‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe.

‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’

MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible?

JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off course badly. One of the strange intellectual events in the past 60 years is that the presumptions of the Enlightenment have been demonstrated to be false. The empiricists, or really the data-oriented people, believed for a long time that we could arrange the world around us merely as a consequence of the facts. The problem with that presumption is that there are an infinite number of facts. If they just lie there, unorganised, value-free and in no hierarchy, they can’t serve as a guide. You have to organise them and prioritise them in your attention and your actions. A description of the way facts are prioritised – that is a story.

This is a revolutionary realisation because it means ‘the story’ is inescapable. The postmodernists concluded, erroneously and precipitously, that the story that orients us is one of power. That’s wrong because power is an unstable basis for psychological integration and for social unity. Biblical stories make the insistence that the fundamental story is one of unity and also one of voluntary sacrifice. That is a very different story than that of power or its twin, a kind of demented hedonism, which also leads to psychological and social disintegration.

MG: Some would argue that if you engage with Milton or Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo, or with George Eliot or Jane Austen, that these authors tell compelling stories about unity and about how a moral life should be led.