James Alexander's July 8, 2025, Daily Sceptic article critiques Jordan Peterson's performance on the Surrounded podcast by Jubilee, where he faced a barrage of 20 atheist antagonists in a rapid-fire debate format. Alexander argues that Peterson's reliance on Jungian philosophy, framing Christianity through archetypes and psychological narratives, left him vulnerable to sceptical attacks, as it secularises the faith. He advises Peterson to speak less, write more, and embrace Kierkegaard's paradoxical view of Christianity to better defend its core tenets. From Peterson's perspective, however, his Jungian approach is not a retreat to a "motte-and-bailey" but a strategic bridge to reach a modern, secular audience. This discussion explores how Peterson might defend his position, addressing Alexander's critiques while arguing that his method is a necessary adaptation for an age of scepticism, without compromising the essence of Christian belief.
The Surrounded podcast, described by Alexander as a "speed rebutting" gauntlet, pitted Peterson against 20 young, quick-witted atheists who wielded arguments from Nietzsche, Marx, and contemporary ideologies like Net Zero and LGBT rights. Peterson, known for his lectures on Biblical narratives and psychological insights, attempted to defend the existence of God using Jungian concepts, stories as carriers of meaning, archetypes as universal patterns, and Christianity as a framework for moral order. His antagonists, as Alexander notes, capitalised on his equivocal definitions, such as his response to "What is worship?" ("Attend to, prioritise and sacrifice for"), which was swiftly dismantled by a sharp-tongued opponent named Danny. Alexander sees this as a failure of Peterson's Jungian lens, which dilutes Christianity's theological specificity, allowing atheists to breach his defences.
Peterson might argue that his Jungian approach is not a betrayal of Christianity but a pragmatic translation for a post-modern, sceptical audience. Carl Jung's framework posits that religious narratives, including Christianity, encode psychological truths about human experience, order versus chaos, sacrifice for meaning, the hero's journey, that resonate across cultures and eras. By framing Christianity as a repository of archetypes (e.g., Christ as the archetype of the self), Peterson seeks to make its relevance accessible to those who reject traditional theology. In his 2018 lecture series on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, he argues that these narratives provide a "meta-truth" that underpins Western civilisation, guiding individuals toward purpose and resilience.
Against Alexander's charge of secularising Christianity, Peterson could counter that he is not reducing faith to psychology but revealing its universal resonance. For example, his definition of worship — "attend to, prioritise and sacrifice for" — is not meant to be exhaustive but to highlight the psychological act of orienting one's life toward a higher good, a concept rooted in Christian practice. In Maps of Meaning (1999), Peterson writes that myths, including religious ones, structure human behaviour by aligning individual actions with collective values. By using this lens, he aims to persuade atheists who dismiss supernatural claims but might accept the utility of religious structures in fostering societal stability and personal growth.
This approach is strategic for the Surrounded format, where rapid-fire exchanges favour concise, relatable arguments over dense theological defences. Peterson might argue that invoking Kierkegaard's "absurd" faith, while profound, would alienate his audience further, as it demands acceptance of a proposition (Jesus as the Word made flesh) without first establishing common ground. His Jungian framework, by contrast, meets sceptics where they are, using reason and psychology to bridge to spiritual truths.
Alexander accuses Peterson of employing a "motte-and-bailey" tactic, making bold claims about Christianity's psychological necessity (the bailey) then retreating to safer, trivial assertions when challenged (the motte). Peterson could counter that this is not a retreat but a layered argument designed for a diverse audience. His bold claim, that Christianity's narratives are essential for meaning and order, is supported by his broader work, such as 12 Rules for Life (2018), where he argues that Biblical stories like the sacrifice of Isaac, teach sacrifice and responsibility. When pressed, as in the podcast, he shifts to simpler explanations (e.g., worship as prioritisation) to maintain clarity under pressure, not to dodge scrutiny.
This flexibility, Peterson might argue, is necessary in an "age of publicity and inertia," as Kierkegaard described in The Present Age (1846). Modern audiences, steeped in relativism and quick to dismiss absolutist claims, respond better to arguments grounded in observable human behaviour than to declarations of divine truth, which the atheist at first rejects. His viral YouTube lectures, amassing over 100 million views by 2025, demonstrate success in engaging sceptics by framing Christianity as a psychological and cultural necessity, not just a theological mandate. The atheist Oswald's retort — "And you're nothing" —reflects the challenge, but Peterson could argue that his approach plants seeds of doubt in such critics, encouraging them to reconsider the value of religious structures.
