The Trumpian Power Worship at the Heart of Jordan Peterson’s ‘We Who Wrestle With God’

Attending the sold out O2 Arena in November 2023 for the launch of Jordan Peterson’s ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC), I was struck by how the supposedly secular political event resembled a megachurch. 

It’s fitting that the event’s star speaker, Canadian psychologist and author of self-help bestsellers 12 Rules for Life (2018) and Beyond Order (2021), has turned his furrowed brow to religion.

Peterson has become a major player on the Right – fronting ARC, creating content for the Daily Wire, interviewing conservative figures on YouTube (subscribers: 8.4 million), and endorsing Donald Trump for US president. So what is Peterson telling his flock about matters spiritual?

In his new book We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, Peterson argues that stories help us make sense of the world, and that the Bible contains “the story on which Western civilisation is predicated”. (This neglect of ancient Greece is significant.) 

Rather than draw on biblical scholarship to look at the stories in historical context, Peterson reads the Bible as a guide for how to live today. In Peterson’s hands, this reduces the text to a vehicle for reactionary politics. 

The first thing you have to know, as Peterson reminds us on every other page, is that the 20th century saw the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism.

The second is that Peterson (based on his reading of Dostoevsky) blames this on the loss of the restraining effects of religion.

Peterson believes that the road to totalitarian hell is paved with having a good time, and the book is really a polemic against liberal hedonism and the decline of traditional values.

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The Book of Jordan

Peterson goes through the Bible stories and describes in tortured prose what he sees as their deeper meaning and modern relevance. He traces a broader story arc about what he calls “prideful” rebellion against God, starting with the serpent in the Garden of Eden (representing Satan) and going through to Cain and his descendants.

Inside this macro point, we get specific political arguments, often as digressions. The story of Adam and Eve is used to defend traditional gender roles, with the Fall blamed on women being too compassionate and proud, and on men for listening to them.  

“The temptation that eternally confronts the woman”, Peterson writes, “is the idea that maternal benevolence can be pridefully extended to the entire world, to even the most poisonous of snakes” and “used to claim unearned moral virtue”.

As for men, the temptation is “to hearken to this false voice” in order to impress women. The sexism aside, do we detect here the virtue-signalling liberal and the feminised “cuck” of right-wing caricature? 

In the same vein, Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel is deployed to attack social justice warriors and identity politics: “It constitutes a pattern for the victim/victimiser narrative that plays such a key role in the ideologies of resentment that so truly characterise our time…” Peterson specifies people who suggest inequalities of “sex, race, class, ethnicity, ‘gender’” are caused by “compulsion and force”, rather than natural differences. 

The chapter on Noah and the flood has a bizarre attack on “hypocrite” vegan animal rights protestors, who are likened to “the Pharisees who conspired to crucify Christ”. The Abraham chapter laments the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting culture of casual sex, pornography, and the “prevalence of abortion”. 

Tying this all together is the bigger point about Cain and the alleged sin of pride. We’re told that the Jacobins of the French Revolution were “the spiritual descendents of Cain”, and that “Karl Marx is Cain to the core, construing society as nothing but a battleground of power”.

To bring us up to date, Peterson adds that “the modern meta-Marxists, the postmodern power players” have “metastasised Marx – but, more deeply, the spirit of Cain”. Given that Peterson puts Cain in the tradition of Satan’s revolt, the book in effect argues that the modern Left is in league with the devil. 

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Moral Chaos

Peterson dodges the question of whether the Bible stories are true (in the sense of describing real events in history), but has no time for secular enlightenment types who take leave to doubt it. There are several angry passages about evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. 

In the chapter on Jonah, Peterson attacks those who question whether a man can really live inside a whale, calling such “falsely wise” people “moral dwarfs, equipped with hydrogen bombs”.

He accuses this irreligious world of moral relativism. “If morality is relative, then Auschwitz was not evil but only unfortunate”, he writes. If Peterson really can’t think of a reason why the Holocaust would be immoral in a world without God, he might want to sit out questions of morality. 

