Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my ninety first episode. In this episode I want to share with you an open letter to Jordan Peterson. Dr. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor at the university of Toronto. He rose to prominence when he challenged the compelled speech legislation that was part of bill C16 in Canada. He’s been a force in the culture and has impacted millions of lives ever since – including my own. There are a number of people in my life who have played a huge part in shaping who I am today. Dr. Peterson is on the short list with several others. I’m certain that he is inundated with letters from people thanking him for his work – so I have no idea if this will ever make it to him – but I think it’s worthwhile for me to share his impact with my own audience. So without further delay I bring you my letter to Jordan Peterson.
Dr. Jordan Peterson. This is Michael Baun. I’m a pastor, I’m the host of The MHB Podcast, and most importantly I’m just another guy who is trying to put himself together. Growing up I had never believed in God – I was one of those people who thought he didn’t believe in anything. I was fortunate in that my parents had built a loving home that reflected biblical values. Of course, none of us knew the origin of these values – we just thought it was the normal way to be. All of my life I’ve wanted to build a home as good as or better than the one I was raised in. I thought it would be easy. I was naive and I thought most of the world was just good like that. I assumed that dysfunction was the minority and that people who suffered it had some kind of sickness incurable by teaching or behavior modification. I didn’t believe in belief. I thought dysfunctional people were just less human than me. I thought what lurked inside of them could never be found inside of me.
At 22 years old I left my family’s home and set out to make my own. Immediately I was blindsided by how much brokenness was waiting for me in the world. I was devastated when I discovered how many people were incapable or unwilling to love. The seeds of nihilism were silently placed into my heart without me knowing it. Then I met a girl and took for granted how deeply she was impacting me. Both of us did things wrong and she ended the relationship. I never thought I could feel pain like that pain. It was a pain that didn’t make sense. It was a pain that didn’t match the depth or the seriousness of the relationship. At the time I thought the pain was a consequence of the relationship failing, but later I understood that it was actually the pain of my worldview dying. Already I had been shocked and confused about the fallen nature of reality and now that fallen nature had made its way into my own relationship and killed it. But the worst was yet to come.
In the midst of grieving that relationship things went horribly sideways for me. I was working at my family’s business and so I had access to money. I decided to move away to the nearest city and start a new life. That new life began with lots of drinking and meeting women. I’m thankful that throughout that binge I never quite let go of the respect I had for the dignity of others – although I thought about it. It was out of that respect that I declined far more hookups than I accepted. I didn’t want any of those women to feel the pain that I felt.
The alcohol kept flowing and it fueled the nihilistic ghost that was growing inside of me. I started to walk alone in the dark through dangerous parts of the city – half hoping that someone would attack me. I can’t explain that behavior – even today I’m confused by it. Perhaps you’ve encountered it in your clinical practice. It felt like I was drawn to the evil in others because I wanted to dominate it. I discovered that almost everyone folds when challenged. I thank God that during those nights I never had the misfortune of encountering a true psychopath. Each night that I stared into the void of risking my life I came away feeling more powerful. I was becoming addicted to the alcohol and to the power of a meaningless life.
Then one night death came close to me. I was out alone drinking too much as usual. I went into this champagne lounge – kind of an upscale place with a dress code. I was already drunk. I ordered a drink, left it at the bar, and went to the restroom. I came back and started drinking it. Then everything went black. I vaguely remember being outside in the square and someone telling me they could either take me back to my apartment or take me to jail. I imagine this person was a police officer. I woke up in my bed the next day with no idea how I got there. My limbs were heavy – a possible side effect of the drugs slipped into my drink. There was mud on my shoes. Too much mud for city streets. As I sat up trying to remember what happened, I couldn’t shake a certain feeling. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was fear. Fear that I had come closer to the end than I could ever imagine. Fear that last night a person truly possessed by evil was watching me – and had it not been for that cop I might not be writing this. In the following weeks my conscience screamed at me that it was time to go home. It was a white hot scream that had a sense of finality about it. Like if I had ignored it in that moment I would cut myself off from ever hearing it again. I called my Dad and we packed my stuff. I moved back home.
When I first got home I didn’t stop the drinking or the destructive behavior. I didn’t see any reason to. I had just met another girl who would later become my wife. As we got closer to each other she became my reason to start putting myself together. I knew she wouldn’t stay long if I didn’t – and I knew I wouldn’t find another person like her. She started going to church with her Mom and she asked if I would go. I resisted. I always scoffed at religion. Eventually I decided to try it because I could see the pain I was causing by rejecting her efforts. My whole life changed in that first service. The pastor was an evangelist type and he was masterful at what he did. I heard him talking about values and principles that I had always hoped were true about reality. He spoke about how love is a choice and how true love is self-sacrificial. The messages hit me like bombs. It was like hearing the Scripture confirm what I knew had to be true about life. Maybe the death of my innocence didn’t have to mean the death of my worldview after all. I decided to meet with him to learn more. He took me in as his apprentice and I became obsessed with learning about the things of God.
Then one day I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed and I saw you. It was the Cathy Newman interview. I watched it and I was amazed by the way you spoke. I remember being most intrigued when you said that you are very, very careful with your words. You spoke and conducted yourself as if every little thing you said or did mattered. I had to know what you thought about God. I watched you speak about how you don’t like the question: Do you believe in God? Then I watched all of your lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical stories. I was mesmerized by how much wisdom you were able to extract from the stories. It was like watching the eternal truths of Scripture dance with the expertise you had gained through years of studying the nature of reality and the nature of mind. I began to see that learning about reality was the key to unlocking deeper levels of the text. How deep could I go in a lifetime of study? This approach really made the stories come alive to me. It’s funny how a psychology professor can do a better job at expository preaching than some preachers do.
