Farewell Patrick McManus

If someone were to ask me who is the funniest writer I’ve ever read, there is little question what the answer would be. Of course, I’m not sure who would ask me that, but I’m ready when someone does.

For the sake of my setup, imagine you had actually asked me who I think is the funniest writer. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Thanks.

Wow! That’s a tough question. I’m not sure anyone’s ever asked me that, but you know, I think I have a pretty good answer.

The funniest books in print are, with little question, by a man names Patrick McManus. Or, as his close friends call him—those of us who have read his stories—Pat.

Now that you’ve asked me about Pat, I have to tell you that he’s no longer writing, because he died recently at the age of 84. He’s gone into the twilight, endlessly grousing. The world is a bit poorer because he’s gone, too.

I discovered McManus in the back of the Field and Stream magazines that came to the house. Then I found out that many of those essays had been collected into books. That was sometime around the 6th grade.

Even as a kid, his humor could make me literally laugh out loud. He wrote with a wit and humor that was slightly self-deprecating, but mostly just funny.

His humor is generally G-rated, with the occasional innuendo that probably flew over my head as a youngster. Unlike so much of the humor in that’s out there now, he was not trying to shock his audiences, score political points, or tear someone down.

Instead McManus tells stories. He tells stories about himself—or the character that he pretends to be—through several phases of his life with a cast of familiar characters. McManus often plays the naïve straight man for the more comedic characters. He most often plays the man who knew too little, and it’s fun to watch him bumble through life.

Among the characters from his childhood are Rancid Crabtree, the old woodsman and sometimes mentor, and Crazy Eddie Muldoon, his childhood friend and negative influence. The amusingly foolish friend, Retch Sweeney, and worried neighbor, Al Finley, carry the storyline in Pat’s adult years. Meanwhile Pat’s mother, his sister the Troll, and his wife Bun, provide foils for the humor of Pat’s hijinks. As you pick up each of his stories, there are familiar people you come to know and become curious about what they might do next.

Even when McManus writes an expected storyline, he tells the story in an amusing fashion. Of course, things were better when he was a boy, but they were also harder. Except that the trails are much steeper and the air thinner now that he’s getting older. Even when you know what is going to happen because the plotline is predictable and McManus has strewn plenty of foreshadowing there is always a twist that makes the tale worth your time.

I’ve known marriage counselors who started sessions off by reading one of McManus’ short stories. If the couple doesn’t laugh, the counselor knows he is in for a rough time. If they laugh, then the ice is broken and the ground is a little softer for the plowing. The man is funny enough to make everyone laugh.

My wife (whose nickname is not Bun, else I be shot) knows when I’m reading something by Patrick McManus because the bed is shaking from my suppressed laughter. And my preteen taught can be heard guffawing when she devours his humor. McManus is a writer for all ages, which gives him a connection to his childhood dog, Strange.

McManus’ humor is where you go when you’ve had a long hard day, week, or month and need to find something to smile about. It never fails, even if it’s a story that you’ve read a hundred times before.

One of his stories, “Sequences,” has become a byword in my household. In fact, it’s an essay much like “A Message to Garcia,” that should be read by all future leaders. The message is simple: Everything is way to complicated, so you might as well just fishing. Or, more realistically, make sure you prioritize fun, because the work will never get done anyway. It has a point, but it is funny, not like this paragraph.

Even for those of us who don’t hunt, the stories that McManus wrote are funny. That’s one of the marks of a really good writer. With very few exceptions, everyone is in on the jokes because they are just good fun. I wish there were more people writing like Patrick McManus.

I’m sad that McManus is gone. He hasn’t written a whole lot lately, but mostly I’m sad that the world is just a little less funny without him. To celebrate his life, I may just do a modified stationary panic in his honor the next time I'm scared.

NOTE: If you are looking for a good place to start with McManus, The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw is one of my favorite collections.

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw

By Patrick F. McManus

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The Banality of Systemic Injustice

People expect evil to come with horns, pitchforks, and an obvious bent toward cruelty. That is, when we meet someone who has done or approved of great evil, we expect them to be obviously angry, psychotic, and express delight in their vileness.

Real evil in our real world is seldom like that. Our villains seldom arrive dressed like Cruella Deville or Sauron. But we still expect those that participate in something really bad to be obviously evil. Wicked people who do wicked things rarely have the flair we expect, which should teach us something about the nature of evil.

Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, helps undermine the expectation of an entertaining bad guy. She does this by presenting a portrait of perhaps the most boring and petty man in the twentieth century who orchestrated some of the most unquestionable evil in the history of humanity.

Who is Arendt?

Others are much better equipped to give a more detailed history of the life and work of Hannah Arendt. This BBC interview of a scholar who has studied Arendt offers a decent overview.

Arendt was herself born in Germany and was a Jew. She left Germany in 1933 ostensibly to study, but eventually emigrated to the United States, where she remained a citizen until her death in 1975. It is for good reason, then, that Arendt felt a keen interest in the Holocaust.

She is best known as a political theorist, though her work is more broadly philosophical than most political discourse of our day. She was also a journalist for the New Yorker, who happened to fund her trip to Jerusalem to see the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

The book that resulted from her trip to watch the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, caused a significant controversy in that day, with apparently coordinated efforts to undermine its spread. The main thrust of the controversy was Arendt’s indelicate handling of the apparent Jewish cooperation with the Holocaust.

That claim, even in this post, is somewhat remarkable and needs some nuancing, but it plays into the general idea of the banality of evil.

Arendt argued that the Jewish community participated in their own extermination because they largely cooperated with the beginning stages of the Holocaust. This sounds like victim blaming—and perhaps it is to a certain degree—but reading the book, that does not seem to be her intention.

What is true is that the Jews in Germany and the other occupied nations rarely resisted the ever-increasing encroachments on their liberty and deprivations of their rights. The community, by virtue of being administratively linked through and led by the synagogue, had recognized structure that often worked with the Germans, always hoping that cooperation at each stage would end the problem.

In some sense the Jews did cooperate in their own demise, though it is not clear whether overt resistance would have been successful. Arendt’s intention does not appear to criticize the Jewish community for their cooperation, but to explain why the mild-mannered Adolf Eichmann was able to help murder millions with little or no violent effort.

I leave final resolution of that controversy to others, but believe Arendt to be helpful on some points even if she is outrageously mistaken on that one.

Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann is the stereotype for the mid-level bureaucrat who is exceedingly efficient at making things move without understanding what exactly what was happening or why it could possibly be bad.

Based on Arendt’s description, which begs to be believed on the grounds of credo quia absurdum if nothing else, Eichmann had little animus toward anyone. He was a boring man, who lived a boring life, and did extraordinary evil because it is what the boring system he participated in required for “success.”

While the world—Arendt included—expected a slavering war criminal spewing anti-Semitic epithets from the witness stand, what they saw was someone who did not believe himself to be a war criminal because he was simply doing his job. Arendt reveals Eichmann to be a splendid manager but a terrible human.

The unthinking reader might succeed in passing over the horror that Arendt depicts, but the observant ones will recognize that Eichmann is frightening because he is so ordinary.

Why does ordinariness frighten? In this case because he managed to participate in such unthinkable evil with such a clear conscience. It is clear from Arendt’s description—which is corroborated by other historical sources—that Eichmann did not consider himself guilty of anything in particular.

In other words, Eichmann’s banality is frightening because we are so susceptible to it.

Systemic Injustice

Eichmann shows us what it is like to participate in systemic injustice with a clear conscience.

I recommend Arendt’s book to readers—particularly contemporary evangelical readers—because it shows without question the power of an unjust system, the difficulty in extricating oneself from it, and the importance of resisting such systems.

Eichmann saw himself as an idealist. According to Arendt, “An ‘idealist’ was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. . . . The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody else had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his ‘idea.’” (42)

Though Eichmann was aware of the Final Solution, which he knew included killing the Jews, he had absolutely no sympathy. “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” (49) He was fundamentally a man that saw serving the system as the highest end, regardless of the cost.

The inability to speak Arendt refers to is that Eichmann was unoriginal in his thought patterns. He knew talking points and catch-phrases but was blissfully unaware of the conflicts internally between them and did not understand the enormity indicated by his language. This was facilitated by the Nazi efforts to sanitize language and speak of things bureaucratically—using boring systemic language to mark overt evil.

One might consider examples in U.S. history such as the idea of “Indian removal,” “separate but equal,” and “reproductive rights” to see how terrible evil can be masked by euphemism. This system can roll right over conscience by convincing the actors they are simply scheduling train cars and not facilitating the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Conclusion

Arendt’s account of Eichmann is sobering in our world filled with systems and euphemisms.

While some of the pleas about systemic injustice are little more than complaints that life was not unfair in favor of a particular group, conservative Christians have for too long ignored the reality of systemic injustice and our own participation in it.