The author reveals more than he intends when he writes that “an untrammeled relativism – the insistence that all things are open for question – destroys both faith and hope”.

This is a growing theme in the book: God’s the boss, and won’t tolerate any backchat. From the Cain chapter: “He cannot therefore be trifled with, no matter the justification. Man is simply in no position to question the fundamental order of reality – not at its deepest levels.” Ours is not to reason why. 

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Bible Crimes

This leads to the great intellectual and moral breakdown of the book, which is its justification for dictatorship and atrocity – provided they are conducted by God or His supporters. 

Peterson defends God’s cruel treatment of Job (part of a wager with Satan) on the glib grounds that it provides the inspiring message that one can overcome hardship.

While God attacking the Israelites with poisonous snakes for some minor transgression “seems heavy handed”, Peterson writes, it teaches them that things can always get worse, and anyway, didn’t they bring this punishment upon themselves? 

If Peterson has any qualms about God slaying Egypt’s firstborn children (the tenth plague in the Exodus story), he doesn’t share them. But he does suggest that tyrants like the Pharaoh need to see their future destroyed before they will make concessions.

Then we come to the real low points. On Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, Peterson effectively justifies child sacrifice. “All things, no matter how valuable, must be offered up to God”, he writes. “Is there any love greater than the love willing to offer a child in sacrifice to what is truly highest?” Again: 

“There is literally nothing more practical than the proper sacrifices to what is highest, and there is simultaneously no limit to the demand for sacrifice. Hence the offering of Isaac and, later, Jesus of Nazareth.” 

Peterson goes on to contrast this with the damage done to a child by overly protective parents. Oddly, he forgets the intervention of the “angel of the Lord” who stays Abraham’s hand and save’s Isaac’s neck, by telling the old man to kill a ram instead. Could it be that Peterson decided the story he so reveres needed an edit to suit his purposes? 

Later, Peterson describes God’s instructions to his favoured tribe after a battle: “He calls on them to put all the female captives, except the virgins, to the sword, and has the same done for all the Midianite boys.” 

Peterson admits that this looks bad. But he asks, “did these captives represent a possible future fifth column and source of destabilisation?”, and suggests it would be wrong to apply today’s “hypothetically higher moral standards to the societies of the past”. 

He then muses about the morality of taking a life, when the issue was whether it is moral to take sex slaves and execute children, if only you can claim God is on your side. 

Lest we see this as a cruel god bent on vengeance, Peterson has an alternative: “If everything necessarily and inescapably tumbles into the abyss when certain strictures are violated, is it not an act of mercy, not of malevolence, to indicate precisely that beforehand?” 

He adds that “our poor choices will also have their consequences, as dire in error as they are good in faithful service”. This is apologism worthy of any Stalinist commissar or fellow traveller, not to mention a creepy servility to authoritarian power. 

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Make God Great Again

Thus out of hatred for totalitarianism, Peterson endorses the ultimate totalitarian authority  – the one which may not be questioned, even when ordering war crimes. And out of fear of the moral chaos of liberalism, Peterson slides into the ultimate moral relativism of whatever God says goes. 

Given Peterson’s references to Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s worth recalling George Orwell’s observation, in a 1946 piece about Stalinist censorship, that: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.” 

Despite his endless digressions, Peterson leaves a lot out. He never finds time to reflect on the centuries of Christian wars and persecution; the collaboration of the Catholic church with fascism and Nazism; capitalist exploitation, conservative dictatorships, the First World War (which set the stage for the totalitarians) or the history of empire. 

Instead, we are invited with a clear conscience to Make God Great Again. In his presidential endorsement, Peterson said the fact that Trump had surrounded himself with “hyper-powerful people” – he named “Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr.” – was a sign that the former president had moderated his narcissism.

“Power” is the operative word here, and it’s the worship of power which unites right-wing populists, economic libertarians, and social conservatives around the reptilian realtor.

Peterson’s book ends by threatening a sequel about the New Testament. His abuse of the Old is the literary equivalent of Trump selling Bibles branded with his own name.