Original Video by Dr. Jordan B Peterson
Transcribed by Joseph Ī-Hông Tân under fair use clause. Contact [email protected] for any copyright claim.
Hi all. It is, of course, completely presumptuous of me to dare to write and broadcast a video entitled "Message to the Christian Churches," but I'm going to do it anyway.
Because I have something to say and because that something needs to be said.
I've been speaking to, watching, and listening to audiences all over the western world for the past four years, in person and virtual form, and have learned a few things in consequence.
It all started with the lectures I did on genesis in 2017. My family and I took a risk and rented out a theater in Toronto on the off chance that there might be an audience for what might be described as a psychological approach to our ancient stories and the miracle of miracles.
I completed 15 or so lectures walking through the first biblical book, sold out the theater, and attracted surprisingly millions of viewers. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. Most people who attended live and watched online were YOUNG MEN.
That is not a phenomenon that can be easily accounted for, but let me try!
Now in the West, because of the weight of historical guilt upon us, a variant of the sense of original sin in a very real sense, and because of a very real attempt by those possessed by what might be described as unhelpful ideas to weaponize that guilt.
Our young people face a demoralization that is perhaps unparalleled. This is particularly true of young men, although anything that devastates young men will eventually do the same to young women. That is precisely the point in this era of anti-natalism and equally reprehensible nihilism.
Boys are hectored for their toy preferences when they are children, which often include toy weapons, such as guns, and their more boisterous playing style. Boys require active rough-and-tumble play even more than girls, for whom it is also necessary.
In grade school, boys are admonished, shamed, and controlled similarly by those who think play is unnecessary, particularly if it's competitive, and by those who value docile, harmless obedience above all.
They even pursued total demoralization by the inculcation of an extremely damaging ideology which essentially consists of three accusations:
1. Human culture, particularly in the West, is best construed as an oppressive patriarchy motivated by the desire, willingness, and ability to use POWER, defined as the compulsion of others against their will to attain what are purely selfish and self-serving ends. This is true at every level of analysis; marriage is akin to slavery, friendship to exploitation, political disagreement to war, and business arrangements to deception and theft. And this is true not only of the current social arrangements that characterize our culture, particularly in the West but also of the fundamental reality of history itself.
2. Human activity, particularly that undertaken in the West, is fundamentally a planet-despoiling enterprise. The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us and could hypothetically exist in our absence. We might well be construed even as CANCER that threatens the viability of the complex systems that make up the earth's ecosystem that shelters and supports us. We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation. And we must place extreme limits on our wants, even our needs, so that survival can be guaranteed, even in a much-reduced form.
3. The prime contributor both to the tyranny that makes up the oppressive patriarchy and structures, all of our social interactions past and present, and the unforgivable despoiling of our beloved mother earth is damnable MALE ambition, competitive and dominating power, mad, selfish, exploitative raping and pillaging.
You might think that I'm overstating the case. Think again, sunshine.
We, in the West, are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the foul logo-centric conceptual structure of civilization itself. To take that apart, that's a society centered on the encouraging adventurous masculine spirit and that privileges that hated word of all things, the divine LOGOS.
And what should we worship and celebrate properly other than that? Deconstructionists? The words of that mass murderer Karl Marx?
And it is precisely those young men who are deeply conscientious and capable of guilt and regret who have come to believe in pain that every deep impulse that moves them out into the world for the adventure of their life, even that impulse drawing them to women is nothing but the manifestation of a spirit that is essentially satanic in nature.
This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically, and scientifically. It is literally anti-true. It's not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality, a minor conceptual error, but something that literally could not be farther from the truth, something that comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from hell.
The Christian Church is there to remind people, young men included and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter, terrible catastrophe of life to face, stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.
Invite the young men back, say literally to those young men, YOU are welcome here. If no one else wants what you have to offer? We do.
We want to call you to the highest purpose of your life. We want your time, energy, and effort, and your will, and your goodwill.
We want to work with you to make things better, to produce life more abundant for you, and for your wife and children, and your community, and your country, and the world.
And we have our problems in the Christian church. We are more abundant, sometimes far too often corrupt, and sometimes deeply so. We're outdated, as are all institutions with their roots in the dead but still often wise past.
So join us. We'll help fix you up, and you can help fix us up, and together we'll aim up.
And here is a message to those young men skeptical about such things.
What else do you have?
You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief. You can say to yourself narcissistically and solipsistically: The church does not express what I believe properly.
Who cares what you believe?
Why is this about you?
Do you even want it to be about you?
What if it was about others?
What if it was about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present?
What if it was incumbent upon you and vital to your health and willingness to live to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast where he has always resided and to restore him to life?
Once again, to the churches:
1. Invite young men, put up a billboard saying: Young men are welcome here.
2. Print some flyers and put them in a box by the billboard.
3. Signal the existence of those flyers with an arrow with the words: more information about attending here.
Tell those who have never been in a church exactly what to do, how to dress, when to show up, who to contact, and most importantly, what they can do.
Ask more, not less, of those you are inviting. Ask more of them than anyone ever has. Remind them who they are in the deepest sense and help them become that.
Your church is for god's sake.
Quit fighting for social justice.
Quit saving the bloody planet.
Attend to some souls.
That's what you're supposed to do.
That's your holy duty!
Do it! Now!
Before it's too late, the hour is nigh!
