A Message to Christian Churches: Jordan Peterson

[June 15, 2026]  In a recent social media post, Dr. Jordan Peterson delivered an important message to Christian Churches.  I need to note that he has been traveling to Western countries, giving talks about the psychological approach to our ancient stories.  In those talks, he overwhelmingly draws young men.  These are the same men who are not attending church.

 As part of his talks, which began in 2017 with an interpretation of the book of Genesis, he also listens to what his audience has to say.  He takes note of what he hears.  While giving these talks, he sold out theaters wherever he went.  He attracted Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists.

 The fact that he mostly attracted young men to his lectures is not a “phenomenon easily accounted for,” he notes.  Peterson begins to explain by noting that in the West there is a “historical guilt that is upon us, a variant of the sense of original sin.”  This idea is not helped by people who weaponize that guilt.

 ”Our young people face a demoralization that is perhaps unparalleled.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson

 He notes that this demoralization is particularly true of young men, although it will eventually devastate young women.  In an age of nihilism that discourages people from marrying and having children, he says that this is the point. 

“When they are children, boys are hectored for their toy preferences, which often include toy weapons such as guns, and their more boisterous playing style, as boys require active, rough, and tumble play, even more than girls, for whom it is also a necessity.”

Dr. Peterson goes on to bring out the fact that in grade school, boys are “admonished, shamed, and controlled” in a manner by those who think that play, especially competitive play, is unnecessary.  Those who do so value a “docile, harmless obedience above all.”

These boys are also imbued with an ideology which, according to Peterson, consists of three accusations:

1. Human culture, particularly in the West, is best construed as an oppressive patriarchy motivated by the desire, willingness, and ability to use power defined as the compulsion of others against their will to attain what are purely selfish and self-serving ends. This is true at every level of analysis.  Marriage is akin to slavery, friendship to exploitation, political disagreement to war, and business arrangements to deception and theft.  And, this includes the fundamental reality of history itself.
2. Human activity, particularly that undertaken in the West, is fundamentally a planet-despoiling enterprise.  The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us, and that could hypothetically exist in our absence.  We might well be construed even as a cancer that threatens the very viability of the complex systems that make up the ecosystem of the earth that shelters and supports us.  We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation and we have to place extreme limits on our wants, even our needs, so that survival itself can be guaranteed.  
3. The prime contributor, both to the ‘tyranny’ that makes up the oppressive patriarchy, and structures all of our social interactions, past and present, and the unforgivable despoiling of our beloved Mother Earth, is damnable male ambition, competitive and dominating power made, selfish, exploitative, raping and pillaging.

We in the West are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on our civilization itself.  

Dr. Peterson warns of the worship of the mass murderer, Karl Marx.  And it is precisely those young men who are deeply conscientious, capable of guilt and regret, who have come to believe in pain that every deep impulse that moves them out into the world for the adventure of their life, even that impulse drawing them to women’s, is nothing but the manifestation of a satanic spirit.

This [neo-Marxist ideology] is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically, and scientifically, but it is literally anti-true.  It’s not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality.  It is something that could not be further from the truth.

“The Christian church is there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps first, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth devoted to love and without fear.”

Peterson is clear.  Invite the young men back.  Say literally to those young men, you are welcome here.  If no one else wants what you have to offer, we do.  

We want to call you to the highest purpose of your life.  We want your time and energy and effort and your will and your goodwill. We want to work with you to make things better, to produce life more abundant for you and for your wife and children, and for your community, country, and world.

We have our problems in the Christian church.  We are sometimes far too corrupt and sometimes deeply so.  We are outdated, as are all institutions with their roots in the dead, but still often wise.  

So, join us.  We’ll help fix you up, and you can help fix us up, and together we’ll aim up.

And here is a message to those young men skeptical about such things.  

What else do you have?  You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief.  You can say to yourself narcissistically that the church does not express what you believe properly.

Who cares what you believe?  Why is this about you? Do you even want it to be about you?  What if it was about others?  What if it were about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present?  What if it were incumbent upon you and vital to your life?

Invite young men. Put up a billboard.  Say, “Young men are welcome here.” Print some flyers.  Tell those who have never been in a church exactly what to do, how to dress, when to show up, who to contact, and most importantly, what they can do.

Ask more of them, not less, of those you are inviting.  Ask more of them than anyone ever has.  Remind them who they are in the deepest sense and help them become that.  You are a church.  Stop fighting for “social justice.”  Quit “saving the planet.”  

Attend to some souls.  That’s what you’re supposed to do.  That’s your holy duty.  Do it now,  before it’s too late.  And the hour is nigh.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).