God and Men and Jordan Peterson

The men fled; the women stayed.

That’s the story of Easter weekend in the New Testament. Most of Jesus’ male disciples vanished when the trouble started, leaving his mother and Mary Magdalene and other women to watch by the cross, prepare his body for his burial, and then (with the men still basically in hiding) find the empty tomb.

Male absence and female energy has also been the story, albeit less starkly and dramatically, of Christian practice in many times and places since. Today, most Christian churches and denominations in America — conservative as well as liberal, male-led and female-led both — have some sort of gender gap, sometimes modest but often stark. Despite their varying theologies, evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, Mormonism and Catholicism all have about a 55-45 female-male split in religious identification; for black churches, it’s 60-40.

Meanwhile, the belief-in-God and frequency-of-prayer gaps are even larger, with American men twice as likely as women to call themselves atheists — something that will surprise exactly nobody who has sojourned among Richard Dawkins fans.

There are interesting arguments about the roots of this division: Whether women are somehow naturally more religious than men, whether Jesus’ dim view of violence is particularly off-putting to the male of the species, or whether some specific cultural shift — a feminine turn in medieval piety, the separation of the sexes in the Industrial Revolution, the late-modern turn away from martial religious language — created the modern Christian situation.

The fact that the gender gap is less apparent or reversed in the Islamic world and Israel is a suggestive indicator that something specific to Christianity is at work. But that raises an interesting question for our own society: What happens to this pattern if historic Christianity decays or transforms into something else? Does a religious gender gap diminish, or does it widen? Does our emerging post-Christian or quasi-Christian model of religiosity — the therapeutic style of Oprah, the individualized mix of prayer and meditation and self-help — potentially reconcile the sexes, or push them further apart?

These Easter thoughts are occasioned, in part, by reading some of the countless think-pieces about the rise of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor turned moral-philosophical guru for a large and grateful cohort of young men.

Inevitably, Peterson has been subsumed into our political debates, attacked as a fascist or hailed as an anti-PC warrior. But the clearest takes on his appeal so far have recognized his role as a tacitly religious figure, a would-be prophet for lost boys.

In complementary essays, Micah Meadowcroft and Scott Alexander have both described him as a figure much like C.S. Lewis, the intellectual popularizer of Christianity — except, as Alexander says, where Lewis believed in the “Old Religion,” Peterson is “a believer in the New Religion, the one where God is the force for good inside each of us, and all religions are paths to wisdom, and the Bible stories are just guides on how to live our lives.”

This New Religion has many prophets already, of course; the most prominent, her Oprahness, can currently be seen playing an angelic being in the de-Christianized, New Age-ified adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” But the example of Oprah points to an interesting truth: When you think about the New Religion’s various cultural and (in the case of yoga) liturgical expressions, they generally skew female. Oprah’s roadshow of spiritual gurus includes men as well as women, but the intended audience for her revivals, as for the “The Secret” or “Eat Pray Love” or the collected works of Paulo Coelho, is very obviously feminine.

Meanwhile, men looking for post-Christian enlightenment seem to gravitate toward secular-rationalist cults like the New Atheism, or more recently toward toxic forms of alt-right politics. In this sense the post-Christian religious landscape is potentially taking Christianity’s gender gap and widening it, playing its own metaphysical role in the growing divergence and polarization of the sexes.

Which is why it will be interesting to see where Peterson and his male disciples end up going. To the extent that he has antecedents, it’s figures like the myth-theorist Joseph Campbell and the poet Robert Bly, whose “Men’s Movement” in the 1990s was a Jungian stew concocted as an antidote to fatherlessness and extended adolescence.

But can a Peterson man and an Oprah woman be happy together? Can they be at least as happy as Christian women and their somewhat-less-pious, prone-to-bolting Christian men?

A lot may hang on this strange question: the happiness of the next generation, the very existence of the generation after that.