Thus said Douglas Wilson at the beginning of this recent debate with Joe Heschmeyer over the topic of sola scriptura. I call it his “table of contents” argument.

This argument, as he enthusiastically levels and defends it here, seems to assume that, in order for something to function as a genuine authority, it must be bounded, enumerable, and indexable.

But this is an un-argued premise, is it not? Why must we accept this? I think this is worth cutting into, here, because it’s endemic to lots of Protestant hermeneutic – simply, the framework is assumed at exactly the point where it most needs defending.

I think of the common law. Is it not authoritative and binding, even without being reducible to a single document one might flip through? Does its lack of clearly-defined boundaries make it less real, or make us less culpable? One might argue it’s less authoritative and that our culpability is lessened because of its relative ambiguity up against some enumerated alternative, but that doesn’t mean it is not authoritative.

I won’t defend, here, what Heschmeyer says about the Magisterium – that’s beyond the scope of this comment. But the Magisterium, both as it’s conceptualized and as it actually works in practice, functions similarly to the common law – constrained by the deposit of faith, by prior councils, by its own precedent. It can develop doctrine but it can’t contradict what it has already defined. One may insist it hasn’t worked properly, but these are unquestionably real boundaries, both in theory and in reality (the Magisterium has stayed very-much on topic for many centuries, now).

There may be no “table of contents,” but there are guardrails. I suppose they just aren’t the kind Wilson wants.

Wilson’s demand for a particular form of accountability here doesn’t mean that no other form exists. The Magisterium can be held accountable, just not in the way Wilson prefers. He smuggles in an assumption about what authority has to look like and then faults Tradition for not conforming to it. But what authority looks like was not the subject of this debate. The question is whether Scripture alone constitutes the full deposit of divine revelation. If it doesn’t – if God also handed on authoritative teaching through Tradition – then the fact that Tradition is harder to index doesn’t make it less true. It just makes Wilson’s preferred method of doing theology less convenient.

One other problem here is that Wilson keeps circling back to clarity of debate as the chief virtue of sola sciptura: “the table of contents sets the limits of the debate, and it has the virtue of being a clear debate.” But ease of argument is a procedural virtue, not an epistemic one! Isn’t that obvious? Am I missing something? The question isn’t whether we can have a tidy dispute, nor is the “winner” of this issue the one who can show why their alleged authority provides a clearer, firmer ground. It’s nice to have that in an authority, I suppose, but that’s not something we’re promised.

(There’s no “firmest” point, anyways, insofar as anything an authority says requires any level of human interpretation. And of course, this debate isn’t won or lost on the margin of which authority is “firmer.”)

All said and done, Wilson’s paradigm here doesn’t rise high enough to address the actual question that demands an answer insofar as we are serious about identifying (if there is one) the “full deposit” of God’s revelation to man. In what mode can we expect to find that, and why? What modes are out of bounds, and why? What criteria should we use, and why? Some of these answers, I think, require an observation of how various perspectives work out, in the end – their logical terminus and practical consequences. And certainly, we ought to consider the manners in which we arrive at truth (or, at least, decide that we’ve arrived at truth) in other areas of inquiry – what criteria is acceptable elsewhere, and what resources (tradition, a codified infallible source, etc.) prove useful for achieving success (however we might define that)?

These are harder questions. They demand a deeper reflection on the nature of truth, the role of language, and the psychology of understanding than Wilson undertakes here. I don’t think Heschmeyer necessarily engages these, either, but he’s not the one making the claim.

A final note – not just about Wilson, but about the shared premise underneath (as far as I can tell) this entire debate. This point is illuminated by the debate, but probably transcends its terms.

Both Wilson and Heschmeyer assume we need a particular kind of authority – some infallible source that settles questions. Their dispute is where to locate it. But this assumption doesn’t go without saying. Sure, it’s some authority that makes much theological debate even possible. If we can’t square up our claims against something, then what’s the point in talking?

But must that something be a propositional, verbal authority that comes to us from the sky? To what extent do we construct the need for a guaranteed authority not because God promised us one, but because we find the alternative unbearable? Even if one insists that we must have authority, what kind of authority can we reasonably assert exists? How specific must it be?

(I think the Catholic hermeneutic and “three-legged” stool model of divine revelation is less scandalized by these questions than sola scriptura, and more comfortable engaging with them continuously – especially insofar as those legs are understood to have with wide and liberal bounds. In this way, I think Heschmeyer left a lot on the table.)

My question here isn’t whether authority exists. It’s whether the demand for a certain kind of authority – clean, final, dispute-settling – brings us closer to God or is simply more convenient.

We attack people who (we think) lack our insecurities in order to justify the things we’re most unsure about (unsurety being a function not only of the genuine gaps in our confidence about some proposition, but also of the strength with which we proclaim – or believe we ought to be proclaiming – our conviction in that proposition).

Our religious (and moral) convictions are obviously center stage, here.

We all carry doubts about what we believe, and someone who seems genuinely happy without any expressed religious conviction (or whilst expressing ones quite different than our own) – “very contented pagans,” per Tucholsky – threatens our self-understanding. Their mere existence legitimates our deepest vulnerabilities. We need them to fail.

So we latch onto every perceived flaw – we fixate on all the ways these “pagans” seem wrong, sad, or confused. We revel in news about their lives falling apart. We attribute all that seems (to us) broken in their lives to the absence of some expressed religious creed.

(Never mind what these people might actually believe on the inside – look too hard and we might learn something we’d rather not admit.)

Meanwhile, we exempt ourselves from these criteria. We ignore the millions of people for whom God was not enough – friends raised and educated in our own religious communities but who fell away. We blame them (”they just wanted to sin!”) but refuse to concede that their desire to stray was something their religious environment probably should have been able to stop.

(It’s pathetic, really, to blame a young adult raised in a thoroughly Christian environment for leaving. It’s a “self-own,” as they say, of the highest order.)