Alexander's second piece of advice, that Peterson embrace Kierkegaard's paradoxical view of Christianity, has merit but overlooks the practical barriers in a debate like Surrounded. Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) argues that Christianity requires a leap of faith to accept the "absurd" claim that Jesus is the Christ, a truth that defies reason and demands personal commitment. Peterson might agree with this intellectually but argue that it's a tough sell in a 20-on-1 debate with atheists who reject any appeal to faith. Declaring "Jesus is our saviour" or citing Hobbes's "Jesus is the Christ" risks shutting down dialogue, as it leans on doctrinal assertions that modern sceptics, armed with Darwin and Freud, dismiss outright.
Instead, Peterson's Jungian lens offers a middle path: it validates Christianity's psychological and cultural utility without requiring immediate acceptance of its metaphysical claims. In a 2021 podcast with Jonathan Pageau, Peterson noted that Jung's archetypes allow him to discuss the Bible's "transcendent" truths in a way that resonates with secular minds, potentially leading them toward faith over time. He might argue that Kierkegaard's approach, while authentic, is too confrontational for an age where belief is equated with opinion, as Alexander cites from The Present Age. By framing Christianity as a narrative framework first, Peterson builds a foundation for deeper theological exploration later.
Alexander's advice to "speak less and write more" addresses Peterson's tendency to over-elaborate in real-time debates, leading to equivocation. Peterson might concede that his rapid-fire definition of worship was overly polished and vulnerable to critique, as Danny's "you're adding something" jab exposed. In writing, as Francis Bacon suggests, one can refine arguments with precision, avoiding the pitfalls of spontaneous speech. Peterson's books, like Maps of Meaning, demonstrate this clarity, weaving Jungian insights with Biblical analysis in a structured format that withstands scrutiny better than his podcast performance.
However, Peterson could argue that speaking is his primary medium for reaching millions, with his YouTube channel and The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast garnering over 8 million subscribers by 2025. The oral format, despite its risks, allows him to connect emotionally with audiences, a strength Alexander overlooks. Writing may sharpen his arguments, but speaking makes him a "ready man," capable of engaging the "age of publicity" Kierkegaard critiqued. To balance this, Peterson might commit to scripting key definitions, like worship, before debates, ensuring they're robust yet concise, while reserving writing for deeper theological explorations.
Alexander's critique that Peterson's Jungian approach makes Christianity a "religion of immanence" is a serious challenge. By arguing that everyone already embodies Christian values (e.g., forgiveness as "carrying one's cross"), Peterson risks diluting the faith's unique claim to divine truth. He might counter that this is a deliberate strategy to counter the "demolition machinery" of modernity, Gibbon's historical critique, Schopenhauer's pessimism, Darwin's naturalism, and the technological triumphalism of Edison and Gates. These forces, as Alexander notes, have eroded traditional Christianity, leaving a secular void where "my truth" reigns. Peterson's approach seeks to rebuild by showing that Christian narratives underpin the moral order atheists take for granted, as argued in his 2017 debate with Sam Harris.
Rather than secularising Christianity, Peterson might claim he's restoring its relevance by demonstrating its psychological necessity. In Beyond Order (2021), he writes that Biblical stories offer "a map of meaning" for navigating chaos, a message that resonates with young people facing existential crises. The Surrounded atheists, quick and forensic, represent this sceptical age, but Peterson could argue that his Jungian lens is a trojan horse: it introduces Christian ideas to those who'd reject outright theology, potentially guiding them toward Kierkegaard's leap of faith.
Jordan Peterson's Jungian defence of Christianity, while flawed in the Surrounded podcast, is a calculated response to a sceptical, post-modern world. Against Alexander's critique, Peterson could argue that his approach bridges faith and reason, making Christianity accessible without compromising its core claim that "Jesus is the Christ." By using archetypes, he engages atheists on their terms, planting seeds for deeper exploration. While Alexander's call for Kierkegaard's paradoxical faith is compelling, it risks alienating audiences unprepared for the "absurd." Peterson might concede the need to refine his spoken arguments, leaning more on writing for precision, but his oral outreach remains vital for cultural impact. In an age of publicity and inertia, Peterson's Jungian Christianity is an imperfect but necessary bulwark against the tide of atheism, offering a path to meaning that even the sharpest atheists might one day reconsider.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/07/08/advice-to-jordan-peterson-after-watching-him-surrounded/
"My brother – who is a reassuring figure as he is firmly to the Right of me on almost everything (so he stands somewhere between me and Genghis Khan) – sent me a critical analysis of Jordan Peterson's performance last month on a thing called the Surrounded Podcast by Jubilee.
