Jordan Peterson this week got himself into some difficulties debating the truth of Christianity with young atheists. This didn’t concern the highbrow theological aspects of the meaning of God, or how one comes upon divine knowledge, but instead on the most basic question: is he a Christian?

After building a career defending Western Christian civilisation against the woke hordes and their pronouns, Peterson couldn’t — or wouldn’t — give a straight answer. When pressed, he mumbled about privacy. The atheist challenger, a young vlogger named Danny, delivered the killing blow: “You’re really quite something, you are. But you’re really quite nothing.” The usually voluble Peterson had no response. The exchange, part of a debate where Peterson faced several atheists in succession, has gone viral, racking up millions of views. The exchange, part of a debate hosted by the YouTube channel Jubilee where he faced several atheists in succession, has gone viral, racking up millions of views.

The debate exposes what some might deem a fundamental contradiction in the psychologist’s brand. Since being exiled from the world of academia and clinical psychology, he has become a defender of Christianity against secular progressivism. Yet when directly asked whether he is a Christian, he became evasive and claimed that it’s “private”.

To Peterson’s credit, he has introduced thousands to Biblical stories, their psychological depth and how they can offer meaning in our atomised modernity. Young men especially have found in his work a gateway to considering moral questions they might otherwise have dismissed. His colourful lectures on Genesis and Exodus treat scripture as serious literature worth wrestling with, not merely antiquated myths to be discarded. But this makes his evasiveness about what he actually believes all the more frustrating.

The problem is that Peterson has been dancing around his explicit belief in Christianity, particularly its more miraculous elements, for years. In 2018, theologian Alasdair Roberts argued that Peterson “is not a Christian, not in any orthodox sense of the term”. Five years later, pastor S. Michael Houdmann evaluated Peterson’s body of work and concluded that his “religious beliefs are not fully aligned with Christian faith”. Even sympathetic reviewers acknowledge a certain gap between his focus on Biblical exegesis and his belief. Christianity Today‘s recent review of Peterson’s new book We Who Wrestle with God praised some of his biblical analysis but noted that it was “slippery on theological truth”. Admittedly, theological truth has been slippery for some of the greatest religious philosophers, from Descartes to Nietzsche.

But the timing of this discussion, coming as it does on the back of Peterson’s new book, does make this critique stronger. In a interview from January, he proclaimed himself “a new kind of Christian” who’s “striving for understanding above all”. When pressed to explain, he offered this somewhat jumbled follow-up: “I suppose people might pillory me as agnostic, but that’s not true because I don’t believe that the proper relationship between this underlying unity and myself would be established as a consequence of intellectual conquest.” What does this mean? Peterson seems to be saying he is Christian but not traditionally so. He seeks intellectual understanding and denies being merely another agnostic intellectual. This sounds profound, but is it? Does being a “new kind of Christian” mean he cannot admit to being merely a Christian?

The contradiction runs deeper than personal belief. As critics have noted, Peterson presents the Bible as humanity’s greatest achievement while refusing to engage with many of its central claims about matters such as the resurrection of Jesus (noted atheist Richard Dawkins forced Peterson into offering a host of circumlocutions to defend Jesus’ virgin birth while simultaneously refusing to admit he believed in it). He’ll defend Christian morality while reducing Christ to a Jungian archetype, a “useful God” and an “abstraction” as he discussed during a 2022 lecture tour of Australia. Does he want the authority of faith without the vulnerability of belief?

There are some self-avowed Christian intellectuals who don’t have this reticence. William Lane Craig has debated the world’s most prominent atheists for decades without hiding behind word salads. Alvin Plantinga developed rigorous philosophical arguments for theism without ever claiming his beliefs were “private”. Even popularisers like Bishop Robert Barron engage substantively with challenges. They know what they believe and can defend it.

Peterson’s opponents, not just in the Jubilee debate, have accused him of “muddying the waters”. His definition of God moves between “conscience”, “unity”, “inspiration”, and “hierarchical foundation” — or all of these at once, depending on the objection. While he admits that the divine is, in his view, unknowable in its totality to finite beings like us, some would say he is retreating into abstraction. When asked for linguistic commitment to being a Christian — he prefers to equate belief in Christianity with acting like God exists — he refuses. To be charitable, this may be because he believes that as imperfect sinners, none of us can ever be truly Christian but that it is an ideal to aim at. But his interlocutors keep demanding, possibly fairly, more from him.

Perhaps Peterson, like the doubting Apostle Thomas before him, will eventually resolve these contradictions. His wife’s Catholic conversion seems to have moved him. His new book shows genuine engagement with scripture. Maybe the “new kind of Christian” he claims to be will eventually become the regular kind — someone who can simply say “yes” when asked if they believe.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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