While there are real reasons to be cautious and critical of key dimensions of Peterson’s broader message, churches have much to learn from reflection upon the reasons why he resonates with so many young men. 

The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, author of the bestselling books 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, has exploded into mainstream evangelical consciousness in recent years. While Peterson has been quietly building up an extensive following for a few years now, many people who had not previously heard of Peterson have been surprised and often confused by the strength and the character of his appeal.
What is Drawing Young Men to Peterson?
Perhaps one of the most striking features of Peterson’s appeal is how male-weighted it is. While Peterson never set out to speak particularly to men and many women have been highly appreciative of his work, his teaching has peculiarly resonated with young men, inviting comment from both his critics and those who are more welcoming of his message. Peterson’s appeal to young evangelical men has been especially pronounced, a fact that provokes challenging questions about what it might be that evangelical men are finding in Peterson that they are not finding in their churches.
While it may be tempting to regard Peterson’s male-weighted appeal as proof that his message is somehow unbalanced, the assumption that all truth must be equally appealing to all persons is not a warranted one. There are some dimensions of the truth that will peculiarly resonate with certain persons, especially in contexts where they are not being spoken to by existing voices. Throughout the West, men are significantly outnumbered by women in churches and complaints about the supposed ‘feminization’ of the church have been exciting conversation and controversy for a few decades now. Perhaps there is something to which we should be paying attention here.
Listening closely to what both Peterson and his appreciative male followers have to say, a few things especially stand out to me. Foremost among these is the fact that Peterson displays a genuine compassion and concern for young men, and for young men as particular persons, not just as an abstract class. Peterson, as someone who is fiercely critical of ideology in general, observes and challenges much of the ideological flak to which young men are exposed by the culturally regnant orthodoxies of feminism. However, unlike many others, Peterson isn’t driven by some countervailing ideology so much as by a palpable compassion for the victims of established ideologies, young men who have been stigmatized, told that they are toxic and patriarchal, stifled, and who are increasingly marginalized or discarded by society and its institutions. I have seen countless figures on the right who want to score petty ideological points against feminists raise the issues of young men: it is Peterson’s compassion for young men as particular persons that sets him apart.
We all, conservative Christians as much, if not more, than others, are in danger of theologies and ideologies that eclipse persons, reducing them to (actual or potential) avatars of—or obstacles to the outworking of—our abstract ideological systems. People recognize this and close themselves off to us. Foregrounding persons in their concrete particularity and unfeignedly desiring and seeking their good is hugely important, not because it matters for ideological persuasion, but because people matter. Men respond to Peterson because he does this for them, but this is a posture that desperately needs to become characteristic of our relationship to every person.
Responding to Responsibility
Men are not unaccustomed to being told about their responsibility. In the society at large, they are castigated as a class for their responsibility for the oppressive structures and operations of ‘patriarchal’ society. In the church, they are often harangued to take responsibility and berated for their many failures. Responsibility is all too often handled as a legalistic rod to beat men down with or a condemnation upon them, rather than as an evangelical declaration of their God-given vocation and an accompanying gracious encouragement and building up of them so that they can live this out well.
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As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.

Don’t make Donald Trump your idol.” “It’s not about Left vs. Right but about the Messiah who already came.” “Saving souls is more important than saving your country.” “Jesus isn’t running in 2024.”
Ever since the former president soundly defeated his opponents in the Iowa caucus last week (as polls had been predicting for quite some time, to the consternation of the political class), and then immediately repeating the victory in New Hampshire, the crush of evangelical elite rhetoric targeting Trump’s evangelical voters has been deafening.
Passive aggressive tweets from pastors and online theologians and op-eds from individuals in the midst of some form of deconstruction have flooded the zone. Accusations abound, and sweeping, ideological generalizations are rampant. Even the very salvation of Christian Trump supporters has been called into question yet again.
Ben Ziesloft has pointed out that the veritable cottage industry of anti-Trump books written by the self-proclaimed guardians of “our democracy” is only equaled by the pile penned by evangelical thought leaders who castigate the evangelical hoi polloi who don red MAGA hats. (Whether or not the term “evangelical” is simply a sociological label or captures orthodox, low-church Protestants who attend church weekly is a different question entirely.) As Miles Smith has trenchantly observed on X, “Is their [sic] any more boring type of self-loathing American than an ‘Evangelical intellectual’ who is still writing about Trump?”
Aaron Renn has already begun reviewing one of the latest entries in this genre, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Among other things, Alberta profiles the “well-organized, well-funded” network called “The After Party” that anti-Trump evangelicals Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang, a liberal Silicon Valley consultant, created in the wake of the 2016 election. This group has been working hard ever since “to reduce Republican voting by evangelicals by providing doing so with a theological rationale.” Unsurprisingly, in original reporting at First Things, Megan Basham has shown that they’re bankrolled by a number of left-wing foundations.
In other words, Moore and French are doing the very same thing that Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian nonprofit, is doing: making sure that a Democrat stays in the White House for the foreseeable future. As Vote Common Good’s website notes, they too are looking to persuade “an additional 5-10% [of evangelicals] who are looking for an ‘exit ramp’ from supporting the Republicans who sacrifice the common good.”
In an election year, the spigot will undoubtedly be opened even more. Scott M. Coley’s forthcoming Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, Ideology and the Religious Right (published by the increasingly heterodox Eerdmans Publishing Company in June), is a prime example. A talk he gave in August 2022, where he described the “ideology of the religious right” as including “creation science, illegitimate appeals to biblical authority or sufficiency, [and] Christian colorblindness,” is likely a preview of some of the arguments Coley will draw on in Ministers of Propaganda. Upholding orthodoxy, it seems, is not part of his project.
Books like Alberta’s and Coley’s, however, aren’t meant to be read. Rather, they are for signaling one’s own inclusivity, rejection of power, and care for the migrant—all elements that are consistent with regime-approved morality.
As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.
On the surface, this is akin to political consultants who consistently run losing campaigns featuring outdated and ineffective messaging but nevertheless remain extremely confident that next time, Americans will finally pick someone who can defeat the Soviets and balance the budget. But if it didn’t work last time, why would deploying the same strategies work this time? Instead, why not reach out to dissident figures on the Right? Or men who lift weights or work with their hands for a living?
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It is my intention to demonstrate with these articles that Johnson’s book muddies the already muddied terminology regarding human sexuality and that he is not alone in using classic Reformed systematic-theological language in a novel manner to support his own conclusions.