The Jubilee is a sort of aggressive round table in which one protagonist is faced by 20 or so antagonists: it is the debating equivalent of speed dating: speed rebutting, one might call it. With a bit of musical chairs thrown in. I wonder why Peterson subjected himself to it. Anyhow, as many YouTube commentators pointed out, Peterson was caught out by his antagonists. His antagonists were, you see, atheists. And atheists are a damnable crowd: difficult to persuade, as they are the self-certain denialists who can refer not only to Nietzsche, Marx and Freud but also to Common Sense, Easy Life and Politics, plus, of course, Net Zero, LGBT and CBBC – and, of course, Free Speech Union, Daily Sceptic and pretty much anything. Plus, they have a point: or many points (as there are many brands of atheism): and Peterson was trying to defend the existence of God from such panopticonic bombardment.
The entire history of thought in the last two centuries has consisted on the one side of attempts to liberate us from historic Christianity and – much harder – attempts to reconstruct Christianity over and against all the demolition machinery of Gibbon, Schopenhauer and Darwin (and Stephenson, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates Jr) and the rubble they left behind.
I have admired Jordan Peterson for speaking of Christianity, or, at least, speaking of the Bible. But I observed that the grave weakness of the Peterson position is that he falls back on Jungian philosophy. Jung was not Freud. Freud used reason to explain Christianity away. Jung used reason to explain Christianity back again. And Peterson's stock-in-trade is a Jungian language of stories, archetypes also 'the psychological literature'. But this means that his rationalisation is, at best, equivocal. This is because if one explains Christianity in terms that are not Christian one allows a breach in the defence. And his antagonists thus can ignore the bastions, cross the ramparts and enter the citadel.
The YouTube commentator I listened to called Peterson's particular trick the motte-and-bailey trick. This is where you, or I, come out into the bailey and make a provocative argument, but, under attack, retreat to the motte of conventional or trivial positions. I am not so bothered by this. We all do it. Almost all of us rattle between exaggerated and absurd claims and then, under fire, versions of those claims that are safe and trivial, whether because bracketed, clarified or compromised. We all do it. Especially in speech.
Peterson is harsh and lordly in manner, but assumes, in lordly manner, that he has time on his side, and what one noticed about les jeunes is how fast they were. American youth talks quickly: sometimes forensically, sometimes in gabble. No amount of wit, especially in an old man, is going to be able to turn the blade of some coxcombed youth. In the most viral clip:
LEAR. You're quite something, aren't you?
OSWALD. And you're nothing.
Perhaps Peterson hoped some Kent would come in and trip this young Oswald over.
Anyhow, I have two bits of advice for Peterson, one relatively trivial, the other more dramatic. The first is to stop talking so much. Francis Bacon said that reading makes a full man, writing makes an exact man, and speaking makes a ready man. The grave danger of being a public philosopher, that is, a philosopher who speaks, is that speech is troubled by endless equivocation. Many times I have been struck by a line someone said, and then written it down, whereupon it looked a lot less remarkable than it had sounded. If someone is throwing a spear at you, you need to adjust position. This is why I sympathise with Peterson's retreat from bailey to motte. Everyone in the history of the world has preferred easy-catch questions, or, rather, prompts for monologue. Everyone since Socrates. But Peterson should speak less and write more: in writing one is cooler, and soon finds out whether one's point is sharp or not. Do not confuse speech and writing. One cannot simply quote one's own writings when one is speaking. Peterson was asked, "What is worship?" and had an almost ridiculously fast and well elaborated answer: "Attend to, prioritise and sacrifice for," he said, a bit needlessly confrontational about it, too. This is, obviously, not a very good definition (it sounds written to me, and only passed the peer review of the wife not listening at the dining table): and so the young Oswald, who was called Danny, cracked it like a Pringle. So then Peterson tried to patch up the Pringle with a bit of chewing gum: complicating matters in academic manner. Whereupon the Oswald said, cleverdickishly, "Now you're adding something to the definition."