We tell ourselves that we’re not confused, we know what we believe, we’re the “good guys.” Those “other” people suffer because they don’t believe like we do. Their lives are a mess because they don’t openly claim to believe in the same God we do, and with the same trappings and vocabulary.

Of course, we suffer too. But it’s never because of our beliefs, right? We might be chronically depressed or anxious or addicted to pornography, but hey, at least we’ve got the whole “religion” thing down.

(I’m being sarcastic.)

We’re good at moving the goalposts. We call “our people” those who do it like we do. We take pride in accomplishments that, by the grace of God, require little effort for us. We scoff at the thief, the adulterer, and the non-believer from our positions of wealth and health.

Anyways, I think pride is the greatest temptation for religious people today (and, I suppose, always has been) – the impulse to willingly ignore all our own faults in order to lend credence to a religious ideology we desperately need to be “right” because, like all modern persons, we chose that ideology more-or-less arbitrarily (”sunk costs,” if you will) and we don’t want to look or feel like a sucker.

How do we fight this? Back to my first sentence – stop hating. Be relentlessly persistent at seeing the log in your own eye. And you know what? I think a nice side-effect here is that we’ll start to feel less of the shame that is, ultimately, the real fixation of our hate.

The former is trying to make a statement or change the world or incite a movement. They publish a manifesto and often align themselves with some existing (even if nebulous) brand. These types have always been around and they have, often, played center-stage in shaping world events. Think Ted Kaczynski or Gavrilo Princip.

The latter are mentally deranged nihilists who literally don’t want to see any fruits of their violent work. They want to take the world down with them and, obviously, have no regard for the future, their friends, their families, or their ideological allies, even if they express political sentiments (usually alongside other obvious signs of psychic instability). Think Robin Westman or Nikolas Cruz.

Call me nit-picky, but I think differentiating between these two motivations is an important part of slowing this violent trend. I also think it’s part of being a humane and solutions-focused society.

We can suppress political extremism all we want (defund ANTIFA, or something?), and it might help. But dealing with suicidal people who hate whatever, to them, seems like the opposite of the chaos in their heads really has no root in partisan politics. These people are no different than 15 year-old school shooters or the guy who, an hour south of my home, shot a random police officer in the head 24 times last week.

The ICE shooter in Dallas today was clearly one of these people. He had logged more than 10,000 hours playing video games over the past few years. Ken Klippenstein reported today that Josh’s friends said he “was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up. He was into politics only in the 4chan sense – contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”

It’s one thing to hate (and kill) the “other side” for ideological reasons. It’s another thing to hate (and kill) the political and social powers that be during an act of suicide. Trying to prevent these things from happening probably entails different approaches, and lumping them together needlessly enflames anxiety, anger, and all-around chaos, and probably directs a lot of energy toward actions that won’t help as much as other things would.

At the very least, I hope we can all admit that taking the alleged “politics” of suicidal, porn- and video game-addicted teens seriously only drags us all down into the muck and lets these people literally control our society.

The Permanent Apportionment Act, which fixed the number of seats in the House of Representatives at 435, was sold as a neutral administrative measure. Proponents argued that too many Representatives would make running Congress difficult. In practice, this locked in a representational framework that increasingly empowers the smallest states regardless of how few people live in them.

The issue isn’t simply underrepresentation of large states like California. It’s that, thanks to the Constitution’s guarantee that each state gets at least one Representative, a capped House becomes less proportional with every census. The result is a form of democratic distortion that compounds over time. Today, the average Representative speaks for about 760,000 people – but in Wyoming, that figure is closer to 580,000.

This is not a glitch in the system. It’s the system working exactly as designed after 1929.

It’s often assumed this dynamic mostly harms Democratic strongholds like California and New York. But that’s not true. The second- and third-largest states – Texas and Florida – are overwhelmingly Republican. Because of the cap at 435 members, they, too, are being shortchanged. If the House had grown in proportion to the American population, Texas would likely have more than 50 Representatives today – not just 38. Proportional representation would make both parties stronger where their actual voters live instead of empowering whichever party can stitch together enough rural districts in overrepresented states.

And this imbalance doesn’t stop with Congress. It carries over into the Electoral College, where every state’s influence is tied to its number of House seats plus two Senators. Since each state gets two Senators regardless of size, and at least one Representative even if its population doesn’t justify it, the smallest states wield far more electoral weight per person than the largest ones. This helps explain how two of the last four presidents took office after losing the national popular vote.

(Notably, the last three Presidential elections would have still been won by the same candidates had the electoral points been allocated based on pre-1929 proportions, but each with larger electoral victories. In other words, a larger Congress would have delivered stronger electoral mandates to each winner.)

That isn’t just a quirk of federalism. It’s a symptom of a representational system that is frozen in time, increasingly incapable of adjusting to the reality of modern America. The population has more than tripled since 1929, but the House has not added a single seat. Districts are now so large that genuine retail politics is nearly impossible. It used to be that each Representative had roughly 200,000 constituents. Today, that number is roughly 760,000, and may hit 1 million before the end of the century if demographic trends continue.

With fewer Representatives, the incentives for people running for Congress shift toward celebrity, fundraising, and national partisanship. Representatives increasingly behave like social influencers instead of legislators because their job is no longer local. Voters don’t just think about who best represents their own local interests, but what type of person is needed to ensure Congress achieves a particular balance of power.

This helps illuminate something deeper about American political dysfunction. Gridlock isn’t just a result of polarization or bad faith – it’s baked into the structure. A coalition of lawmakers representing a minority of the population can reliably block policies that enjoy broad national support. And because this coalition is disproportionately made up of small-state representatives whose voters face little political competition, there’s little accountability.

The Founders anticipated a House that would expand with the population. For over a century, it did. Every decade brought new seats. The 1929 cap was the exception – imposed not for any grand constitutional principle, but to protect rural political power at a time of rapid urbanization. In hindsight, it was a defensive move that became a permanent one.

What would it look like to fix this? It wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment. Congress could simply pass a law increasing the size of the House – say, to 600 or 700 members. Doing so wouldn’t solve every problem, but it would restore some degree of proportionality, particularly for fast-growing states. It would also reorient the culture of the House toward local representation rather than media spectacle.

