By Ruth Amsden
A recent disagreement between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Pope Francis left me feeling thoughtful. I was raised in an extremely anti-Catholic fundamentalist Christian sect, but have since come to cherish my Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ. I have also, through long acquaintance with his work, come to cherish Dr. Peterson and his dear wife, Tammy.
The controversy began when Dr. Peterson retweeted a quotation from Pope Francis about hashtag social justice, commenting, “There is nothing Christian about #SocialJustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.” Many Christians are troubled by the fact that a public figure who has not made a public confession as a baptized Christian would criticize the teachings of the Pope. The argument is that Jordan Peterson does not know enough about Christianity to make such a claim. The Catholic doctrines of social justice, after all, came before the postmodern neo-Marxist forms of social justice, and are rooted in the Scriptures. Perhaps a thoughtful investigation could be constructive and edifying.
My Personal Walk with Christ
But first, a little bit about me so that my readers understand where I am coming from. I have been a Christian, that is, a follower of Christ, since I was a little girl. I have always walked with the Lord and I don’t know any other life. I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical gathering of Christians that had cult-like tendencies. I have seen first hand what Christian authoritarianism looks like; but I have also been privileged to sit under the sound of excellent Biblical teaching and preaching.
I left the cult and fell into the loving arms of liturgical ecumenical Christianity when I was twenty-five. Under the guidance of loving pastors and mentors, I began to heal from the deep wounds wherewith I was wounded in the house of my friends. I began the life-long journey of deconstructing all that was harmful in my upbringing, and sorting through the rubble for the treasures.
After my apolitical upbringing, I immersed myself in the Christian Left, worshiping, working, and attending University alongside my Leftist brothers and sisters in Christ. Somewhere along the line, the Left left me, and I find myself experiencing political homelessness. Like the worthies of old, “They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. … But now they seek a better country, that is, a heavenly.”
“Meeting” Dr. Peterson
About a year ago, my best friend introduced me to the work of Dr. Peterson, sharing with me that taking his words to heart had been instrumental in saving her life. When someone has saved your best friend’s life, a friend you cannot imagine your life without, you tend to give that person a fair shake. I thought Dr. Peterson had absolutely nothing to teach me, and besides I wouldn’t agree with a single thing he said, but I owed it to the bestie to listen, at least for a few minutes.
Famous last words.
Hundreds of thousands of hours later…
I have watched through almost all of Dr. Peterson’s interviews, podcasts on his own channel and on others’ like Rogan and Fridman, lectures both at the university and on tour or as a guest, seminars, conversations with friends, and videos in which he reads aloud pieces he has written. I have thoughtfully engaged with, grappled with, argued with, but more often, agreed with what he is saying. These hours have given me a profound understanding of what he is, and what he is not, saying. But above all, these hours have given me a look into the loving heart and beautiful spirit of the man. He is humanly fallible like the rest of us, he is fragile flesh and indomitable spirit, but as Dennis Prager said of him, he is a good man. I have come to love and cherish him because I have considered his character, his relationships with his family and friends, and the countless testimonies from people in the comment section who have met him and found him exactly the same in real life as he appears in his online content. Mine is not a casual emotional attachment but a carefully considered esteem.
What Is Social Justice, Anyway?
This controversy showed me that even after hundreds of celebrations of the Mass with my Catholic brothers and sisters, countless liturgical church services with my Methodist and Episcopalian and Anglican brothers and sisters, I still had not had the Catholic or Protestant doctrines of social justice as compared and contrasted to the worldly version of social justice explained to me. So like the good Berean I was raised to be, the “workman who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth,” I looked into it for myself.
The seven tenets of Catholic social justice are beautiful. They are all the best ideals I was taught as a child, cherish as an adult follower of Christ, and seek to instill in my children. They are also strikingly similar to the tenets laid out in Dr. Peterson’s recent “Conservative Manifesto.” Those tenets are taken straight from the Scriptures, and they are holy.
