cancel culture has also created strange bedfellows of religious conservatives and second-wave feminists like Germaine Greer. In common with other notable feminists, writers, and broadcasters such as Camille Paglia, J. K. Rowling, and Jenny Murray, Greer has caused controversy for her outspoken criticism of new gender ideologies. She and others have been labeled Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) for their belief that the rights and experiences of women are intrinsically linked to their biology and cannot be conferred on those who have male bodies.

Ever since her bestselling 1970 work The Female Eunuch, Greer has never been afraid to lambast organized religion for its subjugation of women. But even she has spoken approvingly of the value of the convent school education she experienced in Australia. A self-described “atheist Catholic,” Greer says that the strong example of the sisters in these female-only institutions sowed the seeds of her own feminism and that without them, generations of Australian women would not have had any education. In a similar vein, Larissa Nolan writes of how “nuns schooled today’s torch-bearers of feminism.”[32]

Scientists are also among those taking a fresh look at the value of religion. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who, along with his wife Heather Heying, was a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington State. They both left their positions in 2017 after coming into conflict with student activists who had effectively closed down the campus amid protests over race and privilege. Like Boghossian, Weinstein has become a high-profile critic of politically correct ideologies on college campuses, which he says are stifling academic integrity and the free exchange of ideas that should characterize higher education.

But Weinstein is also increasingly well-known for encouraging a détente of sorts in the war between religion and science. As an atheist, Weinstein no longer believes in the Jewish faith he was brought up in but nevertheless engages in some of its rituals and community aspects with his family. When I hosted a discussion between the biologist and scientist-theologian Alister McGrath, we discussed Weinstein’s contention that religion is “literally false and metaphorically true.”[33]

Weinstein rejects the idea that religion is an unfortunate misfiring of the evolutionary process (as his scientific colleague Richard Dawkins believes) but says that the practice of religion has evolved as a beneficial survival strategy like any other aspect of biological adaptation. To that extent, Weinstein is willing to look for the good in religion whilst recognizing the limits of science’s ability to convey meaning and purpose to humans.

Some of the thinkers listed thus far lean to the right (or at least away from the radical left) in their political and cultural outlook. This is perhaps no surprise. Conservative values often go hand in hand with an appreciation for the stability of the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage. A subset of them, along with other thinkers such as Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein’s mathematician brother Eric Weinstein, rallied under the aforementioned (and somewhat grandiose) moniker the “Intellectual Dark Web” for a while.

Yet even more left-leaning academics like Marxist historian Terry Eagleton have written devastating critiques of New Atheism. (He famously compared Dawkins’s writing on theology to someone “holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds.”[34]) And, like Holland, he has repeatedly pointed out to his secular contemporaries that Christianity’s central story of self-sacrificial love is the revolutionary force that has most shaped the moral arc of the West, rather than the value-neutral project of science.

These are just some of the secular players who have been pushing back against the simplistic assumptions of New Atheism and who have begun a new conversation on the value of Christianity in an increasingly fragmented society. We will revisit some of their stories in future chapters.

Some of them still describe themselves as atheists; some admit to a soft spot for Christianity or even seem to be on a journey of reconnecting with faith. Others have invented their own labels. (Douglas Murray, as we’ve seen, has adopted the epithet “Christian atheist” for himself.) Either way, they are all convinced that a meaning crisis has overtaken the West that neither atheistic humanism, liberal progressivism, or any other variety of secularism is capable of responding to.

PETERSON AND GOD

As already mentioned, there has been feverish speculation about whether Jordan Peterson may yet embrace orthodox Christian belief. Throughout the debate I chaired between him and Susan Blackmore, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Peterson was already a full-blooded Christian apologist, so vigorously did he defend a Christian worldview against her atheism.

Yet Peterson has consistently refused to be pinned down on his personal religious convictions. When I pressed him on it, he described himself as a “religious man” who was “conditioned in every cell as a consequence of the Judeo-Christian worldview.” The closest I could get to whether he really believed in God was that he lives his life “as though God exists,” saying, “The fundamental hallmark of belief is how you act, not what you say about what you think.”[35]

Peterson frequently applies the Jungian language of value hierarchy to this phenomenon. In our interview he insisted, “You have a hierarchy of values. You have to, otherwise you can’t act, or you’re painfully confused. Whatever is at the top of that hierarchy of values, serves the function of God for you.”[36]

He’s also openly critical of atheists such as Richard Dawkins, as their anti-religious polemic won’t help anyone to actually live in the world. “The New Atheists have a hell of a time with an active ethic,”[37] he says. Indeed, Peterson has found more common ground with spiritual seekers like Russell Brand (both have appeared on each other’s podcasts) than with his celebrity atheist interlocutors.

Which leads to the question of what Peterson actually believes about the unique claims of Christianity. During their debate, Susan Blackmore verbalized the frustration of her atheist peers. Peterson clearly believes in a scientific account of evolutionary psychology yet marries it with a fervent admiration for Bible stories that leaves many skeptics scratching their heads.

But Peterson was unapologetic, stating that “the biblical texts are foundational.”[38] For instance, he believes the creation narrative in Genesis 1 —in which God creates man and woman in his own image —is fundamental to our belief in the intrinsic dignity and equality of humans.

Likewise, he strongly endorses the effect of Christianity on the world, writing, “The Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law. . . . It is in fact nothing short of a miracle.”[39]

Of course, recognizing the cultural and psychological debt we owe to Christianity is not the same thing as believing Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead. Again, this is where Peterson becomes difficult to pin down. Christians don’t just believe Christianity is socially useful; they believe it’s true. But it’s never quite clear where Peterson falls between those two options.