That such a move has never crossed the minds of most Americans speaks to how deeply we’ve internalized the current structure. Most Americans believe 435 is a constitutional number. It isn’t. It’s a relic – one that, for all its inertia, increasingly undermines the logic of representative government.

The real question isn’t whether big states are getting enough seats, but whether the very idea of proportional representation still matters in a country where the arithmetic of power no longer tracks the demographics of the people. Until that’s addressed, democratic legitimacy will continue to erode – not because of some crisis or scandal, but because the numbers simply don’t add up.

I tend to think most of this is an illusion.

The simple fact is that statistics just don’t show anything like a revival in these traditions. And honestly, I heard the same kind of talk back when I was in college 15 years ago. I probably had a hundred conversations on this exact topic – “young people want tradition!”

But since then? These traditions haven’t gained any significant share of overall church attendance. It’s probably true that they skew younger now, but that’s largely because the older generation – the ones who grew up with this stuff as the norm (for Catholics, pre-Vatican II) – is dying out.

Here’s what I think is really going on: Young people have always liked exploring unfamiliar things, and they always will. That’s part of why so many leave church altogether – it’s new, it’s different, it’s freedom. A small number of them stop off at traditionalist communities for a while. But then life happens – they meet a spouse from a different tradition, move somewhere that doesn’t have a Latin Mass or an Orthodox parish, or just drift into a more “mainstream” church with friends or family.

And once you have a family, practical concerns starts to matter more than liturgics and aesthetics: nurseries, youth ministry, meal trains, people to help you out. Most young people become less ideological and more pragmatic with time. I think of my child’s godfather – a cradle Catholic who’s taken his wife and (now seven) children to Mass almost every Sunday for two decades – who told me they switched parishes when their old priest started using too much Latin and a few of his kids started zoning out because of it.

But spend too much time in a particular algorithm bubble, and it’s easy to start believing that the average young Catholic attends Latin Mass, or that the average young man’s favorite author is Seraphim Rose.

(Many people will read this and wonder what the heck I’m talking about, and this proves my point.)

The reality? Almost no one is like this. Around 1% of Mass-attending Catholics go to Latin Mass, and Mass-attending Catholics themselves make up maybe 3% of young adults. Same story within Eastern Orthodoxy. I recently saw a glowing write-up of a “booming” Orthodox parish in Texas – it had fewer than 200 members. In that same Texas suburb, there are probably three dozen churches with bigger congregations, and hundreds across the metro area.

I think of a local evangelical megachurch here in Jacksonville that hosted their annual “Baptism on the Beach” last month. 11,000 people showed up. That’s twice the size of my Catholic parish (the largest in the diocese), which is 10 times bigger than the local Latin Mass parish. And I’d bet that this single baptism event brought in more new initiates to that one church than all the “traditionalist” churches in the country combined so far this year.

Why am I saying all this? Because I think in-group vibes are blurring people’s sense of reality. The fastest-growing churches in America aren’t traditional. They’re evangelical megachurches with loud, passionate worship, practical and engaging preaching, and strong community life. And they’re doing a much better job reaching the people no one else is reaching. Just 40 years ago, almost nobody in America attended a mega-church. Now? One-in-ten American churchgoers attend a mega-church regularly (source: Hartford Institute, 2020 Megachurch Report).

I’m not knocking traditionalist communities. It’s good that some young people find relevance in tradition. I do! I think more people would attend something more “traditional” if they knew more about why those traditions exist. But that’s abnormal, and a church that wants to reach more people needs to have the other 99% in mind.

“Todos, todos, todos,” as a wise man once said.

Now, I think that’s an anachronistic (and even anti-Christ) reading of that verse. But that’s beside my point. Consider that when European religious refugees and separatists settled North America, they didn’t name their towns things like Salem, Canaan, Nazareth, or Bethlehem by accident. Those names reflected a deep identification with Israel. Many early Euro-American religious communities truly believed they were the “New Israel.”

(Go and read Puritan sermons or founding charters. They are saturated with Old Testament covenant language.)

I’m not saying this was good or bad. But it’s certainly a fact, right? These settlers viewed themselves this way. It’s why they risked their lives crossing oceans and plains.

The Mormons – the largest religion founded on American soil – arguably took this the furthest. The LDS Church teaches that they, not modern-day Israel, are the true heirs of Abraham’s covenant. New converts to the LDS Church receive a patriarchal blessing (“You are of the tribe of Ephraim”). And of course, their trek across the North American continent in search of their own “promised land” – like Moses and the Israelites crossing Sinai – is a defining episode central to their religious conscience.

Likewise, enslaved Black Americans found hope and self-understanding in the Exodus story. Their spirituals and sermons are full of “Pharaohs” and deliverance. Many Black churches today still carry forward this living sense of themselves as a people waiting for liberation – not just as a metaphor, but as a genuine identity.

For centuries, American communities claimed the line of Abraham for themselves. This gave them a galvanizing sense of destiny and mission.

Even President Reagan embraced this vision. He spoke of America as “a land of destiny” and a “city on a hill” (quoting Puritan John Winthrop). He was even known to repeat the apocryphal tale of an angel of God signing the Declaration of Independence (a story invented by American mystic Manly P. Hall). Reagan’s rhetoric toward this end wasn’t original. Americans love it, and him, because it resonated with their mythic self-identification with a “chosen” people.

But today, this identification has shifted. Millions of fervent church-going Americans (evangelicals, especially – the base Ted Cruz claims to represent) no longer see themselves as the direct heirs of the promise. Instead, they see the modern State of Israel as the chosen people. America’s divine mission, in this view, is to protect Israel – to live out the old sense of “chosen-ness” vicariously through Israel rather than claiming it directly.

Interesting, right?

Before 1947, no American could have made the claim Cruz made two weeks ago. And it wasn’t until the 1980s that the argument found wide traction. It is arguably John Hagee, more than anyone, who enshrined “Christian Zionism” as a pillar of the modern Religious Right.

