My Journey Back

In this post, I’m going to recount my journey back to Christianity. I’ll first describe the version of Christianity I grew up with and fell away from. I will then pick up the story at the point when I encountered Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Pageau after that.

Hopefully, despite my ignorance of Christian lingo, the next sentence will make sense: The church I grew up in was non-denominational, evangelical in culture, and emphasized spiritual gifts (particularly speaking in tongues) like Pentecostalism, but not Pentecostalism.

I attended church almost every Sunday when I was a kid, less frequently when I moved into my teenage years. I went with my Mom and my two sisters (my Dad is an atheist). I was never particularly “zealous” and found church boring, I went because I had to, and later I went because I felt I had to. I kept going until high school, but when I entered university, I rarely went. During this time, I would describe myself as agnostic. I wasn’t combative or entirely dismissive, I just didn’t really see the point.

There were several reasons (probably a lot of the new atheist tropes) why I fell away, but what I discuss here played the largest role. I needed a Christianity that could stand up to the dark. What I knew felt like a brave-face Christianity—and that wasn’t going to cut it. For readers who don’t know, I have muscular dystrophy, a muscle-wasting disease, and, essentially, it’s like slowly dying. The problem of evil was literally eating away at me.

And this Christianity seemed to have only one answer, a miracle. Behind that seemed to be the idea that good things happen to good people. But if you’ve read the Bible, you’ll know that not only do bad things happen to godly people, they also happen to God. I knew that many go without a miracle, and if it was the same for me, what was I to do?

In my third year of university, I decided to stop pursuing my engineering degree. The workload was heavy, I didn’t want to extend my degree an additional year (I already extended it to five years), and a career in engineering didn’t seem viable because of my condition. So I withdrew.

Shortly after this, I encountered Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Prior to this, I did some general exploring and took a few online courses in attempt to figure out a new path forward, but I was still quite unclear as to what direction I should go. So this encounter was rather timely.

The beginning of the conversation was mildly interesting and focused on the political controversy surrounding Peterson rather than the mythological/religious aspects of his work — as it moved into these topics it became profoundly salient to me.

I didn’t have enough time to finish the whole podcast, I probably got about halfway through. It was probably an hour or two before I had time to finish the rest of it. During that time, I remained enthused and excited to hear what else Peterson had to say. That isn’t normal for me—I scored a 4% in enthusiasm on Peterson’s personality test. It seemed as though life had colour again.

In terms of Christianity, Peterson allowed me to open the nearly-closed door a little bit more, he showed me that there was more to religion in general and to Christianity. His psychological analysis of the Bible showed me that it at least housed practical wisdom, and, perhaps, more. He also dismantled the idea that our ancestors were morons; in hindsight, this idea makes very little sense. They had the same faculties, they explored different frontiers.

One idea of Peterson’s that resonated with me was the idea that life is suffering. And that given this, it isn’t so surprising that people fall into bitterness, despair, and resentment. On its own, this idea isn’t helpful—however, what he adds on is: life is suffering and giving into resentment only makes it worse. (Aside, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was also deeply impactful on me, I highly recommend it.)

Peterson’s antidote to resentment is of course meaning. This is where his practical advice and philosophy meet. Life is suffering, we need meaning, how do we get meaning… clean our room, improve our relationships, forge new relationships, climb the hierarchy, etc.

All of these things were helpful, but on their own, they weren’t enough, for me at least. I’m not quite sure how to articulate why they weren’t enough (perhaps, I’ll return to this in a future post).

After encountering Peterson, I discovered Jonathan Pageau through the podcast they did together. Jonathan Pageau’s work played a major role in my movement towards Christianity. I think this is because Jonathan’s approach focuses on showing rather than proving. The more philosophical approach played a role in my journey, but it eventually became unfruitful. Pageau’s symbolic approach did not wane in this way. I had my objections to Christianity, but I could see the overall picture so I didn’t feel like I needed answers to them all.

I could see manifestations of the patterns discussed by a Pageau, manifestations of high/low, death/resurrection, centre/periphery, etc. I could see these patterns in everyday situations. “I look up to so-and-so.” “Don’t look down on me.” “You’ll be more productive if you take some time for recreation.” “The fire will help the forest flourish.” And so on.

The fact that these patterns pervade multiple layers of reality need not imply Christianity. However, as I engaged with Pageau’s work more, I could see how Christ manifested these patterns in their fullness. Take the resurrection as an example, as Pageau often says, there is no other story that pushes beyond its limit. No one before Christ went into death and destroyed death itself. There is no frontier beyond that.

Why am I a Christian?

I can’t unsee Christ, I can’t unsee that things fit together, that the world is made of intelligible patterns, and that Christ is the cornerstone holding them together. The rejected cornerstone, because that too is part of the pattern.