This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The journey towards religion, faith and spirituality is a personal one. Some people immediately identify with their family’s traditions and customs, whilst others gradually drift into it. Some choose not to follow this path and firmly reject it. There are those (including me) who decide that religion won’t be a part of their lives, but gain respect and admiration for those who have faith. 

Meanwhile, some people struggle mightily with religion and God. They may try to make sense of the Bible, including the stories and heroes who helped define ancient society. They may wonder if the centuries-old battle between good and evil has any legitimacy in the modern world. They may muse as to whether a line should be drawn between reality and fantasy — and if so, where. They may even feel guilt at times for not having a stronger attachment to their faith. For those individuals, it’s a question of religious belief versus believing in religion.

Which brings us to Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine. The author, a psychologist and world-renowned public intellectual who previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Toronto, could be described as more of a layman when it comes to religion. Nevertheless, he’s created an impressive volume of academic research and personal analysis on an immense topic that clearly has a deeper meaning for him. “The Bible is the library of stories,” he has written, “on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated — the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”

Peterson spends great time and care examining a cornucopia of Biblical stories. He starts at the beginning with the book of Genesis and goes all the way to Jonah’s quest for eternal bliss as he travelled to the city of Nineveh. There are several mentions of modern historical figures like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Hobbes and John Milton — and brief references to Walt Disney’s Pinocchio and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. A few sections could potentially challenge the thinking of religious and non-religious readers. And, unsurprisingly, there’s some penetrating analysis that perfectly fits the mind of a trained psychologist.

Here are but a few examples. We Who Wrestle with God has an intriguing take on the story of Adam and Eve. Peterson writes that “Eve’s role is in keeping with the well-known personality differences between men and women, evident cross-culturally and more pronounced in more egalitarian societies.” That’s an interesting point of view. How did he reach this conclusion?

“Women are more agreeable — more concerned with others; more interested in people than in things — as well as more prone to experience negative emotion, threat and pain; more sensitive to the things that will endanger or hurt people and cause them distress … It is this role, unfortunately — tightly tied with caring for infants and children and attending to their inchoate and subtle concerns — that also renders her arguably more susceptible to the lure of the serpent (or at least first susceptible).”

In a section related to the tragic story of Cain and Abel, the author spends several illuminating paragraphs analysing the consequences of the former’s actions. “Insofar as Abel is a precursor to, foreshadowing of or ‘type’ of Christ and Cain the same in relationship to Satan, the parallel between Cain’s sin and the sin against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32) is apt.”

There’s a fascinating comparison to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictional character of Rodion Raskolnikov from his novel Crime and Punishment, “who in the aftermath of his dreadful — and hypothetically successful and justified — crime finds himself so alienated from everything he had so unconsciously taken for granted that punishment comes as nothing less than a relief”. Peterson also poses several questions related to Cain’s actions, including “who can live after destroying his ideal, knowing full well that the fault for doing lies unquestionably at his own feet?”

There’s also the story of Abraham and the Word of God. Using the prophet’s original name, Peterson makes this intriguing assessment: “in establishing a covenant with the One True God, Abram swears, in essence, to live by the truth. He is by no means perfectly capable of doing so, at the beginning. He is, at best, an ordinary man. This is very good news for the rest of us, striving to aim up and put our lives together, insofar as we are also ordinary men.” 

Few would doubt that his ideas and opinions make you think

These are the types of profound concepts that many people, both religious and non-religious, wrestle with daily: the differences between men and women, which the author John Gray immortalized in his famous (and still widely discussed) book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; the battle between God and Satan, good and evil and crime and punishment; how mortal, imperfect beings struggle to be good servants of a higher being whom they largely view as loving, benevolent and perfect. 

Similar thoughts may be evoked when devouring Peterson’s two thought-provoking chapters related to the story of Moses. “We can picture Moses alone in contemplation, taking note of something anomalous; something that appeals to his curiosity, to his adventurous spirit,” he writes. “It beckons to him at the edges of his attention. He decides to investigate — to walk off the beaten path and to see what lies beyond the day-to-day and predictable — what still remains, outside the mere normal goodness of his now well-established life.” What this means, in Peterson’s view, is that “Moses — and therefore the leader, as Moses is the archetypal leader — is he who attends voluntarily to his calling. A calling is perhaps best understood as a manifestation, both proximal and tangible, of the eternal covenant between God and his people.”

The Hebrew prophet therefore willingly stepped outside his comfort zone and walked into a world that could be fraught with difficulty. He felt compelled to take this important step, and others over time, when God entrusted him to speak His word and lead the Israelites out of Egypt and slavery. This, in many ways, is what we expect our leaders in politics, business, religion and other fields to do when the situation and need arise. It not only defines a level of self-awareness but also explains why some people have the utmost faith in their own leadership. 

Peterson may be regarded by some critics as controversial (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but few would doubt that his ideas and opinions make you think. He fiercely challenges the views of some people and either confirms or corroborates the beliefs of others. As some may wrestle with the concept of God, they may also wrestle with the concept of whether God’s will is eternal as they read this fascinating and thoughtful volume.