I wonder what it means for our politics that this vision has shifted – that the spiritual center of America’s “chosen” identity now lies overseas? I’m not sure it was ever wise for American Christians to conflate themselves with Israel, but that they did so is undeniable. And so, I think, is the fact that the founding of the modern State of Israel profoundly redirected that old self-conception.

But I think much (even most) of the time, it’s more likely that people who “leave Christianity” simply express their reasoning by borrowing language from a prevailing cultural vocabulary – in particular, one used by the kind of people who lose their faith but still strive for some kind of community-solidarity on the other side (say, the LGBTQ community, though of course, not every LGBTQ community operates beyond the purview of any religious influence) and a sort-of nod to the goodness of fellowship and togetherness even without the trappings of religion.

In other words, deconstructing one’s faith has (usually) is less about a tidy ideological pivot and more about finding words to articulate an already-felt incredulity.

I don’t have evidence for this aside from conversations with friends. But is it really needed, in our modern age? “Miracles,” the “supernatural,” and the sheer weight and influence of an alleged and invisible “spiritual realm” are hard things for modern people to justify – especially in the face of suffering and crisis. That these things could ever be allowed to go without much saying (as is, unfortunately, the case in many religious communities) and not end up discarded by inquisitive young people is unthinkable, to me.

And all this leaks over into other questions and doubts – especially as the prospect of a commitment to holiness and the denial of many “worldly pleasures” seems ever more oppressive as young people mature into adults.

But enunciating one’s rejection of the idea that, say, prayer works or that there really is a God out there is not necessarily an acceptable way to explain oneself to friends and family who take their faith seriously. It entails an (at least) implication that all the time spent in church and at religious school was mostly wasted – that all of mom’s daily prayers are useless. Understandably, few people are willing to throw this kind of wrench into their relationships.

So pointing to other, more relatable reasons (like “progressive politics” and its alleged concern for marginalized persons) that keep the discussion at a comfortable distance from questioning a loved one’s fundamental convictions is an easier way “out.” It’s a cushion for the fall, in a sense, that helps soften the blow for both sides of the usually-scandalous split.

I’m not opposed to seeing evidence that “progressive politics” really does drive people away from Christian faith. But for now, I simply don’t think positing “progressive politics” as the reason why someone rejects the idea that God is real, Jesus is the incarnation of God, and that Jesus’ kenotic love saves the world is likely to be accurate. True Christian faith runs much deeper than politics. When and where it doesn’t (or didn’t), I think faith probably doesn’t (and didn’t) exist – neither for church-going or non-religious people. And there’s no use in lamenting that someone fell away from a faith they never really had.

Anyways, so long as we level about religious participation only on the dynamic of expressed convictions and partisan politics, I think we talk in circles and uncover almost nothing about why so many modern people give up on it altogether. And we ostracize intelligent and good people (from whom we might learn a thing or two) with our unwillingness to listen just a little bit harder to what they’re saying and think deeper about why they’re saying it – our refusal to give them the benefit of the doubt, for just a moment, and read between the lines that many of them graciously keep within the purview of something that’s more acceptable (than something like, say, “God is fake”) to the family and community they are leaving behind.

We often use these words interchangeably, but they are different things.

I think that, for just about all of us, faith is a core part of our identity. It’s the deepest thing about who we are, whether we admit that or not. It’s what gets us up in the morning – some reason for continuing on through pain and suffering, and despite the lack of “proof” that there’s any purpose to life (we all die, in the end) and the continual disappointments we meet along life’s path.

Faith is a personal, internal certainty that colors how we see things. It doesn’t need a formal label or definition to be real, and its structure or “content” may not even be something we know how to describe. I think we often just don’t have the words to explain something so ingrained into the fabric of ourselves. Our faith is a very hard thing to articulate discursively. Most of it, I think, just goes without saying.

And it’s not only religious people who have faith. Everyone has some kind and measure of faith — that things will work out, that life has a purpose — even if they categorically refuse to adopt any specific or coherent way to express it.

And that’s what religion is – a specific and coherent way to express faith. More definitively, religion is a structure or narrative that gives content to faith, and maybe one that organizes what most people experience, more-or-less, as instinct into something more rational and easier for a third-party to understand.

In this way, religion is descriptive. It’s an “intellectual” development of faith that translates a personal and usually abstract experience into something that’s organized on some margin or other. It describes faith, though with varying degrees of success (sometimes the way one experience their religion may not align well with their faith).

Usually, if this religion is sufficiently intelligible to other people, it’s something shared amongst many people. It’s possible, I suppose, to have your own religion. But if it’s not shared, what would be the point? Leave your faith in the world of subjective instinct if there is nobody else who needs to understand it.

Anyways, there are many religions and they each use different stories and “models” to give structure to faith. I find Christianity particularly compelling. The narrative of God “incarnate” is more powerful than I can imagine any other story about God and the human condition might be. But there are other stories that have stuck around for millennia, even as the world around the generations of people who’ve embraced such stories (and, for that matter, the people themselves) has changed dramatically.

Faith is what happens inside. Religion is what gives expression to faith.

Maybe this all seems obvious. I think most people who’ve given serious thought to their “faith” and their “religion” have come to these same conclusions. So why bring it up?

A few reasons…

First, insofar as a religion entails one being “saved” from hell or from some corrupt condition (this is certainly a core tenet of Christianity), and insofar as having “faith” is part of how that salvation happens (this is, too, a core tenet of Christianity), this means that one may ostensibly be “saved” without religion. That is, one might have “saving faith” but not adhere to any religious creed or profess any religious framework. Jesus told certain of his followers that “their faith” had saved them, and he said this to both Jew and Gentile. These people had “saving faith” but different religions, which is something many religious adherents insist is not possible.

Second, this helps demarcate the two roles of religion – “descriptive” and “prescriptive” – which can help us to avoid the kind of cognitive dissonance that otherwise has many religious people (young people, especially) believe that they do not have faith when they find themselves in disagreement with their religion. Religion articulates faith, but it also gives shape to faith. Religion does not necessarily demand anything in return.

