Professor Jordan Peterson says such fighters are no friends to religion

OTTAWA (CCN)



The University of Toronto professor at the centre of controversy over new transgender pronouns has a warning for churches regarding the politically-correct agenda of social justice warriors.

“Tremble,” said Professor Jordan Peterson in response to a question regarding the implications for religious freedom. He described the social justice warriors as “postmodern Marxists.”

“Those people are no friends to religion, that’s for sure,” said Peterson, a political psychologist who has studied the psychology of totalitarianism for 30 years. “As long as your religion doesn’t contravene any of the social justice warrior doctrines, and by the way it does, then you’ll be okay as long as you’re quiet and I would say very quiet. You guys have every serious reason to be worried.”

Peterson was in Ottawa Nov. 19 to receive the Canadian Values Award from POGG Canada (POGG stands for Peace, Order and Good Government), an Ottawa think tank.

The professor has been in the centre of a media storm after he uploaded several YouTube videos decrying new transgender pronouns that he says are required by the Ontario Human Rights Act. Soon they will be required by the Canadian Human Rights Act as transgender bill C-16 quickly makes its way through Parliament, he warned. He has contended forcing people to speak against their conscience and beliefs is a hallmark of totalitarianism, even more so than preventing speech.

He described his experience since uploading the videos as surreal, “like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.” Hundreds of thousands of people have watched his videos, and he has been subject to demonstrations, accusations of promoting hate propaganda. The University of Toronto has sent him letters meant to silence him.

Peterson grew up in Alberta in a family that attended the United Church. He became attracted to “classic Canadian socialism” of the CCF as a teenager, and began to read widely, particularly George Orwell. He lost his Christian faith when he began to learn about evolution. Orwell helped him to understand the dangers of ideology and Stalinism, as well as the pretensions of middle class socialists who claimed to care about the poor yet had contempt for the working classes, he said.

Today’s social justice warriors claim to care for the oppressed, when what they have is a “hatred for the rich,” for anyone more successful, Peterson said. But on campuses such as Yale, the social justice warriors are “so privileged” they represent the top one per cent of the one per cent of the elite.

They are “members in training for the ruling class” who “identity with the oppressed” yet have “all the advantages of the ruling class at the same time,” he said.

The good intentions and compassion of the social justice warriors are grounded in resentment, he said.

Social justice warriors are responsible for a “terrifying rewriting of fundamental legal doctrines that govern our rights,” he said.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission, for example, and its related tribunals, do not go by standard legal principles such as innocent until proven guilty, or the need to prove criminal intent.

In Ontario you are liable for what your employee says whether the effects of that speech were intentional or not, he said.

“The women’s studies people and their ilk have created between 300,000 and three million committed social activists over the last 10-20 years,” he said. That’s up to one per cent of the population of the United States, he said. That number of people “committed to the demolition of the patriarchy—read committed to undermining western civilization because those things mean exactly the same thing—” can cause a substantial amount of damage, he said.

Though Peterson is not conventionally religious, he has studied the importance of foundational myths in providing order out of chaos and meaning for society. He believes in the Logos, a fundamental archetype that predates Judaism, and finds its expression in the Word made flesh in Christianity-the symbolic ideal man. As a psychologist, he takes a more Jungian, archetypal approach to religious faith. The Logos brings order out of chaos, and provides a way for a society to inhabit within an articulated truth.

“The Word made flesh is a fundamental principle of western culture,” Peterson said. “It will not survive without it. We’re unmoored and oscillating” from the radical right to the radical left with “nothing to keep people centered. What keeps people centered is the Logos.”

“When a society loses its religious suppositions, people turn to ideology,” he said. Ideology is a “poor” and “dangerous substitute” for religion.

Religious presuppositions are hardwired into our biological being, he said. Losing the symbolic landscape has left people “with no strength of spirit and we’re paying a huge price for it.”

At stake is our integrity, what “enables you to stand up to the onslaught of existence” so that it does not “corrupt you and make you malevolent,” he said.

The great religions teach you “don’t let go of your soul or you will become a monster,” he said.

He asked why we are allowing our universities to turn out postmodern Marxists. “If we were producing Neo-Nazis there would be a huge outcry,” he said. Yet Marxists have no more ethical claim than Nazis given what happened in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and Vietnam and the Cold War which almost resulted in a nuclear holocaust.