In many cases, we unknowingly participate in such systems and in others we lack the requisite compassion to see the impact of our participation. Eichmann in Jerusalem should cause readers to ask what ideals they are pursuing to the detriment of others and recognize that if that ideal cannot be achieved without the injustice it is not a worthy ideal. The ends simply do not justify the means and they never can.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

By Hannah Arendt

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They Thought They Were Free - A Review

Godwin’s law is that the longer an online debate gets, the more likely it is that someone will make an analogy to Hitler. One corollary to the law is that the person who makes the comparison loses the argument.

A reductio ad Hitlerum is a rhetorical device altogether too common in internet dialogue used to show someone how they are evil just like Hitler. Adolf Hitler is, of course, one of the few human beings that people can nearly universally agree is the embodiment of pure evil.

But if Hitler was the embodiment of pure evil and the German people put him into power, how did he either trick them or force them to make him the supreme ruler of their nature? Or, more sinisterly, was it that the German people were somehow an evil people themselves who saw Hitler as the embodiment of their nation.

The third option is helpful wartime propaganda, but unlikely to be convincing in the presence of real, live Germans who may think differently, but who are pretty clearly not the embodiment of evil. This leaves the first two as possible options.

In the late 50’s, journalist Milton Mayer set out to figure out how Germany was led to elect Hitler—even to cheer him on—despite the evil that he embodied. Mayer, an American of German descent and a Jew, went to Germany to spend time with common men in a small town in Germany to figure out how they were duped.

The result of Mayer’s journalistic efforts is contained in the book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. The book was originally published in 1955 but was republished in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press. The volume’s republication is timely as Europe and the U.S. wrestle with the rise of populism in the face of economic difficulty and political destabilization. In some ways, we are living in a period very similar, which means that if we are to avoid (or overcome) the great evil of our age, we must be prepared to learn the lessons from history.

The book is a collection of interviews. They have obviously been edited to focus the reader on what Mayer himself saw, but the portraits he paints of the ten Nazi men that he befriended and interview do not bear the marks of caricature. Though he had every reason to be repulsed by these people who had supported the regime whose crimes are now the most readily useful hyperbole, Mayer presents his subjects sympathetically and, we may presume, fairly. If what he depicts is really true, then we have good cause for concern.

It becomes clear throughout the book that none of the people being interviewed consider themselves bad people—their loss in World War II was an unfortunate reality they were coping with, but even the public discovery of the mass murders in the concentration camps did not convince these men they were culpable for such great evil. Though the world may have viewed Germany broadly as somehow complicit in the extermination of the Jews, homosexuals, and other “unfit” populations, these men clearly do not believe they are criminals.

As the interviews explore the mindset of these Germans leading up to and during WWII, it becomes clear that these people—not to say all Germans—actively supported Hitler’s social program. Hitler solved unemployment, bringing relatively prosperity to a large portion of the population. He helped bring them out of the depths of depression and give them a sense of national pride, even after the stinging defeat and economic reprisals of the Great War. A rising stock market, so to speak, was a bigger concern than the dispossession of a small minority of the population.

The Nazis were unquestionably anti-Semitic. That was in the DNA of the National Socialist party, very clearly written in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. At first, when the vitriol in Hitler’s book might have been more striking, it was apparently not commonly read. To be fair, how many Americans have really read The Art of the Deal or The Audacity of Hope? Even if those books had alarming theories in them, it would be altogether easy to minimize their implications or ignore their severity, trusting the sluggishness of bureaucratic government to minimize the impact of any excesses of thought.

As it turns out, the people Mayer interviewed were largely indifferent to anti-Semitism or actually anti-Semitic. The culture shaped them to be so, with frequent political rhetoric designed to show them how unjust the economic systems were and how the Jews had taken advantage of the rest of the population. Eventually people started to believe that, so that when the synagogue was torched it did not seem to great a travesty and when the local policeman was given the order to collect his neighbor for relocation and forfeit of his property, it seemed simply logical given. The program of anti-Semitic action was introduced slowly and incrementally so the German people had little sense of outrage at the next “little” encroachment on the lives of their Jewish neighbors, though all the while the kettle was getting hotter.

One of the key elements of the Nazi program was about distracting people from thinking about fundamental concepts like truth, justice, and holiness. As this conversation between a German academic and Mayer illustrate, distraction was part of the program of social change:

“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

‘Those,’ I said, ‘are the words of my friend the baker. “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.”’