Third, this helps us to avoid the pitfalls of fanaticism and rigid ideology. When we recognize that our religion is, in large part, descriptive, we don’t have to get mad when people express a different religion. They are often just trying to be honest with themselves when they do this.

This understanding has helped me reconcile the concept of faith with the identities of people who do not consider themselves religious. They may possess an intrinsic faith – a certainty about life or purpose – but simply haven’t found a framework or story that describes it fully (I know many such people, full of hope and a kind-of faith yet irreligious). Religion, in this sense, serves as a descriptive tool: it articulates and gives shape to what someone believes, rather than demanding a belief in return. When faith is understood primarily as descriptive, it avoids the dangers of fanaticism and rigid ideology – problems that can arise when religion becomes solely prescriptive, telling people what they must do without allowing space for personal belief.

I think this descriptive approach to faith encourages a humble understanding of religion. It allows a person to find their own story within a religious framework, making what’s most important to them intelligible and relatable. And for those who inherit a religion, this process can be even more significant, as it involves aligning inherited beliefs with personal convictions. Ideally, a person’s stated beliefs should reflect what they truly value and understand. Religion, when it works well, helps us marry inherited beliefs with personal understanding over time.

However, this raises a question: If religion adequately describes our beliefs, at what point should it also start to prescribe how we act?

For me, this tension is particularly pronounced in areas where I don’t fully understand the teachings but choose to follow them anyway (like in the case of the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception). While this doctrine may not make intuitive sense to me, I let my Catholic religion guide me here, respecting its authority even in moments of personal uncertainty. In other areas of Catholic doctrine, I find a closer alignment with my beliefs. There, the doctrine serves as both descriptive of my own thoughts and even aspirational, giving me insights beyond what I could articulate on my own.

This interplay between description and prescription is fundamental to our inner life. Religion helps us articulate our beliefs, describing an moral or metaphysical conviction we may already hold, but it can also provide a guide where we lack the concepts (or, simply, the time and energy) to extrapolate our faith into a model for how to behave or how to think about “ultimately reality.” Religion can help us to live in alignment with our inner-most beliefs. I think striking a balance between these two things – reckoning honestly with what we believe while recognizing where faith may call us to act or conform beyond our understanding – is one of our most important human duties. This is a big part of what, in my Catholic tradition, is called formation of conscience.

Our inner life should be an evolving dialogue with oneself – a commitment to finding meaning and truth using our faith and our reason – and not just conformity to religious prescriptions. But openness to religious prescriptions may fill in gaps that we might, without religion, otherwise never even notice.

In the end, I think this interplay between descriptive and prescriptive belief challenges us to be honest about what we believe and to engage thoughtfully with the principles that our faith presents. It’s through this balance that we can integrate religion meaningfully into our lives – not as a set of rules to follow blindly but as a story that resonates deeply with who we are and what we aspire to become.

Some dance around the accusation, dressing it up with vague allusions to “globalists” or “elites” or “shadowy financiers.” Others dispense with the euphemisms altogether, opting for the sort of unvarnished paranoia that, until the past few years, was seen only on fringe internet forums, but now finds a regular home on mainstream platforms.

Now, I’m willing to entertain the idea that these people aren’t outright anti-Semitic, or that maybe, in their own minds, they’re honestly “just asking questions.” Maybe they think they’re uncovering something profound – some grand, hidden mechanism of power that only they are brave enough to expose.

But here’s the problem: by their own admission, they aren’t really “on to something.” They hedge. They smirk. They throw out a few eyebrow-raising “coincidences” and then quickly retreat behind the safety of plausible deniability. “I’m not saying anything definitive, I’m just pointing it out.” “It’s just interesting, isn’t it?”

And their hosts? Let’s focus on Joe Rogan, specifically. He nods along the whole time, for literal hours on end. Not just as some polite neutral moderator, but as someone who seems genuinely engaged.

But does he actually believe these people?

I don’t think he does. Nor do I think he’s intentionally trying to move the “Overton Window.” I think he’s just trying to have a good conversation and make more money. That’s the game. He likes weirdos, fringe thinkers, and people who seem like they know something the rest of us don’t because we, his audience, get bored with the same ol’.

In an especially tense episode just last week, Rogan’s guest – British historian and conservative Douglas Murray – took him to task for recently platforming conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, whose amateur work calls into question some of the most widely-held historical consensuses of modern historians.

“It’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to tell you what I think,’” Murray said. “If we all pretend Churchill was the bad guy of the 20th century, at some point, you’re going to lead people down a path where they think that’s the view, and that’s horseshit of the most profound kind.”

Rogan responded with uncharacteristic sheepishness. “I don’t think about it that way. I just think I’d like to talk to this person,” he says, as if giving a platform to Holocaust revisionism is the same as hosting a beekeeper. “I didn’t bring him on for that purpose. I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”

So it’s just about “conspiracies,” then – never mind the actual substance of what Carroll says. Rogan just wanted to platform conspiracy theory, and he simply used Carroll and his half-baked ideas to do that. Rogan might as well have interviewed a fictional character – Dale Gribble ranting about black helicopters, or Abed Nadir spinning a meta-narrative – and let them set the agenda. At least then we’d know it was just for fun, like Rogan seems to say.

To some extent, I get it (although it seems a bit insulting to take his guests with such a grain of salt). Controversy sells. Rogan isn’t exactly known for his intellectual rigor, so he can get away with it – with not taking full responsibility for the implications of his platforming.

But I think that makes the whole game even worse. Because while Rogan isn’t known for his intellectual rigor, he’s not a stupid guy. He’s smarter, I think, than he lets on. So as it stands, he’s just a guy with an expensive microphone and a massive platform who nods along because it’s easier, because it’s lucrative, because he doesn’t want to push back too hard and risk alienating the audience that made him rich or becoming too “mainstream.”

In so many ways, it’s nothing more than cowardice disguised as curiosity. And it’s borderline pathetic.

