Jordan Peterson's Vision of Christian Civilization

My Reaction to Peterson's Lecture at ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship)

Recently, Jordan Peterson spoke at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, his organization for international leadership. This article contains the transcript of his talk and my reaction to it, taken my from most recent YouTube video.

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Hey! I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

In this post, I'm going to react to Jordan Peterson’s speech at ARC 2025, the text of which is transcribed below.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is Jordan Peterson’s sort of global policy and vision network, kind of an antidote to Davos and the elite culture. And he’s been casting his culturally Christian, conservative/classical liberal vision over last year’s and now this year’s conference.

This video just came out, so I’m gonna react and see what we can say about the philosophical and theological significance of his talk.

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Credit: ARC Forum / Flickr (CC0 1.0)

Jordan Peterson:

What is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization, conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism.

To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation, for life, for being and becoming. And I think we've proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that.

The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self absorbed hedonism. And I would say that that's the default state that characterizes human immaturity.

That possession by implicit, fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated, uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner, and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure, seeking the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure is not a principle that can improve when it's implemented, or unite people in productive cooperation and competition, so that a society can be established.

The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self serving whim is not a playable or noble game, and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the Neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power. If you're motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment, or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others; because if you're dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self gratification, then it's all about you in the narrowest sense, and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will.

We've seen forever, the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it's played out, and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment.

Hey, let’s stop there for a second.

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Refounding Our Civilization

So the setup is giving an intellectual foundation to our civilization. And it’s really interesting because all the questions about, “Is this Christianity just cultural?” come to the fore as well as just like, “What is Jordan Peterson's project?”

He isn't bringing us back to religion kind of for its own sake in a a pietist way, to just get us close to God. It's not even narrowly psychological, for us to sort ourselves out, though that's obviously part of Peterson's program. It's for our civilization. If you think about the foundational questions that have driven Peterson, it was the Cold War. It was ideological conflict and the ability of human beings to do collective evil.

And part of that is to say that those two – psychology and politics – are connected. Like tyranny, a tyrannical state is one in which everyone is lying all the time, as Peterson says. And so very much the way that Socrates and Plato spoke in the Republic, the soul of the individual and the soul of a community are connected.

And I think that's important for those on the kind of religious side who really want Peterson to profess to be a Christian and to get other people to profess Christianity from the heart, with true piety, kind of à la Billy Graham. That's not what Peterson is about, but I think it's also a corrective that, “Isn't that too narrow a goal?”

You could think, as many do, that Peterson is instrumentalizing Christianity to political and social ends. But on the other hand, he's saying Christianity has at least to be something that can give foundation to society. Maybe it's more. Maybe it can bring you into the kingdom to come. But if it has nothing to say to the life here and now, in our political situation, what worth really is that?

Now he's really spelling out the poverty of what you could call “metaphysical liberalism.” So John Rawls is supposed to be a theorist really of classical liberalism. Rawls's liberalism was the idea that we're going to choose a society where you don't know what religion you're going to be. You don't know what your social or economic position is going to be. We're behind this veil of ignorance and we want to choose something fair for everyone.

And so it's not going to be based on any partisan doctrine. It's going to be metaphysically agnostic as to those things. And it's also going to be generally egalitarian social safety net, because if you don't know if you're going to become a poor person, you're going to want to be cared for. You're not going to want to just be blamed. We allow the kind of inequality that actually benefits everyone and especially the least well off.

Now, Rawls, early in his life was a Christian. He left behind that faith to be kind of this ethical figure spelling out political liberalism. But he never intended for [his theory of liberalism] to be metaphysical agnosticism. In response to critiques of his view, he argued that he was just after political liberalism, which is just a principle of pluralism. “Here's how we're all going to operate together, even though we don't agree on every point.” He's like, “If you can get there by thinking about natural law, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Great. That's not my foundation. If you can get there and you’re postmodernist, if you can just get there by mutual respect for other beings, great.”

But as it's played out, the lack of a coherent vision of the good or metaphysics has allowed society to become more about everyone seeking pleasure, with side constraints on your action so that you just don't hurt other people or inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. It's basically become organized hedonism, hedonism with maybe a little bit of Kantianism to respect other people's right to pursue their own hedonism.