‘Your friend the baker was right,’ said my colleague. ‘The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism have us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?’ (167-168)”

Though the Third Reich replaced Christian belief with a pagan-infused religion with Christian trappings, the religiously devout were led to abandon their faith for German unity. Though their neighbors were displaced and abused, they assented or failed to resist. The intelligentsia and the common man were played by Hitler and his administration—made ineffective—and they allowed it to happen.

This book is powerful. Not primarily because I believe the present administration to be equivalent to Hitler’s, but the social climate seems to be laying the groundwork for a similar horrible power in the U.S. or even in Europe.

We are not to the stage of Germany in the 1920’s, but it is as if we are being groomed for that condition. Our call should be to resist. Not merely to resist the politics of the “other side,” whichever side that might be, but to resist the moral formation that will enable us to countenance the grave, overt, and unforgivable injustices that the Nazis were able to perpetuate. This may require us to put down our phones, read fewer blogs, and contemplate more fundamental things, like hope, love, truth, and faith.

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

By Milton Mayer

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

12 Rules For Life - A Review

Depending on who you read, Jordan Peterson is either the scourge of the hour or the timely herald of reason crying in the wilderness. Relatively unknown until the last few years, he now has millions of followers on YouTube, more speaking engagements than he can handle, television interviews, and has reached a level of notoriety that only our wired world can manufacture.

His latest book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson offers some self-improvement tips for his readers, but has stirred up controversy with a variegated mess of adulation and castigation from critics.

Peterson as a Cultural Phenomenon

The reaction to Peterson has been polarized both from Christians and non-Christians. He seems to a sort of Rorschach Test that draws predictable reactions from the same old crowds.

Peterson’s rise to public notoriety came when his resistance to a speech control law in Canada hit the news. He indicated that he would resist the law requiring him to use sexually dysphoric people’s preferred pronouns. This resistance was widely publicized even though Peterson made it clear that his opposition is to the legal mandate of a certain accepted civility rather than a disapproval of transgenderism or even a desire to offed—in fact, he indicated he would use people’s preferred pronouns when they requested.

Normally this sort of resistance to the Zeitgeist comes from people that are quickly exposed as “uncultured,” “boorish,” or “ignorant” by the media. This sort of rejoinder tends to result in being celebrated by one cable news channel, ridiculed by another, and disappearance after a week or so. Even tenured professors like Peterson are usually subdued, squashed, and even fired after expressing cultural opinions like the ones he has offered.

That has not happened with Peterson. Instead, his appeal has broadened, he has weathered the storm, and he continues to have a voice in the public square.

A significant reason Peterson has been able to maintain his position is that he seems uniquely equipped to handle the rhetoric and bustle of our knuckle dragging media culture. In an extremely hostile BBC4 interview, where the interviewer intentionally misrepresents his position repeatedly, he remains calm, corrects her, and even manages to get her to stop and think. Most cultural rebels spontaneously combust in confrontation because they lack the self-control and reasoned care that Peterson demonstrates.

If there is only one thing Christians can learn from Peterson, it is how to manage controversy in this age of garbled communication and bloviating. He manages to hold well-reasoned views publicly and generally not get drawn into shouting matches or bluffed into silence. He communicates clearly and his words are carefully chosen and well-considered.

Of course, his resistance to the identity politics of the left, including his open scorn of some of the pseudo-disciplines in academia like feminist studies and its variants, has made him a darling of a growing, vocal, and toxic group of people on the political right. Some like Peterson because he delivers what they most want—liberal tears.

One danger for Peterson and his fans is getting sucked into the vortex of sewage in the nationalist right and alt-right. These groups are cheering Peterson as a long-awaited hero. This increases the left’s hatred for him and may draw some well-meaning Peterson fans beyond what he seems to intend.

To be clear, based on my reading of Peterson and what I’ve seen of his videos, he does not support the ideologies of nationalists, overt racists, and conspiracy theorists. In fact, he is careful to set limits on what he is and is not saying. However, we’ve so deeply drunk from the well of belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and the friend of my enemy is my enemy that Peterson serves as a scapegoat or talisman for groups that haven’t really considered what his message is.

Peterson and Christianity

The reception of Peterson among Christians has been similarly mixed. Among revisionist Christians who generally accept and promote whatever counter-Christian social mores the culture adopts as a matter of course, Peterson is anathema for not agreeing with them. However, among orthodox Christians, the opinion of Peterson is widely varying.