“You have to admit…”

I’ve brought this up to people before. Lots of people—regular Rogan and Rogan-adjacent listeners—respond with some level of sheepishness. Usually they even look down, or away. “Yeah,” they say, shrugging their shoulders. “That guest was kind of crazy. But you have to admit, those are some pretty wild coincidences.”

Oh, really? Pretty wild? So what could it mean, exactly? Do you think it’s possible that, if not for the Jews, we’d all be living in some utopia? That if only they weren’t around, lots of society’s problems simply wouldn’t exist?

They deny that, too. “I mean, I have nothing against Jews,” they say. “Seriously. I have Jewish friends.”

Hmm. Would you listen to these episodes alongside them? Have you asked them what they think about all this? Or would their understandable offense simply get in the way of the fun?

But the fact is, it’s hard to explain what’s wrong with how Joe Rogan talks, even if so many of us feel it in our bones. And it’s why so many people continue to listen who, ultimately, never seriously believe almost anything said on the podcast. I think most listeners know something is weird about it all.

On Bullshit

In his iconic 1986 essay On Bullshit, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt set out to define a word that everyone uses but few analyze. He wasn’t interested in everyday lying or rhetorical fluff. His goal was more elemental: to explain what bullshit is, how it operates, and why it’s corrosive to truth.

And while Frankfurt couldn’t have known it at the time, his essay doubles as a field guide to understanding Joe Rogan, Ian Carroll, and the online manosphere’s favorite pastime: saying things that sound serious without ever meaning to be held accountable for them.

Here’s the core of Frankfurt’s argument.

The OED defines a bull session as “an informal conversation or discussion, esp. of a group of males.” … What is distinctive about the sort of informal discussion among males that constitutes a bull session is, it seems to me, something like this: while the discussion may be intense and significant, it is in a certain respect not “for real.”

This is Frankfurt’s first critical point: bullshit is male-coded performance. It thrives in the dynamic where men, usually too emotionally-guarded for this kind of vulnerability, find a comfortable “safe-space.” They won’t voice their private, outlandish opinions around their family or coworkers, of course, and they’ll try to blame “political correctness” for that. But they’ll open up on the biggest podcasts in the world when they’re insulated by the unspoken agreement that nothing said is binding. In these spaces, honesty is less important than vibe. Conviction is less important than swagger.

This is why Rogan’s show doesn’t feel like propaganda—because on the surface, it’s just a bunch of guys “shooting the shit.” The stakes feel low. The tone feels unserious. But it’s a very particular kind of unseriousness: the kind where serious topics are played with, not examined. The ideas don’t come with disclaimers—they come with winks.

You can see this dynamic in who participates. Besides Candace Owens, whose audience is also majority-male, how many women operate in this space? How many females go on Rogan’s show to spin casual theories about Jews, culture, or shadowy elites? Almost none. Because this genre of bullshit, as Frankfurt makes clear, is gendered. It’s not just a behavior; it’s a ritual of male bonding. And Rogan’s audience reflects that – more than 80% male, according to most surveys.

Frankfurt continues:

The participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things… without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say.

This is critical point #2: plausible deniability is the currency of the bullshit economy. Guests say things like “I’m not an expert, but…” or “I’m just pointing something out…” and Rogan nods along, not endorsing, not condemning—just vibing. Everyone gets to participate in the game of speculative taboo-breaking without owning any consequences.

That’s the core appeal. Not clarity. Not truth. Not even genuine inquiry. The appeal is in the performance of daring to “go there.” And if someone calls it out? You were just joking. Or just curious. Or just listening. The fallback is always ready.

Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words, upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be understood as being what he means wholeheartedly or believes unequivocally to be true. The purpose of the conversation is not to communicate beliefs. Accordingly, the usual assumptions about the connection between what people say and what they believe are suspended.

That last line could be Rogan’s tagline.

It’s why shows like his can host someone casually implying Jewish conspiracies are behind American decline, only to turn around and say: “Hey, I’m not saying I agree – I just like talking to interesting people.” The game is to say what others won’t, blame that reticence on “political correctness” run amok, and then insist that it all means nothing, anyways.

Frankfurt wraps it up:

These statements are unconstrained by a concern with truth… Bull sessions are, indeed, quite probably a sanitized version of bullshit sessions.

And that’s where the real danger lies. Because bullshit isn’t the same as lying. It’s more corrosive. A liar at least cares about what’s true enough to try to conceal it. The bullshitter doesn’t care whether something is true or false. He’s focused only on the sort of reaction he gets.

And when the same bullshit gets repeated enough – on a massive platform like Rogan’s – it becomes background noise. It starts shaping belief through osmosis. It bleeds into the mainstream, where it stops being performance and starts becoming policy.

So yes, On Bullshit is about language. But it’s also about cowardice. About what happens when you trade honesty for vibes. About how unserious people with massive audiences accidentally launder dangerous ideas into public discourse by hiding behind the thinnest veneer of “just wondering.”

Frankfurt could’ve called it On the Manosphere and published it tomorrow. Nothing would need to change.

How to Respond?

That’s all good and well. But isn’t this kind of thing just perennial? Will it ever really go away? Is this just a “Boys will be boys” sort-of thing, mostly-harmless and, at the end of the day, a built-in feature of human society?

Maybe so. But so is being stupid. We don’t have to give ourselves over to the paradigm. We can try to be serious and thoughtful with our words, even when it’s not fun. We can resist the temptation to turn every conversation into an audition for edge-lord status, or a social experiment in how much we can get away with saying before someone calls us out. We can stop treating serious matters – antisemitism, historical revisionism, conspiratorial politics – as party tricks for podcast banter, coming in just between the ads for “cooking-for-one” meal-kits and overpriced nicotine pouches.

We can also start holding people like Rogan accountable – not with cancel campaigns or purity tests, but with the thing they fears most: boredom. We can get bored of the bullshit. We can stop pretending it’s funny to watch someone sit in a leather chair and entertain genocidal theories with a shrug and a vape. We can demand better conversations, with people who actually care about getting things right, even if they’re less entertaining.