Not only were you able to glean such depth of information from the text – but you also explained why it mattered that we know these things. Your lectures taught me that we can actually avoid certain pits of misery if we put ourselves together and pay attention to the information around us. Occasionally I have people tell me that my own lectures are too difficult to understand and that I bring too much information. I do my best to take this criticism seriously – but I’ve often wondered what would happen if I offered $30,000 to anyone who could accurately summarize my lecture back to me. Would they go from being self-described simple people to being scholars?
The value of correcting myself so I can be less wrong in the future is one of the major gifts you’ve given me. It’s led me to listen to every person as if they know something I need to know. It’s broken my barriers to conversations with people who disagree with me. I almost find the disagreeable conversations more valuable than the agreeable ones – there is no growth without resistance. Once I could see the value of this practice I began to search out the most strident critics of religion I could find. That’s what led me to Sam Harris. Brilliant, articulate, and cool Sam Harris. I knew if there was anyone who could plumb the depths of my presuppositions it was him. I listened to all of his podcasts. Every single one of them. Then you sat down with him and I watched each of those conversations three times. Many people inside the church would balk at the idea of listening to Harris. But I can tell you that doing so has made me more secure in my faith that I could have ever been without him. My worldview and my structure of belief have been tempered by the flames of his argument. When you spend time learning how to stand in front of the most cogent atheist philosopher in the world – it makes most other people feel like child’s play. There is no growth without resistance.
From the beginning of my walk with Christ I had a sense that it was all true. It’s like I knew without knowing how I knew. I suppose that’s one of the hallmarks of faith. Watching you explain ideas at such a high resolution sparked a hunger in me to set out on an adventure. I wanted to figure out how I knew that Christ is truth. I learned a little bit about your consilience approach and I thought it was a good place to begin. I had to figure out which commonly held biblical ideas worked at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and did not degenerate across time. This produced an incredibly narrow path where ideologies could not survive. To walk this path I needed a rich and detailed story about the nature of reality. Jesus Christ, the archetypal being, seemed to be at the end of it. The personality of Christ seemed to be the only one who could produce a community that would exist across time without degenerating into chaos.
Doing what I can to explain the divine person, the imago dei, has been the cornerstone of my pursuits since I became a pastor. I cannot articulate to you the profound sense of meaning that comes over me when I face the old darkness of reality but this time with an attempt to overcome it through Christlike conduct – and through teaching Christlike conduct to others. I don’t do this perfectly – the fallen nature of humanity runs through my heart as well. But it seems to me that trying to do it at all makes an eternity of difference. It’s hard to say how horrible the world would be without those who pick up their crosses daily and stumble uphill toward the city of God. Maybe it would be hell. Maybe it has been hell in certain dark corners of the twentieth century.
As per your recommendation I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Understanding that there were some individuals who chose to conduct themselves with integrity even in the midst of a death camp changed the way I saw the world. It showed me that no matter how difficult my situation – I have within me the power to either transcend it or to make it a whole lot worse. We can’t ever eliminate the pain and suffering that comes with limitation. Even if we could it’s not clear to me that we would want to. If we lost the limitation, we would also lose the vulnerability that we love about each other.
Many people have asked me why God would allow for suffering in His creation. The best answer I can come up with is that the highest plane of good is not absence of suffering. The highest plane of good is redemption from suffering. A recliner in an air conditioned room is good. But a recliner in an air conditioned room after standing outside all day in the hot sun is better. We can never access the highest good without going through the suffering. There is no resurrection without the crucifixion. And this, to me, is the most valuable part of what you’ve done in the years that I’ve watched you. You’ve shown people that it’s okay to see the world for what it is – full of suffering and malevolence. You’ve shown them that it’s okay to see the fallen creation for what it is – fallen and cursed. You’ve shown them that it’s okay because you’ve shown them that they have what it takes to get through it and come out on the other side. You’ve shown them that there is something inside of them that is a spark of divinity the light of which is bright enough to drive off any darkness. And you’ve shown them that the key to making the world closer to the way it ought to be lies not in changing the world – but in changing ourselves.
It took me a long time to understand that the way to a better world runs through the proper development of the individual. Like many other people my age, I struggled to understand why we couldn’t just make the world itself better. Then as I thought about it I realized that combat is much safer for a Navy SEAL than it is for a 12 year old kid. It staggered me to see that how we interact with reality is the single greatest factor in what kind of reality we manifest around ourselves. I think this is why lying is so dangerous. Telling lies causes you to surround yourself with a reality that is mismatched with who you actually are. It’s hard to think of a more certain recipe for unending misery than that. This sort of revelation caused me to open my eyes and pay attention to everything.
Jordan Peterson you’ve sacrificed your anonymity and cast yourself into the blazing hot pressure of public recognition so that you could remind us of the hope our ancestors had. You’re not just another pop-psychologist or self-help guru. You’re an imperfect man who could have chosen to use your gifts to empower yourself and wage war on being – but instead you chose to remind us all of what we’ve come so perilously close to forgetting. That human beings, for all our flaws, are made in the image of God and are co-creators of reality itself. That if we clean up our rooms and get our acts together we might just bring a reality into being that is better than how we found it. This is a responsibility that all of us can choose to shoulder in all of our respective areas of life. It is a pursuit that imbues our existence with a sense of meaning that carries us through the darkest of valleys. It has carried me through the darkest of valleys.
I thank you for what you’ve done. I pray for you and your family as you face the difficulties of life. I’m just a young guy and God-willing I will have many years ahead of me to pursue these meaningful things. And I will remember you while I do it. I will remember the psychologist who never met me – but who through the miracle of modern technology has changed my life and the lives of millions of others. I feel like I know you and if you ever listen to this I’d love to meet you. Until then, God-speed sir.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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