In sharp contrast, the secular version of social justice is the offspring of the unholy alliance between postmodernism and neo-Marxism. I came to that conclusion over many years through conversations with my wisest friends, through my university studies, and through my own observations of culture and society. I am grateful to Dr. Peterson for giving me the words for what I knew to be true but could not easily articulate.
The world’s version of social justice is, in short, what we would have called in the fundamentalist group “the religious flesh.” It is works without faith, which is every bit as dead as faith without works. It is what Isaiah was referring to when he said, “all your righteousness is as filthy rags.” It is what St. Paul was warning Timothy about when he described those “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” Secular social justice is the result of human beings trying to act out the teachings of the Bible without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, without faith in the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, and without the love of God the Father.
Addresses to the Seven Churches
As always, when I am troubled by the state of the Christian church and the Christian testimony, I find wisdom and guidance and instruction in the Addresses to the Seven Churches. I was taught that the addresses could be interpreted as an outline of church history, and that is helpful in understanding the many denominations. But it is more useful to take to heart the solemn warnings and promises of reward as though they are written to us, today.
As I have hundreds of times before, I stumbled over the “doctrine and works of the Nicolaitans.” Of course, I thought, some weird long-forgotten doctrine like Gnosticism, that has no modern-day application. But something made me take a closer look. Our Lord says he hates the doctrine and works of the Nicolaitans. Hate is a very strong word that, unlike us, our Lord does not use lightly. So what could I learn from it?
I fell down several rabbit-holes of research, which didn’t break my academic heart, but I was most struck by the breakdown of the name, Nicolaitans. In the Bible, names of people and places are highly significant and instructive. This was no exception:
“The name “Nicolaitans” is derived from the Greek word nikolaos, a compound of the word nikos and laos. The word nikos is the Greek word that means to conquer or to subdue. The word laos is the Greek word for the people. It is also where we get the word laity. When these two words are compounded into one, they form the name Nicolas, which literally ‘means one who conquers and subdues the people.’”
(https://renner.org/article/who-were-the-nicolaitans-and-what-was-their-doctrine-and-deeds/)
So who is this Nicholas who was going around conquering and subduing the people? Church history suggests it was the deacon mentioned in Acts 6:5, who was “a proselyte from Antioch.” In other words, Nicholas had converted from paganism to Judaism, and then from Judaism to Christianity. Perhaps he was one of the people described by St. Paul as “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” We don’t know for sure; but we do know, from the writings of the early church leaders, that Nicholas taught a doctrine of compromise. That is, Nicholas taught that Christianity need not be separate from the doctrines and practices of the occult that were so widespread in the Roman Empire at the time.
Idolatry and Sexual Immorality
The address to the church at Pergamos goes on to call out the doctrine of Balaam. The doctrine of Balaam seems to be linked with the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, but I couldn’t think what the connection was. That’s when I got on the phone with my best friend, because two brains steeped from childhood in the Scriptures are better than one. My friend pointed out that Balaam was being courted by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the children of Israel for a profit, and that instead of flatly refusing him, Balaam was meeting Balak half-way to “negotiate.” Balaam was famously rebuked by his dumb ass and finally saw the angel of the Lord who was standing in the way. In spite of all the riches Balak was offering, Balaam found that he could not curse the people as long as he was looking down at them from the top of the rock.
Balaam was, like Nicolas, trying to compromise with the world for political and socioeconomic power. But that’s just the beginning of the story. Reading further on in the address to the church at Pergamos, it seems that since he could not curse the people, he would undermine them in another way: idolatry and sexual immorality.
Like most fundamentalist evangelical Christians, I grew up believing that idolatry is the veneration of public figures like sports stars and musicians and actors. I now believe that idolatry is much more subtle, and therefore much more dangerous, than that. Idolatry is replacing God with a person, object, or ideology.