Because at some point, the line between bull session and bullshit breaks down. When the same “just asking questions” routine gets repeated enough, it stops being hypothetical. It starts shaping how people think. What begins as unserious talk becomes, slowly and insidiously, a kind of ambient worldview – one where nothing can be known with any degree of certainty, everything “mainstream” is suspect, and the worst ideas are never really removed from the table.

And in this fog, bad actors thrive. Not lovable cranks or harmless eccentrics, but angry people with hidden (and, sometimes, not-so-hidden) agendas. People who know how to ride the wave of “I’m just saying” into something far darker.

Call me a party-pooper. Self-righteous, even. But injecting continuous strems of bullshit int our ears has consequences. The longer we let cowardice wear the mask of curiosity, the harder it’ll be to tell the difference between the two. At some point, someone has to call it what it is – before the whole thing goes mainstream again.

That’s what they say, at least, to explain the continued and meteoric rise of the “father figure” influencer – middle-aged men like David Goggins, Patrick Bet-David, Gary Vaynerchuk and, most notably, Jordan Peterson. Indeed, in one of the earliest (albeit brief) analyses of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, National Review profiled the Canadian “self-help guru” and his meteoric rise on YouTube in 2017, saying:

Peterson connects his message to something eternal, offering mytho-intellectual fatherly advice that men, especially Millennial men, are starved for in an age of perpetual and trivial digital distraction.

Of course, Peterson has only become more popular since then. As of today, he has 5.6 million followers on X and 8.6 million on Instagram. His 2018 self-help book 12 Rules for Life has sold, according to his website, more than 7 million copies. More than 850,000 people have purchased tickets to any number of his popular in-person lectures. His YouTube channel boasts more than 8 million subscribers, where he’s posted more than 1,000 long-form videos covering an increasingly diverse set of topics – videos with titles like Talking to Muslims About Christ, The Fight Against Worldwide Child Slavery & the Sex Trade, Introduction to the Idea of God, and The Origin of COVID-19.

But while his topics of discussion have diversified, his core message remains the same. Per his podcast’s official description, Peterson offers “a new perspective and a modern understanding of your creativity, competence, and personality” that caters predominantly to men – a demographic Peterson says comprises more than 90% of his audience.

A “new perspective” – that’s the key. Peterson represents, as cultural critic Anthony Bradley described all the way back in 2018, “the father and pastor that thousands of Millennial and GenZ men have needed for nearly thirty years.”

Jordan Peterson, savior of young men. It’s a nice story – endearing, even.

But is it true?

Fathers Today

Over the past 50 years, parenting behaviors in the West have changed dramatically. In fact, it’s hard even to identify some sort of baseline when it comes to how much time, and what kind of time, parents spend with their children. For as long as any standardized “parenting metrics” have existed (just a few decades), the way parents spend their time in regards to their children has been in flux.

But one thing is for certain: Parents today – both mothers and fathers, and especially the university-educated – spend vastly more time than ever before with their children.

In a landmark 2016 study by sociologists Dotti Sani and Treas, parents across the United States and Europe were demonstrated to have more than tripled, on average, the time they spend each day with their children. Our World in Data visualizes their findings below:

With the exception of France, every country surveyed showed a significant – massive, even – increase in the time parents spend with their children (in this study, children means those under 13 years old). And this study was conducted before COVID-19, which saw millions of parents in these countries move more-or-less permanently to a work-from-home arrangement, cutting out the time spent commuting on either end of the workday, and (in the United States, at least) more-than doubling the number of children being schooled at home by their parents.

Pew Research has researched the role and behavior of fathers, specifically. In 2013, they reported that between 1965 and 2012, fathers almost tripled the time they spend with their children – from 2.5 to 7.3 hours per week. That study is, of course, now 14 years old, but more recent research confirms that this trend has only accelerated.

Of course, this hasn’t all happened in a vacuum. Since 1965, the number of American children raised in single-parent households, born out-of-wedlock, and raised predominantly by a step-parent have all increased dramatically. Simply spending more time with their kids isn’t the only thing that’s changed for the average parent. But the data that Pew (and other researchers) use to measure time-spent-with-kids is all-inclusive – even divorced dads, for example, are still spending more time with their kids than did such dads in the past.

The simple fact is, dads are more involved in their children’s lives today than probably at any time in the history of the West. There’s hardly a question about it.

Replacing Dad?

Is it true, then, that the “Jordan Peterson phenomenon” is about young men’s need for more paternal validation than they got growing up? For more fatherly encouragement and instruction? For someone older and wiser to show them the way?

Is the 19 year-old teenager who binges Peterson videos for hours on end really trying to “re-father” himself?

We can’t know, of course, what exactly goes on in the mind of Peterson’s fans, and there are ostensibly many reasons one might like the man. It’s probably true that many of his followers felt aimless before stumbling upon one of his videos (aimlessness and angst, and even clinical mental illness, are hallmarks of modern adolescence). Lots of teenagers, both males and females, are depressed and many of them don’t like their parents.

But did these teens’ parents fail them? Is that what predicts interest in people like Peterson? More specifically, did all of these dads, spending more time than ever with their sons, somehow drop the ball?

It’s not an easy question to answer. But new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience sheds some important light on just what goes through older adolescents’ minds when mom and dad talk. Psychiatrists Abrams, Mistry, Baker, Padmanabhan, and Menon write:

Using functional brain imaging of human voice processing in children and adolescents (ages 7-16), we demonstrate distinct neural signatures for mother’s voice and nonfamilial voices across child and adolescent development in reward and social valuation systems, instantiated in nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. While younger children showed greater activity in these brain systems for mother’s voice compared with nonfamilial voices, older adolescents showed the opposite effect with increased activity for nonfamilial compared with mother’s voice. Findings uncover a critical role for reward and social valuative brain systems in the pronounced changes in adolescents’ orientation toward nonfamilial social targets.