Still Time to Care: Selective Quoting?
Greg Johnson’s Still Time to Care has garnered no small amount of attention since its release in early December 2021. Prominent voices in the Reformed and broader evangelical world have hailed it as the seminal text for a new era of ministry to same-sex attracted persons both within and without our churches. Out of the ashes of the ex-gay movement of the last 50 years has arisen, they say, a new (or if you ask Greg Johnson “revitalized”) paradigm of care. For a fuller treatment of the book’s contents I would heartily recommend Dr. Jonathan Master’s review. In fact, the reader may find it helpful to consult his panoramic view of the forest before reading what is my cross-sectioning of several noteworthy trees.
It is my intention to demonstrate with these articles that Johnson’s book muddies the already muddied terminology regarding human sexuality and that he is not alone in using classic Reformed systematic-theological language in a novel manner to support his own conclusions.
Throughout the book, Johnson puts what he calls “heterosexual orientation” and “homosexual orientation” side by side in an attempt to demonstrate how both are fallen, sinful orientations (139).1 Johnson is not shy in expressing his frustration with those who turn a blind eye to their own heterosexual sins and fixate instead upon the homosexual sin of others. To be sure, if a man is addicted to internet pornography, frequenting gentlemen’s clubs, or cheating on his wife, he is no place to identify specks or beams in the eyes of others when he has such a whopping beam in his own. Sexual sin is not the exclusive vice of the same-sex attracted. This is not up for debate, we are all in agreement. Men and women sin when they lust after a member of the opposite sex who is not their spouse.
As true as this is, Dr. Johnson so stresses the sinfulness of heterosexual lust that, at times, he obscures the Reformed distinction between sins that are against nature and sins that are not thereby obscuring the differing degrees of heinousness. 2 In one particular instance Johnson does so by bending the language of others to support his premise that “heterosexuality as experienced on this side of the fall is drenched in sin” (139). In the section titled “The Sinfulness of Heterosexuality This Side of the Fall” Johnson recounts the details of his interview on the CrossPolitic podcast.3
NB: What follows should in no way be construed as a defense of the people or theology represented by the CrossPolitic podcast or as a defense of others in Moscow, Idaho. Far from it. The reader should consider me squarely in the camp of those who are opposed to the pastoral abuses that have been documented and the reader should consider me opposed to the Federal Vision theology. My only intention in recounting this discussion is to demonstrate that Johnson engages in a subtle twisting of words to support his own conclusions and misconstrue the position of his discussion partners. To what end does all of this trend? To the blurring of the distinction between sins that are contrary to nature and sins that are not. In a follow up article, I will demonstrate how Johnson further blurs these lines in choosing to apply the word “disordered” both to heterosexual and homosexual lust, but never the descriptor “unnatural” to homosexual lust.
Johnson says:
I was once on a podcast with some church leaders who seemed to be of the opinion that a gay person who becomes a Christian can choose not to be attracted to member of the same sex anymore. I questioned them about their own sexual attraction to women other than their wives.4 Can you choose to turn that off? They scoffed.
“For one, heterosexual men don’t need to repent of being attracted to another woman,” one panelist said.
Another added, “Because that’s natural.”
A third agreed, “That’s the way God planned it.”
The first one then jumped in again. “What we need to repent of is being lustful” (139).
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Notes
1 My using the terms “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality,” and “orientation,” is not a wholesale endorsement of those terms. I find them problematic at a number of points. The purpose of their usage is to engage as directly as possible with Johnson’s line of argumentation.
2 See WSC Q.82 and WLC Q.151 s.3
3 The full interview can be found here. Please note that this is not an endorsement of the CrossPolitic podcast. For more on this podcast see the resources below, e.g., “The Smear Was Intentional” and “A Smear Memorialized.”
4 Please note that all emphases are my own.