And as Peterson is saying, that's just not adequate. We need a deeper foundation for society than that. Even the principles of classical liberalism that Rawls was for, those need a metaphysical foundation. We need to truly believe that people are ends in themselves, that humans have dignity. We need at least the mythical mythological version of the doctrine of the Image of God that Peterson is so famous for. So I want to see where he keeps going now.

He's going to have an argument against hedonism but let's just think about that setup. That seems like a very legitimate thing to be after and very necessary, especially the idea that it's time to become self-conscious as a civilization about our foundational principles.

For a long time, religious societies were very self-conscious about their foundational principles. They just thought of it as doctrine, though. They didn't think, “Well, we need this to be the foundation of civilization.” Maybe the kings and princes were thinking that way.

But there's something interesting about a society that has left that behind now saying, “Well, hold on, what do we actually need, simply in a political or pragmatic sense?” There’s a possibility for a civilization to become self-conscious of its own intellectual foundations. I'm excited for that.

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Let’s hear what Peterson has to say about hedonism:

Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong? Technically, I think it's because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they're iterated. You can't go through life like an immature two year old, because you can't sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present, and you can't sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity the fractionated, hedonistic proclivity and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they're implemented and iterated.

The skeptics, that's particularly true of the post modernists – this is the definition of post modernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there's no uniting metanarrative other than that of power, and that's wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative, and as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we're now in a position where we can explicitly understand it; and that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the self-evident…axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested.

The biblical library, that lays out the narrative principles upon which free, Western societies are founded, is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice.

Taken at face value, the dramas of sacrifice that are portrayed in our foundational texts have a impenetrable and opaque quality. What does it mean to offer something of value to the divine? It's a drama that's predicated on the realization that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of civilization.

Civilization is social and future-oriented, and that means, since it’s social, that the individuals who come together to constitute society have to sacrifice their narrow pleasure, seeking individuality, demanding gratification in the moment, for the sake of their mutual, reciprocal relationships with others, locally, first in marriage, in family, in town, in city, expanding to province and state and country, nested all under the auspices, let's say, of the Divine. That's a sacrificial process. It means forgoing the narrowly immediate, for the sake of the community.

It means, equally, a sacrificial process in relationship to time, the distinguishing characteristic of maturity as opposed to immaturity, and wisdom as opposed to folly, is the ability to sacrifice the immediate demands of the present for the future. To think before you act. To act with Caution so you don't have to repent at leisure. It's a sacrificial process.

When a child learns to make a friend, he learns necessarily, the principle of sacrificial reciprocity. “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” The sacrifice there is that it's not always my turn. And that sacrificial reciprocity is the…foundational principle, of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society, friendship in childhood, let's say, are predicated.

The foundational texts of Western civilization, the biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice, predicated on the emergent discovery or realization that the sacrifice most pleasing to God, that sets the world right, that creates the order that is good or very good is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate.

The Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form. It’s no chance occurrence that the sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town, and the town is at the center of the state, and the state, organized under the Divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit, that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance. [Light Applause]

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Is Reciprocal Self-Sacrifice Enough?

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Let's think about this thing about sacrifice.

In a recent video, I was listening to the Diary of a CEO interview, this clip that Ruslan KD had pulled out.

And Peterson wants to say that the Christian story is true in the sense that sacrifice, voluntary self-sacrifice is the ethical key to the saving of the world. Essentially, that is what we need to solve the problems of the world.

And I want to think about how that relates to Christian teaching, of course, in the full metaphysical sense, but then narrowing down to the ethical teaching of Christ.

And what it comes down to is a dichotomy in Christ's teaching between:

1. The way of the world, the kind of reciprocity and justice that you find there, and

2. This higher righteousness that Christ himself is calling for.

There’s a kind of give and take that is part of the natural human way.

And there’s a kind of giving without asking in return that goes beyond that.

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Now, let's look at an example of that.

So Peterson is talking about the first beginnings of sacrifice are when a child and another child accept that they must sacrifice some of their time with a toy in order to allow the other child time with a toy so that the relationship of play can continue. It's just going to end if I don't share it all. So the price of getting to play is that I sacrifice the toy some of the time.