There is good reason for both positive and negative reception of Peterson’s message. It depends on why Peterson’s message is received and what the recipient is intending to glean.

For example, Peterson’s resistance to the cultural tide of the domination of supposedly oppressed ideologies is helpful. He has showed that it is possible to resist the current manias of our day and yet survive. Also, Peterson seems to be honestly seeking the good of his audience, particularly young men who have been told they are oppressive and evil simply for being men. He speaks with a sort of compassion and in that way represents a good and helpful voice for our time.

On the other hand, Peterson represents a dangerous temptation to some Christians who are more interested in a certain place in society than truly orthodox belief. Peterson is well-versed in Western culture and has a good grasp on the Bible as literature. He interprets the Bible using the methods common among theological liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, there is a strong Judeo-Christian ethic and an invigorating call to arms based on the canon in Peterson’s message, but it denies essential elements of Scripture, like miracles, the resurrection, and the supernatural in general. Some Christians may follow Peterson and pick up well-reasoned resistance to cultural tides in some areas while imbibing unhealthy theology in the other—and that error may cause confusion in the pews.

The task for the discerning Christian is to learn what can be learned from Peterson, while resisting the error. This means that pastors and leaders within orthodox congregations should not rush to recommend Peterson’s work to immature believers, because it may be caustic to their faith.

A Review of 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is Peterson’s second book. His first, book Maps of Meaning is a much more academic volume that was released in 1999. Peterson is both a professor and a practicing clinical psychologist, which seems to have previously directed his efforts toward the counseling room rather than the written word.

According to the introduction, this volume sprang out of a post Peterson wrote on a website called Quora, where anyone can pose a question, anyone can answer, and the crowd votes to approve or disapprove the answer. He provided a lengthy list, some serious, some humorous, of responses to the question, “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Peterson’s answer went viral and, after Peterson himself went viral over the political correctness law, he got a book deal that resulted in this volume.

There is nothing earth shattering about his rules, but the reception of this advice indicates he has struck a nerve with people that want to live well, but don’t know how. As a general rule, the advice is pretty good, too.

Most of the “rules” are just good advice: Present yourself well, because you’ll be treated better and have more opportunities. Don’t hang out with people that will harm you and drag you down. Discipline your children appropriately, using the means with the lowest force possible. Stop worrying about everyone else and their problems if your life is in shambles. Tell the truth and do not lie for any reason. Celebrate the joy of life in others, especially kids, as they explore the world around.

Although I would qualify some of the rules Peterson offers, they are generally pretty good advice. For example, one thing I would qualify is that Peterson advocates staying away from people that will harm you. This is good advice to a certain extent, because it keeps people out of trouble. However, it may cause some readers to avoid the sorts of people that most need help and lash out in their confusion. There is plenty of meat in the rules, but the reader must be prepared to spit out a few bones.

I won’t take the time to summarize each of the rules and critique them, since the list from the table of contents fairly indicates the content of each. It is worth discussing the general framework behind the rules.

Peterson’s Philosophical Foundations

Peterson is a Jungian Existentialist. Jung was a contemporary of Freud and generally friendly, but Jung’s philosophy (the underpinnings of his psychology) took a different turn. Instead of focusing on repressed sexual urges and presuming an Oedipus complex in everyone, Jung built on the evolutionary thinking of his day to build a theory of collective human consciousness arising from our ancestral heritage.

The key to understanding both the benefits and dangers of Peterson rest in knowing a bit about Jung. I am certainly no expert, but a quick bout of internet research shows that Peterson has done little more than modernize and popularize some of the core tenets of Jung’s thinking.

Much of the argument in Peterson’s book assumes that proper human behavior is based on a collective consciousness from evolutionary theory. Thus, Peterson defends hierarchy by noting that even relatively simple creatures like lobsters have a hierarchy, therefore humans should anticipate hierarchy in their social orders and reject the notion that there can be a perfectly egalitarian society.

This sort of argument is what angers Peterson’s critics on the left, because to their ears, Peterson affirms the evils of the patriarchy, inequality, and everything they dislike about our current social order. Since Peterson actively rejects the notion that patriarchy, sex difference, and white power are solely responsible for all the ills of this contemporary age, his critics on the left equate his arguments with the Alt-Right, Fascism, and whatever else they happen to hate that day.

It is pretty clear from reading him that Peterson is not arguing for anything like an Alt-Right position, despite attempts to paint him in that corner. His position is much more reasoned and more nuanced. Privilege exists, but this is majority privilege, not specifically white privilege. Therefore, the response should not be to shame white people for their genetic makeup, but to teach people to navigate the power structures to overcome privilege.

On this point, Peterson’s common-sense approach with a hefty dose of personal accountability will be attractive to many conservatives—both Christian and non-Christian. Yet, this is also the point at which Christians need to be the most careful in imbibing or spreading his message because it is entangled in a form of the naturalistic fallacy. Peterson assumes that what is in evolutionary history helps reveal what ought to be, as if humans have reached a sort of pinnacle of development based on everything that has gone before. If absorbed without due caution, such belief can justify a lack of compassion for the poor and the weak who “deserved it” or were simply bound by genetic misfortune to be at the bottom of the heap.

A second point of caution, which also arises from his Jungian foundation, is on the use and truthfulness of myths. In concert with many scholars, particularly German scholars that were his contemporaries, Jung taught that religions were explanatory myths that developed from the collective human experience. Christianity was a more advanced religion, but that is not because it is true, simply because it has more truth encoded in its scriptures and practices than earlier religions.

Such an approach enables Peterson to decode the Bible and other ancient texts to reveal psychological truths that can be applicable today. Christians should be careful embracing Peterson on this count, because he is teaching Enlightenment hermeneutics with an evolutionary twist that ascribe value to the text but deny its supernatural power.

Peterson’s overt and public use of Scripture, however, does show that preachers that believe they need to pull the Bible out of their sermons and not refer to it as authoritative to communicate to people in this day and age are sorely mistaken. It is worth watching some of Peterson’s talks to see how he uses Scripture to make a compelling case for his positions. Teachers should be careful not to adopt the bad hermeneutic, but his method of communication is helpful.

A third cause for caution is the existentialist framework that Peterson brings to the table from his Jungian base. In brief, existentialism relies on the idea that we are making meaning and that our essence is formed by our choices. This is a much better philosophical position than nihilism, which presumes there is no meaning or truth in life, but it is dangerously anthropocentric.

Many of the critiques of Peterson from the left are attacks on his existentialism from nihilists. They have reduced life to a meaningless pursuit of individual power and autonomous individualistic freedom. Therefore, Peterson’s more optimistic—or perhaps stoic—existentialism creates difficulties for them, particularly since Peterson points to meaning not in creating hegemonies to subjugate the presumed powerful under the whims of the self-identified oppressed. Rejecting the oppressive force of the supposedly downtrodden, which Peterson does often, makes him persona non grata in the world of identity politics.

This is exactly the place where Peterson is both most attractive to conservative Christians and the most risky. He is effective at resisting the progressive movement, but he does it for the wrong reasons. Christians can learn from Peterson, but have to be careful to not swallow the existentialism he is teaching. Though there have been Christian existentialists (e.g., Kierkegaard) who are helpful, that epistemology does not entirely line up with Scripture. We are not meaning makers, we discover the meaning that God has already woven into the universe, revealed in creation and, more clearly, in Scripture.

Peterson seems like a hero to many on the right because he is effective in frustrating the bullying of the progressive left. He may be an ally in that cause, and his methodology may be informative, but we should be careful of adopting his whole worldview because it is not one that has been well-formed and seasoned by God.

Conclusion

Church leaders should consider reading this volume and watching some of Peterson’s videos for several reasons.

First, Peterson has obviously struck a nerve with a broad swath of people. Though we should not run after every earthly trend to copycat it, he’s found an audience hungry for meaning and is giving it to them. We should consider how the church can offer true meaning rooted in the cross of Christ.

Second, Peterson is an example of communicating counter-cultural ideals carefully, clearly, and well. His rhetoric—especially his ability to maintain his poise when attacked—is something pastors, teachers, and average Christians will only need more skill at in the future.

Third, Peterson reveals that teaching the Bible in public to non-Christian audiences is not off-limits. He teaches his version of theology with boldness and clarity. We have the better message, let’s see what can be gleaned from his tools.

Fourth, the Peterson phenomenon is fairly well recognized. This book could be the contact point in a deeper conversation leading to evangelism. There will be young men in your church reading and watching Peterson, leaders need to be aware of him to help the flock sort out the good and the bad.

At the same time, Christians should be cautious in rushing to celebrate Peterson too fully. There is a lot of good, but it is wrapped in old time theological liberalism. We can do better. But we have to do better, and Peterson’s advice would be for us to continue to do better. So, let’s do that as we find meaning in the good news of Jesus Christ.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

By Jordan B. Peterson

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.