Similarly, a key question in the debate I hosted between Bret Weinstein and Alister McGrath centered on Weinstein’s willingness to acknowledge the social and cultural benefits of religion even though he didn’t believe in God. To that extent, he took the view that religion was useful rather than true. For many people, that is enough. They can get the benefits from practicing yoga without having to believe in the spiritual dimension of it. They can enjoy the feelings of goodwill that the Christmas season brings without believing that Jesus was born of a virgin.

But I’m not so convinced that we can forever enjoy the fruits of religion without the roots of religion, especially when it comes to Christianity.

Yes, we should be grateful for all that the Judeo-Christian heritage has gifted the West —human rights, democracy, and freedom of speech among them. However, as any student of history will tell you, these are rare fruits, uniquely cultivated in the soil of our specific Judeo-Christian heritage. How much longer will those concepts endure if the Christian identity of the West continues to wane and, in its place, multiple competing stories of identity and meaning continue to spring up?

These are the questions that also exercise many of the thinkers engaged in the new conversation on God. When Susan Blackmore confronted Peterson with the fact that once-Christian Scandinavian countries still lead the world in happiness and welfare despite their rapid embrace of secularism, he countered that these nations are still in the infancy of their post-Christian experiment. “They’re stable to the degree that they’re not secular,” he said. “We’re living on the corpse of our ancestors. But that stops being nourishing and starts to become rotten unless you replenish it. And I don’t think we are replenishing it. We’re living on borrowed time and are in danger of running out of it.”[40]

Peterson recognizes the social utility of Christianity and fears for the future of the West in its absence. But again, recognizing something is useful doesn’t make it actually true. Weinstein and Peterson seem to be willing to see Christianity as “metaphorically” true because it works. However, in the rest of this book I will be seeking to persuade you that the reason so many people are attesting again to the fact that Christianity works is because it really is true.

A NEW CONVERSATION BEGINS

So as we consider this new conversation that is happening, the question remains: Is Jesus really the divine Son of God? Or is Christ only a symbolic “archetype” (one of Peterson’s favorite Jungian terms) who represents the perfection of the human condition? When asked by Catholic broadcaster Patrick Coffin whether he’s ready to assert belief or disbelief in the historical resurrection of Jesus, Peterson replied, “I need to think about that for about three more years before I would even venture an answer.”[41]

Peterson still seems to be thinking about it. Since his return to public life, the discussions he has chosen to engage in have increasingly focused on the realms of meaning, religion, and purpose. Perhaps the reason he continues to find such a large audience for these conversations is because he himself is still working out his own salvation in such a public way.

In conversation with Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox Christian and sculptor of religious icons, Peterson struggled to contain his emotions as he spoke of his religious longings. Almost in tears, he described his growing comprehension that the “objective world” of history and fact and the “narrative world” of myth, meaning, and beauty seem to come together in the person of Jesus Christ, saying, “I’m amazed at my own belief, and I don’t understand it.”[42]

The psychologist is not afraid to wear his own emotions on his sleeve when he talks about such things, frequently tearing up in interviews or on stage. This too is part of his attraction.

He talks about people as though they have a soul. As if beauty, truth, and meaning really exist. Peterson has somehow broken through the intellectual firewall that often separates public thinkers from the “real world” of emotion, tragedy, and joy.

None of this means that Peterson should be hailed as the savior of the West or of Christianity (that job is already taken by Jesus Christ, as far as Christians are concerned). Some are also wary of the theological outworking of Peterson’s take on Christianity. Practically speaking, it often boils down to a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps philosophy. One could argue there’s more works than grace in such an approach.

Nevertheless, Peterson’s reconnection of intellect, emotion, and spirituality is a powerful one. For a generation that has been starved of meaningful engagement with those faculties, it seems that a pressure valve has been released. “This is what I was looking for” is often the reaction from millennials who have been fed a meager diet of rationalism and science. And being given the opportunity to see the world in this new and unshackled way can often give people intellectual permission to explore Christianity.

Wherever the psychologist may personally find himself on the faith spectrum, he has been described as a “gateway drug” to orthodox Christian faith for others, and it’s easy to see why. Indeed, his own wife Tammy and daughter Mikhaila Peterson have gone on record as having “found God” and an unprecedented peace through prayer and Bible reading.[43]

Peterson and the other public intellectuals who are following in his wake have identified the problem in the West: A lack of meaning. An identity crisis. The anxiety produced by living in a world without a story to live by.

But what can solve it? New Atheism has resolutely failed, but I don’t believe the IDW and its cohort of new thinkers will successfully untangle this problem either. Yes, they are asking important questions, but they are far from having all the answers. Even someone with the cultural influence of Jordan Peterson —someone explicitly encouraging people to reconsider the value of Christianity —can’t save the West from its meaning and identity crisis.

Why so? Because all these thinkers are pointing people back towards a story that is only useful if it is true. Yes, it may be “metaphorically powerful.” But the power of a metaphor is contained in the fact that it ultimately points towards something that exists in reality. We cannot live on metaphors alone. We cannot use poetry, psychology, and myth to hold God at arm’s length forever. What if this two-thousand-year-old story is only able to reconnect with our deepest desires for meaning, purpose, and identity because it is the true story to which all other stories point?

I sense that this generation is becoming primed to hear this story afresh.