Why are young guys into Jordan Peterson? (It's not his politics so if you think that's it, take a seat). Here's really why: Baby Boomer & GenX religious leaders have been exegeting the world of men since early 1990s. Dead wrong & they've lost a generation of guys in the process.
(2) Before Peterson, the first Jungian psychologist to sound the alarm about our culture's disintegrating understanding of masculinity in the late 1980s & early1990s was Robert L. Moore. Peterson is not that differnt from Moore. amazon.com/Robert-L.-Moor…
(3) Moore hit the nail on the head in 1991with "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine." Other books came out by Sam Keen like "Fire in the Belly." Where evangelicals reading these books? Not really.
(4) During the early 1990s, evangelicals were, in part, too busy fighting their stupid "culture war" against the "liberals" with their idolatrous conflation of America & Christianity as they were being played by Republicans. Catholics were all over this> amazon.com/Wildmen-Warrio…
(5) Why weren't the evangelical leaders reading Jungians? Maybe because of their really silly aversion to the social sciences? I don't know. Catholics don't have a sacred/secular approach to the social sciences. Many Catholics listened.
(6) But wait, no so fast, evangelicals knew something was amiss & Promise Keepers launched in 1990 but it was not based on the Jungian observations about American masculinity so it went off on a tangent to build a "biblical masculinity" for men needing "accountability," etc.
(7) Here's what the PK movement missed: beginning the in the 1990s American culture shifted to a disposition toward men grounded in shame & emasculation. Promise Keepers, in part, operated on the pre-1950s vision that men's basic problem was self-agrandizing pride & sexual sin.
(8) Ooops. The Jungians knew better. Builder & Boomer leaders were barking up the wrong tree. Here's why: in the 1980s American culture shifted to raising kids to be narcissistic, valued according to performance. Christopher Lasch wrote about this in 1990 amazon.com/Culture-Narcis…
(9) A culture that is narcissistic & performance oriented eventually becomes a culture characterized by perfectionism. A narcissistic, performance-driven, perfectionist culture is one that sets up *every* man to be destroyed by the shame of not measuring up.
(10) Millennials & GenZ men were raised in churches speaking to them as if they were 1960s men instead of 1990s men. Since shame is, on average, the root of all kinds of Millennial and GenZ sins, conservative churches metastasize the shame men walk into church already carrying.
(11) This is what Jordan Peterson understands. As an observant Jungian, he knows that 28 years of shaming men needs the antidote of empathy, encouragement, and practical day-to-day ideas to help men recover their identities. Moore predicted this in 1990. Where was everybody?
(12) In the early 2000s, John Eldredge tried his best to address this shaming but failed because he focused too much on the father and not enough on the oedipus issues with men's mothers & reduced masculinity to living in Colorado being in the woods.
(13) Dude. The YRR movement was terrible for this. Taking in cue from shaming boomer pastors, many new Calvinists shamed guys for not having good theology, playing video, games, being single, porn, etc. with ZERO empathy for their already shame. Lots of rebuke with no compassion.
(14) Acts 29 & Acts 29ish GenXers & Millennials leaders gave a valiant effort but many of those churches (like Seattle & St. Louis) were just as shaming as the culture at large. "Real preaching" is to make people, especially guys, feel like sh*t for being the guys that they are.
(15) Then dudes were also told (a) to stop wasting your lives b/c they were pathetic losers or (b) upperclass men were told that theirs entire lives were pathetic examples of idol factories that needed to be destroyed. No empathy, no encouragement. Just rebuke.
(16) Jordan Peterson, then, is the dad and pastor that 1,000s of millennial & GenZ men needed and never had because their fathers & leaders failed to see that perfectionistic, performance-driven, failure-avoiding shame is causing men to check out of church & school for vice.
(17) Until today's parents, leaders, and pastors abandon the idea that making guys feel like sh*t opens them up to the gospel guys will continue to withdraw from church life & school & sit at home and re-watch Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube. It's your void, not his content.
(18) Bottom line: no empathy for men's already shame, no encouragement with practical day-to-day, regular solutions = no dudes in your institution. Moore, 1990. Peterson, 2018. When will leaders listen? Rebuke must follow deep empathy & encouragement about men's already shame.