Unfortunately we live, still, in an age of audio: and though talk is charming, it is not accurate or even clear. And one can lose an argument in speech that one knows is sound on paper. I have spent a lifetime losing arguments, and so I prefer to be reactionary. Let the other person make an argument and then I'll attack that. Why set up skittles for someone else to knock down?
The other piece of advice is more fundamental. Peterson should read some Kierkegaard, or, more likely, read it again. Christianity is a vexed matter, and hard to defend or even articulate in an unsympathetic age. There are two things to say about Christianity in such an age.
The first is substantial. One should not engage in Jungian persiflage. One should not try to secularise Christianity or allege that everyone respectful, honourable or forgiving or 'carrying their own cross' is somehow a Christian in disguise. One should rather say, frankly, that Jesus is 'our saviour', as even Shakespeare does. Or, if one wants to be objective rather than subjective (as Peterson seems to want to do) one should say, as Hobbes suggests in Leviathan that the sum and substance of Christianity is the saying 'Jesus is the Christ'. Say not this, and one is not Christian.
The second is the rest. Christianity is, to begin with, simple: a simple affirmation. I believe. Credo in unum Deum and all that. But, after this, it is a lifetime of contemplation – or not, depending on what is willing to do. Why? Because 'Jesus is the Christ' is absolutely not simple. It is the not-simple as the absolute. It is, as Tertullian put it, absurd. It is, as Kierkegaard put it, a scandal, an offence, a paradox. One is being asked to believe something unbelievable.
To be asked to believe something unbelievable is simple if everyone believes something unbelievable. We do this every day. Switch on the BBC and believe – believe in all the things we are sceptical about in the Daily Sceptic. But 'Jesus is the Christ' is more unbelievable than climate change, trans rights and anything Ferguson, Whitty and Michie maintain. But to believe the unbelievable is vertiginously difficult if no one else does. We are asked by Christians to believe that a man was not only a speaker of words, but the Word, and that he was the Son of God – in fact, that he was God, or one of the persons of God. Divinity, Trinity etc. are necessary: but they are fragile theological constructs designed to somehow defend the proposition that Jesus not only came to say something about our condition, but that, by his works, and also by the strange and paradoxical willingness to submit to the malign work of others – in his passion or suffering at the hands of the Jews and Romans – he embodied the truth in such a way that we have to believe in him rather than believe in any of his utterances.
Anyhow, Kierkegaard is probably still the best attempt to articulate the oddity of this for the modern, sceptical mind. No wonder the trumpery Jungian piffle did not work well on the aggressively sceptical and atheistic youths on Jubilee. It is not enough to tell them that they are blind to the obvious, as Peterson tried to do. One has to say that they are blind to the unobvious. But this is even harder to do: and of course no one should expect that anyone would do this very well on Jubilee.
For any of you who are not getting a very clear sense of what I am saying, let me try this. Kierkegaard, in one his books – Concluding Unscientific Postscript (what a good paradoxical title!) – distinguished two types of religion. One is the religion of immanence, of accepting ordinary beliefs, of this-is-what-the-world-is. He took this to be a type of Christianity, a worldly Christianity, or our favoured 'cultural Christianity', but we may take this to be any belief system that says: "This is the world: act accordingly." It could even be an atheist belief system. He distinguished this type of religion, one which unites many Christians, Muslims and Atheists, from the paradoxical religion in which one has to believe the unbelievable. Not the relatively unbelievable e.g. Muhammad received a message from God, but the absolutely unbelievable, i.e., Jesus was the Word made flesh. Incarnation is the root of all Christianity. No Incarnation, no Atonement. And then Jesus is not our saviour.
Kierkegaard wrote an essay called The Present Age in which he said that we live in an age of publicity and inertia, in which no one does anything but in which everything is contemplated from a sedentary position, and in which we talk about my truth and your truth and everything is a matter of opinion. How about that – written in 1846 – as an anticipation of the smartphone/internet world?
Back to Peterson. The mistake he is making, I think, is to attempt to make Christianity relevant to our world by making it into a 'religion of immanence'. The 20 atheists noticed the problem: but not as elegantly as Kierkegaard did. Christianity simply is no such thing. Peterson is trying to make Christianity believable by saying we already believe it, whether we know it or not. And this argument simply ain't going to work.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey."