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Does anyone remember “The New Atheists”?

There was a time well over a decade ago when there was a whole host of them, prominent intellectuals with book after book denouncing Christianity. The four most prominent, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation), and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), were dubbed “The Four Horsemen”.

There were others, but these four were the ones who attracted the most critical attention, both for and against, as well as the highest sales.

At the time, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth among Christians who feared the tide had turned irredeemably against Christianity, as these atheist intellectuals tore relentlessly into the fabric that held Christian beliefs together.

However, the critical tide actually turned the other way, and very quickly. Dawkins’ book attracted the attention of so many Christian writers who published books refuting his that he stated that they were “building a career riding on my back”, and he collectively called them his “fleas”, quoting the Irish poet WB Yeats, “But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?”

So the tide turned, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth faded, and Christianity became stronger through the intellectually rigorous defence of so many Christians who showed that the atheist “Emperor” was stark naked.

Antidotes

But now we have a new enemy, the increasingly aggressive neo-Marxist movement dubbed “Cultural Marxism”, but I think more technically correct is the term “Critical Theory”. Again, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth among Christians, as they watch our modern Western culture, in all of its expressions, torn at and threatened. And both we Christians and those neo-Marxists driving this push understand that the real target is Christianity, which is the foundation of that culture.

Here’s one of life’s great ironies: unlike the opposition to “The New Atheists”, the most public opposition to this current threat is not coming exclusively from Christians, but from the secular world, and in two of the four people I will focus on, from within the ranks of “The New Atheists”!

Those four are Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, James Lindsay and Douglas Murray. I’ll deal with Peterson here, and then Ali, Lindsay and Murray in subsequent articles.

There’s been no shortage of commentary from Christians, not least here at the Daily Declaration, on Jordan Peterson, particularly in relation to his regular referencing of Scripture in both his books and his lectures. What I offer here is no more than my personal impressions.

I bought his best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, at the airport before a flight to Europe over four years ago. I bought it hoping to get into it on the flight. However, after all this time, I’m only up to chapter 6! It sits in the pile of books by my bed, and every so often, I pick it up again and start reading. But then I’ll quickly get to a section where he starts interpreting Scripture through a Jungian lens, and I get so frustrated that I put it down again for a few months before I try again.

Don’t get me wrong, I see so much in his writing and his lectures which is truly wonderful. He’s certainly profound and thought-provoking. Although he interprets Scripture through the wrong interpretative lens, he is introducing the Bible to many people who otherwise may not give it a second thought. We should always remember that God has told us through the prophet Isaiah:

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it produce and sprout,
And providing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will My word be which goes out of My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the purpose for which I sent it.”
~ Isaiah 55:10-11 (NASB)

It’s because of this I disagree with Martyn Iles, who in a recent Facebook post described Peterson thus: “When dealing with things spiritual, he’s a factory of heresy”. Now, that’s pretty strong language. “Heresy” normally refers to teachers spreading false teaching from within the Body of Christ, and more specifically to teaching which misrepresents the divine nature or authority of Christ.

In a slightly broader context, I would include teaching consistent with the truths expressed in the various Creeds as a general measure of the necessary orthodoxy, and anything which departs from those truths as heretical. Both of those contexts, I am restricting to any who are established Christians in preaching or teaching positions.

But Peterson is not a teacher inside the Body of Christ, nor is he pretending to be. In fact, he is an unashamed seeker, and I don’t believe we have any right to impose that kind of judgement on someone outside the camp who doesn’t have a 100% accurate picture of who Christ is. In fact, in Peterson’s case, there are times when you wonder what it will take “for the penny to drop”. This brief video taken from a conversation with Jonathan Pageau illustrates this well:

I’m sure there are many other influential Christians who are making an effort to help that penny to drop. One of those he recently interviewed was one of my heroes of the faith, Professor John Lennox, a Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford.

There are also a number of excellent videos of John Anderson in conversation with Peterson on Anderson’s “Conversations” website.

Gathering

As a Christian conservative, I also enthusiastically applaud his new endeavour, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, where he has gathered a large group of influential people from many different fields of expertise, and again, a good proportion of them are Christians.

Most notable in that regard are the other two founders of the Alliance, Britain’s Baroness Philippa Stroud and our own former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson. I’m also pleased to see people there who are not only Centre/Right, but some who are Centre/Left, all working together to take a stand for classical liberal views.

It’s through this inaugural gathering that we can see a serious pushback against the neo-Marxist juggernaut which is eating away at the fabric of Western society and a few more nails in the coffin of the “New Atheists’ and their followers.

Again, arising from that gathering, there have been a few responses here at the Daily Declaration and elsewhere, some positive and others less so.

It’s the ones which are less so, as has been the case in general with Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article titled, “Why I Am Now A Christian” (which I will deal with in the next article), which I find disappointing.

One writer suggested that the survival of ARC was dependent on the Christian message being front and centre. I have to disagree. If the issues which ARC seeks to combat are cultural in nature, then a uniquely Christian response will fail. Why? Jesus told us: “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6 NASB)

In other words, we cannot prove to others, and especially those who may be ideologically opposed to our conservative worldview, that our worldview is true in a cultural context just by placing our Christian beliefs front and centre. We must address cultural issues as cultural issues before we can begin to show how that aligns with the truth of the Christian worldview.

That’s what I’m first seeing from these notable Christians in conversation with Jordan Peterson.

As with all these intellectuals who have appeared in recent years who are not Christians, yet have placed themselves in the front line of the battle against the ideological dismantling of Western culture, they understand the foundational importance of Christianity to the culture.

If you think that only a few years ago, the biggest threat to the faith appeared to be the “New Atheists” and their strident attacks, the irony of a significant number of mostly atheist and agnostic scholars now being our most public defenders should not escape us. We should all welcome the opportunity to use their witness, and use it to point to the ultimate truths of Scripture.

As well, there is the opportunity that their Christian colleagues and public figures have to witness to them, and for the rest of us to pray for them. In this way, the ultimate truth of the Gospel, which points directly to the strengths of our Western culture, can be like the yeast (Matthew 13:33), which causes that whole association to rise up even more effectively because of the Christian witness within its ranks informing the debate.

As for ARC now, this conference was obviously a launching pad. It was a coming together of like-minded individuals from many walks of life and fields of expertise, but all united in being able to be involved in a conservative alternative to think tanks on the Left like the World Economic Forum’s at Davos in Switzerland. It was obviously an occasion for the purpose of creating links and setting agendas. Whether from a generally conservative or particularly Christian viewpoint, we should reserve judgement while cheering the initiative.

I’m writing this article on the 60^th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis. And like Peterson, Lewis was gradually attracted to Christianity. In Lewis’ case, it was primarily through two close friends in the English faculty at Magdalen College, Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. It was actually several years before Lewis came to the point of decision. This is how he described it:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

We can only hope and pray that Jordan Peterson recognises that same “steady, unrelenting approach” as Lewis did, and comes fully into the revelatory Light of Christ that his Jungian lens cannot perceive, and like Saul of Tarsus, the scales fall from his eyes as he acknowledges the risen Christ.

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Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons