I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I learned Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, had recently become a Christian. If you’re not familiar with Peterson, five or six years ago he became a cultural phenomenon by speaking what to most people is common sense, but not in the Canadian university setting in which he worked. One piece on him put it well, “Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.” He became a Youtube sensation back in 2015 when he started to challenge leftist Canadian groupthink. He then published a best seller called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which launched him into a popularity he seemed to endure far more than he enjoyed. A good introduction is a documentary you can see on Amazon Prime called The Rise of Jordan Peterson.
Some years ago I started keeping a “Heathen List,” which, believe it or not, is a list of non-Christians for whose conversion I pray weekly. I recently added, for instance, Joe Rogan, of zillion person podcast fame, among other things. He’s becomingly increasingly red pilled of late given the utter insanity of what’s happening in our world, and often uses the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in a way that clearly shows he doesn’t believe he his Lord and Savior, and his Creator. Some years back I added Jordan Peterson, who from a human perspective has seemed so to embracing Christianity, but can’t quite get there. Only God, of course, can change hearts of stone to flesh, so we pray.
The conversion of Jordan B. Peterson could be huge culturally. Yes, I know that pales in comparison to his eternal soul, but the spiritual war behind all things has very real, real world consequences, and the war against Christians and Christianity only seems to be intensifying. Witness a Canadian law that just went into effect that makes woke sexuality the law of the land. When Kanye West boldly embraced faith in Jesus in 2019, it sent shock waves through popular culture; Kanye? That can’t be. It was, and still is. Peterson might be just as huge, but in a much different way.
I wrote a chapter in my book on the concept of plausibility structures, and the role they play in making certain things believable to us or not. I argued because of the ever present power of secular plausibility structures in Western Culture, most people reject Christianity not because they’ve studied the evidence or arguments for its veracity, but because it just doesn’t seem real to them. The secular view (God exists but is not relevant to my everyday life) seems more real. That’s what strikes me about Mikhaila (and pretty much every conversion story I hear); all of a sudden, literally when she woke up the next morning after praying hard for God to reveal himself to her, he was so real to her it immediately started transforming her life, praise God! This concept of plausibility structures is one reason why Christianity at the cultural level is so important, and why the conversion of people with cultural respectability is not insignificant. I learned of her conversion from this podcast on Rumble:
The gentlemen she’s talking to is an Orthodox Christian, and he has a very different perspective on the Christian faith than Protestants. He does a good job, though, being as fair as possible and not trying to indoctrinate Mikhaila into his version of Christianity. She’s brand new and knows very little, but she’s doing what every legitimate converted Christian does: she’s reading the Bible and praying every day, and trying to figure out what Church to go to. When I hear of and listen to testimonies, I think of the phrase, redemption accomplished and applied. Jesus came to save his people from their sins, which is why he was given his name. I don’t believe he tried, but actually accomplished redemption through his death and resurrection for those people specifically, like Mikhaila Peterson. Even those who are not Calvinists like I am believe it is God who saves, not we ourselves. I also think of Jesus’ promise for his church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, every day all over the world by the power of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of his people. Every time I see it and hear it happen, I just say . . . WOW!.
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