I wrestled with the connection between the church at Pergamos, our present day, and idolatry until I found the following instructive thread on Twitter from a Christian user named Zelek:
‘We must be cautious when taking an issue-oriented approach to sharing the Gospel. If one begins by defining the situation, i.e. oppression, and then offers the Christian message as the answer to the problem, the Gospel becomes ancillary to the program (social justice). WE have defined the issues, and WE are responsible for the program. One may be in danger of ‘moralism’ – being a Christian is identified with commitment to a certain line. This is how “your Christianity is worthless unless it’s fighting against systemic racism” takes arise.’
This issue-oriented approach to the Gospel is idolatry, by definition, because it puts us in the center in place of God. Without God, who as Isaiah tells us “lays judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet,” there is no true justice— social or otherwise. We are called to do justice (Micah 6:8). But we are also called to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. This is a threefold cord that is not quickly broken. If we remove one or more of the strands, the cord will break.
The minute we define Christianity as anything other than following Christ, we have departed from the simplicity of Christ. The Gospel I received as a small child said “whosoever will.” Whosoever.
Cancel culture, which enforces social justice in society, is utterly without grace and forgiveness. We fundamentalists did cancel culture first, and we did it best. And because I participated in it and I’ve seen where it ends, I feel an obligation to warn practitioners of cancel culture: that culture eats its own. As St. Paul wrote, those who “measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves among themselves are not wise.”
Balaam also taught Balak to place the stumbling block of sexual immorality before the people. I trust that my readers are all adults and that I don’t have to expound on this. Let me just say, I miss the days when the worst sexual immorality I was aware of was loving, consenting couples living together without being married.
The Doctrines of Balaam, the Nicolaitans, and Marx
To summarize: the doctrine of the Nicolaitans and the doctrine of Balaam are about authoritarian power and control of one group over another, while living with one foot in Christianity and one in the occult, and giving over to idol worship and sexual immorality. We often point to Constantine, who made Christianity one of the state religions of Rome in order to gain political power and control, as the author of the unholy alliance between the church and the world. But from the addresses to the seven churches, we can see that the mingling of Christianity with the occult began long before Constantine.
But we are not at present concerned with Constantine. We are considering the version of social justice that has sprung from Marxism and its offspring. What’s the connection?
Like the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, the focus of Marxism is the power and control of one group over another. It was not the doctrine of Marxism which led to the beautiful Christian community of the Acts, in which the believers “had all things in common.” (At least they did until Ananias and Sapphira decided to keep back part of their worldly goods and lie to the Holy Spirit about it, but that’s a conversation for another time.) Marxism at its root is about resentment and bitterness over haves and have-nots. Marxism is closer to the spirit of Cain, or to Cain’s New Testament counterpart, the Prodigal Son’s older brother. While Christ said “Blessed are the poor,” Marx taught something closer to “Resentful are the poor.” Modern day Marxism has evolved from “bourgeoisie and proletariat” into gender ideology, the patriarchy, critical race theory, and queer theory— the darlings of the worldly social justice movement.
When we as Christians blend neo-Marxism and its offspring into our own creeds and practices, we are following the works and doctrines of the Nicolaitans.
Has Modern Social Justice Become Unjust?
Many people have made the argument much more eloquently than I can that the modern social justice movement has become authoritarian. For further reading, I suggest the work of Yeonmi Park, defector from North Korea, and Konstantin Kisin and Michael Malice, who each grew up in communist Russia.
I didn’t grow up in communist Russia. But I am old enough to remember when Russia was the U.S.S.R. Growing up an evangelical kid, our great heroes were the missionaries like Brother Andrew who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. We prayed for our fellow Christians in communist China constantly. I cannot fathom why the religious and political Left has developed collective amnesia about the horrors of godless Communism, when I was raised in the fear and admonition of it.
The elements of the modern social justice movement are reminding me very painfully of growing up in an authoritarian Christian cult. The legalism, the imposition of shibboleths, the collective shunning of anyone who dared ask a question or raise an objection, the competitive performative piety, are all the same amongst practitioners of social justice as they were amongst us fundamentalist evangelicals.
Jordan Peterson: The Archetypal Wise Outsider
So when Jordan Peterson called out the Pope for espousing “hashtag social justice,” is it possible that he was calling out the unholy alliance between the church and the world? The creeping authoritarianism that seeks to subjugate a certain class of people? Idolatry that replaces God with ideology? Those are issues that have plagued the church all down the ages.
Is Jordan Peterson suggesting that the church has abandoned scriptural social justice for its secular counterpart? And why should we listen to Dr. Peterson?
In literature, one of the most archetypal characters is that of the outsider. The outsider is often the wisest character in the book or play, having a clear perspective that those inside the narrative do not have. Some of my favorite outsiders from the Bible are Ruth and Esther. Dr. Peterson may be understood as the outsider. However, his wife of thirty-five years, Tammy, and his daughter, Mikhaila, are both practicing Christians, and his close friend, Jonathan Pageau, is an intellectual Orthodox Christian. The influence of these dear ones on Dr. Peterson’s thinking can hardly be overstated.
Dr. Peterson may not have it all sorted out; he has never claimed to. From the very beginning, he has been inviting us along on his journey. But since “knowledge puffs up; divine love builds up,” are his gaps in knowledge reason for us to casually dismiss him? He does know enough to say, “Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.” I don’t think you could meet a single Christian who could argue with that.
Is Jordan Peterson a Christian? As St. Paul wrote to Timothy, “The foundation of God stands sure, having this seal, The Lord knows them that are His.” For my part, I am convinced from my deep acquaintance with his work and his spirit that he is our brother in Christ, and unless I find out otherwise, I will consider him such, and esteem him very highly in love for his works’ sake.
Does Jordan Peterson get loads of things wrong when he addresses those of us who name the name of Christ? Of course. Who doesn’t? As St. Paul reminds us, “Now we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” Perhaps a better answer for us Christians is St. Paul’s rebuke to the church of the Romans: “Who are you to judge another man’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Yes, he shall be upheld, for God is able to make him stand.” God is using him mightily to build a bridge between the intellectual atheists and academics, and the church; and if God is using him, then he is God’s servant, and God will uphold him.
Is Jordan Peterson sometimes angry, irascible, vulgar, and crude? Yes. So was St. Paul, who suggested that the people who were troubling the church of the Galatians should go castrate themselves. So was our Lord, who called out the religious leaders, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; for ye tithe in mint and anise, and neglect the weightier matters of the law.” So was St. Peter, every single time he opened his mouth.
If God can use the dumb ass to rebuke the madness of the prophet Balaam, God can use Jordan Peterson to call us complacent Christians out on our embrace of the doctrine and works of the Nicolaitans. When a man like Jordan Peterson, who spent decades studying totalitarianism, is warning us that the modern social justice movement has elements of authoritarianism, we ignore, scoff, or laugh at his warnings at our peril.
Hold Fast… Strengthen the Things That Remain
So what’s the way forward? Dr. Peterson says that we’re bearing our crosses and stumbling uphill toward the city of God. But what if we look around and become convicted that we are not, in fact, stumbling uphill toward the city of God? The answer is in each of the addresses to the Seven Churches: repent. To repent is to turn around and go in the opposite direction.
We often use the Scripture from the address to the church at Laodicea, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock,” as a Gospel verse. The imagery of our Lord standing at the heart’s door asking for admittance fits the Gospel message. But this is taking the verse out of context. It is addressed to those who already profess Christ, but have locked Him out of their midst. The answer to the unholy alliance between the church and the world, to idolatry and injustice and corrupt power grabs, is to open the door and let Christ in.
It fills me with comfort that no matter how evil the day, there is a word of encouragement for the true believers in each of the seven churches. “Hold that fast which you have.” “Strengthen the things that remain.” “Keep My word and do not deny My name.” These are exhortations to hold fast to. And no matter how evil the day, there is in each address a promise to the overcomer.
May we all be overcomers as we wait for Christ’s soon return.
Maranatha.
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