Now, is that “sacrifice” in the unique sense of Christ’s offering of himself unto us? I don't think so, but I don't know that Peterson is wrong to draw the connection.

So let's look at the key passage for this.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be repaid in full.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”

— Luke 6:32-35

So looking at that, if you love those who love you, you will engage in some of these initial forms of sacrifice. You're no longer just about yourself. You have a circle of love that's wider than just yourself it's a circle of love governed by a principle of mutuality and your circle of who you do good to similarly is—it's tit-for-tat; it's I do good for those who do good for me.

In another passage (Matt 5:46-48), it talks about who you greet. Well, I'm going to greet on the street people who I know are going to say “hello” to me as well. I don't want to be in one of those situations where I'm like, “Hey!” and they ignore me (as I've often been).

And then the same for lending. Look at verse 34: “If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you?” Well, if there's any argument that civilization is founded on something, it would be that: If you have a society that can't even have the level of trust to do lending, you don't have civilization yet. You've got some stage of barbarism.

And to get to the level of Western civilization and modernization, you need a society to reach the point where you can lend money and expect repayment. You can have give and take. You can have what Aristotle might call natural justice.

OK, there's nothing supernatural here yet. There's nothing supererogatory going beyond the demands of justice. We don't have this new thing, which is lending without expecting to get anything back. And that's what gets you heavenly reward according to Christ.

So there’s a kind of sacrifice built into mutual love that goes beyond barbarism and hedonism. It founds civilization, but it's not yet the distinctively—it's not the kind of sacrifice that Christ brings into the world.

This is where you get something like Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of Peterson. Because Kingsnorth is going to say, “Mutual justice? No, it's fully self-sacrificing and making a bad business deal.” It's not capitalism that is the sign of Christianity, but this very terrible business practice of lending something without expecting to get anything in return.

Is Peterson flattening the distinction between those two?

Potentially. There's evidence that he is.

But he would probably argue that the one paves the way for the other.

The ability to love those who love you precipitates this extension of the circle of love even to those who do not yet deserve it. Verse 36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” This is an extension.

ButI think the question remains. Are these the same in kind: the self-sacrifice of “I'll give you a little bit of time if if I get more time with the toy as well” — or is Christ teaching radical and something brand new – not something that founds a civilization, but something that might actually challenge the foundation of a civilization, as Paul Kingsnorth and others have argued?

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But let’s continue listening:

And it's not just sacrifice; it’s voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end. That’s the foundation of civilization, the post-modernists be damned, which is virtually a certainty, by the way. Now understanding this, I think, in a more explicit sense, to see that what we've been wrestling with for millennia is the movement towards the explicit formulation of the principle of voluntary upward self sacrifice as the foundation of the community, as the foundation of abundance itself, as the precondition for the trust and reciprocity that enables us to compete and to cooperate so that We can produce societies that are endlessly productive. The explicit understanding of the centrality of that principle, in my estimation, allows for the intelligent union of the traditional Western conservative with the traditional Western classic liberal. The hypothesis being that the stage is set for the emergence of a liberal of the liberal individualism that we associate with the free Western world. The stage is set for the emergence of that ethos when the bedrock of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifices, established and firm. And the Conservatives stand for the self evident foundation of Western civilization. And the classic rebel liberals stand for its manifestation at the level of the individual, a manifestation which only maintains its validity when the underlying presumption of voluntary self sacrifice is serves as the proper foundation.

Okay, so let’s stop there.

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Socrates and Christ: Martyr and Messiah

The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787)

All of a sudden, I’m hearing a duality emerge in that Peterson is trying to capture something from both philosophical conservatism and classic Western liberalism.

You see the duality here between:

1. the firm foundation of Western civilization, the foundation on which community can be built, and

2. the free individual who steps out and has the ability and the will and the wherewithal to stand against the community as necessary.

And I still don’t know if that is quite this Christian self-sacrificial love that asks nothing in return, but it might be.

The type of individual Peterson is talking about goes back before Christ, to Socrates, to a philosophical martyr, someone who’s willing to stand against the crowd.

He’s not an opponent of society or civilization, but someone who calls it to account, who articulates the foundations of society. Socrates is figuring out what is justice. He's not assuming that there’s no justice anywhere, though he does think current society is unjust in many ways.

