Jordan Peterson explains how Bible stories can help navigate modern life —even for atheists
Clinical psychologist, lecturer and author Dr. Jordan Peterson turns his insightful analysis to The Bible for his latest book.
In “We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine,” out November 19th, he argues the stories within the holy book can help guide anyone through life, regardless of their religious viewpoint.
“If you can’t see the wisdom [in the Bible], you haven’t contemplated your own misery … That’s the thing you have to understand: The books are about you,” he told The Post’s Rikki Schlott in an exclusive interview.
Here, he explains how young people can make order out of the chaos of modern life, with guidance from the religious text:
This book is an impressive tome. How long did it take you to write it?
That’s a hard thing to say. I probably started working on it, in some ways, when I was 13. So how long is that — 50 years?
Now, when did I put pen to paper? For this particular book, it was after the publication of the last one [in 2021], but I wrote three at the same time.
A fair bit of it was the consequence of touring and lecturing, because I used the lectures to develop the ideas, and sometimes I recorded them and used the transcript as a template for a chapter. It’s radically re-written because a lecture and a book are very different, but it took three years.
You have a remarkable ability to get young people excited about things that might not be sexy to them at first glance, like making your bed. How do you get young people invigorated by a topic as serious as religion?
We have a crisis of identity in our culture. Obviously, the culture war is a crisis of identity. And, well, this is a book about identity.
It’s about the identity of the divine and its relationship with men and women and culture.
The reason I say, make your bed is, well, you can probably do that. Maybe your life is chaos, just hellish, like Israelites in the desert, and you don’t know where to start. Well, you can organize your sock drawer and make your bed. It’s a symbolic offering in the morning.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s still true: That’s a recreation of the opening scene in Genesis where God makes order out of chaos. That’s what you’re called upon to do, because you’re made in the image of God. Make some order out of chaos.
I make the case in the book — and it’s a very exciting thing to know — that the most adventurous pathway forward, which is also the most meaningful pathway forward, is the one that involves the voluntary bearing of the maximum amount of responsibility. That’s the symbol of the cross, by the way.
Without responsibility, there wouldn’t be adventure. There’s nothing at stake. And if there’s nothing at stake, there’s no meaning. So this is an invitation to adventure.
It’s also a call to the deepest strata of memory. Plato and Socrates believed that all learning was remembering. Well, there’s truth in that. It is remembering who you are.
You’re Abraham. You’re Moses. You’re Sarah. You’re Adam. You’re Noah. Who else would those stories be about?
I believe that if you lived your life, you would be all those characters. All of those things would happen to you, because everyone goes through a time of storms, everyone inhabits the Tower of Babel, everyone commits the sin of pride.
Now everyone has a call to adventure. Everyone should stand up against tyranny and slavery. That’s all part of the human experience, and so I’m explaining that to you.
Do you think a lack of spiritual grounding is partly responsible for the epidemic of anxiety and depression in our society?
It’s all a lack of spiritual grounding. It’s like people have fallen sway to the presumptuous technologists [in Silicon Valley] — that’s exactly what happens in the Tower of Babel. In that story everyone procrastinates and no one can communicate.
Well, yeah, obviously — we can’t even agree on what a man or woman is. Words have lost their reference. That’s one indication that you’re in a Tower of Babel. Is that going to cause misery? Definitely.
What’s the way out? Well, we’ve been talking about it. You need to know the stories. They orient you. Because if you say ‘God is dead,’ in Nietzsche’s terminology, the unifying ethos collapses, and the world becomes meaningless. What happens is the world becomes hell, and the hell is characterized by suffering.
Well, what’s the antidote to mortal suffering? That’s a great question. That’s what the biblical stories are about.
Young men have been demoralized, and young women have been tempted down the garden path, and the pathway out of their self-conscious misery is the adoption of responsibility.
Without that responsibility, there wouldn’t be an adventure. There’s nothing at stake. And if there’s nothing at stake, there’s no meaning.
You can degenerate into your infantile self-gratification, but … if it’s each according to his need, it’s so pathetic. It’s like, who are you? You’re just a bottomless pit of consumption.
Well, no wonder you are fat and miserable. You know, it’s appalling. It’s an appalling view.
What sort of attitude do you hope a religious skeptic, agnostic, or atheist might approach your book with?
Look, when you’re reading you’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s what a critical reader does. A critical reader doesn’t find something that bothers them and then throw away the book.
Reading is investigation. That’s how you approach a text. You gather what’s relevant and useful, and you discard the rest and use your critical judgment. If you’re sensible, you do it well, because you’re aiming up, and you want to learn.
You’re all the characters in the story. That’s the thing you have to understand: The books are about you.
But even if we take the contrary proposition: It’s not about you. Well, then who’s it about? Even if you’re atheistic, then, let’s just say humans wrote the book. Okay, well, then it’s about us — and that means it’s about you.
That’s quite the daunting realization.