But he's articulating those foundational principles on which society works and saying, we now need to hold to those. And because I’m holding you to that standard, I become a martyr.

Christ, in many ways, does the same with respect to Roman society, Jewish society, the Pharisees and so on.

In both cases, it manifests as the willingness of the individual to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the good of the community in an elevated way, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of, I’m trying to make the community a better place, but I’m willing to be the sacrificial goat in this case. It won’t be mutuality. I’m not pitching in and everyone else is pitching in. It’s, “If I am the gadfly, which this society needs to hold us to account, I might be what gets sacrificed along the way, but that’ll be good for the community.”

And it’s hard to argue with the fact that Christ is embodying that archetype and that pattern. The idea is that he’s doing it on an even higher level. Christ goes even beyond Socrates. He's not less than Socrates. He is an individual holding a community to account and being martyred as a result.

But is Socrates still operating say on a natural level or is Socrates operating on this level where I’m sacrificing my own good and, I hope, for heavenly reward?

If you look at Socrates’ dialogues, if you look at the end of the Republic, there’s an argument that it’s the latter. Perhaps self-sacrificial love is anticipated with Socrates and other philosophical martyrs for their community, which Jordan Peterson also embodies in the slings and arrows he's willing to take to stand up for what is right. I’m open to that possibility.

But there in that duality between the conservative and the classical liberal, I see something of the duality between reciprocal sacrifice and true self-sacrificial love, the natural law and the New Commandment, that I see in Christ’s teaching.

Stay tuned next week for a post dedicated to explaining the distinction between the natural law and the New Commandment! I think it’s at the heart of our political and theological divides. And almost no one knows about it.

Let’s listen to the last section:

So what's this civilizational moment?

This civilizational moment is the opportunity that we have in front of us to wake up and to realize, consciously and explicitly the nature of the dream that has enveloped us for the thousands of years of Judeo-Christian civilization. That dream is the celebration, the worship, the divin- the deification of the principle of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community As the necessary, inevitable and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant.

And so, it’s a core part of our mission to get our story straight. And in the free West, the destination of the oppressed across the world, we've acted out the appropriate story and benefited in consequence, and now we have the opportunity to understand that story explicitly and to unite our understanding with our mythos with our drama, and to fortify ourselves with the reunion of our cynical and skeptical mind and the bedrock foundation stone, the cornerstone rejected by the builder, that constitutes the true basis for civilization. And so that’s what we’re doing.

Okay. Interesting. I love the material and there's so much there to think about.

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Peterson and the Penultimate Things

What I come back to from a Christian perspective is, Do we not think that this stuff is important?

Peterson is not talking about how to get saved. That is not his topic.

His topic is, How can human society work?

And I think you could argue that maybe, he’s actually not talking about the distinctively Christian stuff. Maybe he's talking about the natural law and natural justice and the reciprocity that that includes. Maybe it's the stuff Jesus said, “The Gentiles do that.”

Well, these days, the Gentiles aren’t doing it. And so we're having to be called back to that that simple level of natural human justice, which isn’t so simple. It does require an ethical dimension. It requires virtue. It is certainly fed by Christian virtue, even if Christian virtue isn’t necessarily required to exhibit natural virtue.

But I think we can’t deny the goodness of natural justice and civic righteousness.

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Bonhoeffer called these the penultimate things.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, written from a Nazi prison, basically argued against a bunch of Christians who just think it's about getting people saved. They think it's only about the ultimate things. He said, “Sure looks like how politics goes and how society goes matters!” It has some dire consequences if we get it wrong.

And these are the penultimate things. They’re not the ultimate things; they don't get people saved.

But as James said, “Don’t just say to somebody, ‘Here's the gospel. Be warm and well fed.’ Actually feed them.” Actually do good to people in their physical being.

The political too is about people’s physical being. Are people free? Are people materially abundant? Are they cared for? Are they safe?

These things matter.

They’re not the ultimate things, but they are the penultimate things.

And Peterson is calling us back to those things and opening up questions that I admit are still open: How does this relate to the distinctive content of the Christian faith and the unique call Christ has upon us, that we live out the New Commandment, to love even our enemies, not just to love those who love us?

Well, I’ve been Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

Until next time.

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