In other words, older adolescents are less likely to listen to their parents than to strangers. Brain activity associated with the “reward and social valuation systems” show increased activity for non-familial voices in positive correlation with a child’s age (the older the child, the less mom’s voice resonates).

I suspect that most parents of teenagers didn’t need a study to tell them this. And most adults, if they’re honest, can probably point back to a time during their adolescence or early adulthood where they ignored mom and dad’s rules to experiment with their own way of life, or to listen to some other mentor (a coach, or an older friend) instead. “Coming of age” films and books are aplenty, after all, and the “rebellious phase” has become a virtual rite-of-passage for American teens.

So perhaps what’s really going on here is nothing new. When Peterson says “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (the title of Chapter 1 in his book), his audience listens because, well, he’s a stranger. Mom and dad may feel like they’re talking to a wall when they suggest as much to their teenage son day after day, but Peterson gets it done. And maybe it just doesn’t matter how much more time dad spends with their kids – yes, teens are with their parents more than ever before, but they just don’t listen.

In this way, Peterson (and those like him) are, perhaps, more the fortunate recipients of a perfect storm of time-and-place than some sort of “mytho-intellectual” teen-whisperers. The internet simply made it possible for someone to be everyone’s “online dad” by sharing nothing more than very basic advice – literally, “clean your room” (the kind of thing most teenage boys have heard from mom and dad a hundred times before).

The Phantom Father Archetype

If that’s true – if someone like Jordan Peterson was simply bound to happen – then the whole thing is probably harmless, or even good. After all, standing up straight and cleaning your room are good things for young people to do, and thousands of testimonials both online and at Peterson’s in-person lectures attest to the idea that his impact on his audience is very real and very positive. His politics aside (and he’s become markedly more political in recent years), a 19 year-old male could do a lot worse in terms of finding someone online to follow obsessively.

But I think there’s a dark side to rhetoric like Peterson’s. It happens when young men become genuinely convinced that they never heard any of this stuff before – that dad failed to help them become a man and so they need to listen more closely to people like Peterson (and Goggins, and Vaynerchuck, and even Andrew Tate), even at the expense of listening to real-life mentors.

Why do young men feel they can so publicly embrace Peterson and ignore dad? I think much of it has to do with a shared cultural vision of an “archetypical father” – a strong, manly, steady, ambitious, caring, and hard-working male authority – that simply is not easy to see in dear ol’ dad. It’s a picture of strength, vitality, and stability that many Peterson fans (and, for that matter, Peterson himself) allege is not prized today as much as it was in the past. “There is a backlash against masculinity,” Peterson said in a popular 2018 BBC interview. “The masculine spirit is being increasingly demeaned.”

Maybe he’s right. To be sure about that would require a lot of study. Many of his fans may scoff at the suggestion that (their definition of) masculinity is not under existential threat by forces more-or-less beyond their immediate control. But separating a secular “de-masculinization” trend owing, perhaps, to changed diets and more sedentary working conditions from some active campaign against masculinity isn’t as easy as those scoffers are likely to insinuate.

Nevertheless, a picture of masculinity has emerged in recent decades that has a strong hold on young people (especially males) today – an aspirational “father archetype” that has young men striving to gain and wield a particular sort of power over themselves, others, and the circumstances around them. The vision is, I think, of a man much bigger and more powerful than the more passive “cog-in-the-machine” they feel “society” raised them to become.

But where does this picture come from? It’s easy to find examples in modern literature and film – think Mufasa (Lion King), Captain Von Trapp, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson in Taken), Cooper from Interstellar (played by Matthew McConaughey). Even Donald Trump fits the bill in many of his fans’ minds. Tony Stark is arguably the most powerful man in the world and yet sacrifices himself, on his own volition, for the sake of his daughter. The examples are endless.

But what about older, more traditional examples of such a figure? From antiquity, or even early-modern literature? Well, those are harder to find insofar as we limit ourselves to the narrow mythical imagination commonly available to American boys and men today.

Consider the Scriptures. Proverbs, much of it narrated by a father figure sharing wisdom with his “children,” arguably demonstrates such a figure – eminently wise and perfectly confident. Joseph the adoptive father of Jesus, too, is depicted (especially in Roman Catholic lore) as a “protector” – hard-working, self-sacrificial, a “strong-silent” type. And perhaps Job, who was “blameless and upright,” father to seven sons and three daughters, and the proud owner of seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and very many servants (the book calls him, on account of his progeny and his wealth, “the greatest of all the people of the east”).

But aside from these examples, a Biblical “father archetype” is elsewhere hard to find. Even Yahweh himself exhibits considerable emotion in the Old Testament, changing his mind and becoming enraged, even “regretting” what He did and “relenting” in the face of Abraham’s and Moses’ insistence. “Father Abraham” was prosperous and his obedience to God was, per Hebrews, ultimately credited to him as righteousness, but he also doubted God’s promises and fathered a complex and broken family situation that set off generations of intense conflict. King Saul was paralyzed by fear, sought the help of a medium, was ultimately defeated by his enemies, and then killed himself. King David – wracked with doubt and overwhelming fear – was a murderer, womanizer, and even chose, near the end of his life, to flee his throne and his city rather than face his own son. Zechariah didn’t believe his wife and was, embarrassingly (especially for a priest), struck mute by God for several months. At least two of Jesus’ disciples left their own father empty-handed to become Jesus’ disciple, and none of the disciples were known to have started or raised families of their own – at the very least, no mention is made of this aspect of their lives, if it existed. Jesus, of course, was a 30-something year-old unmarried man with close female friends at whose home he was known to stay. And the Apostle Paul, of course, suggests that it’s better for a man not marry and not to have children, but rather to live chastely and quietly, submitting to authorities and staying out of political squabbles.

None of these examples paint a compelling picture of the sort-of figure that many young men today have in mind when they imagine a strong and maximally-masculine father. And, for that matter, nor does Peterson himself. He’s rail-thin, sickly-looking, and highly-emotional. His voice is weak and shaky. His appearance is that of a stereotypical flimsy-wristed academic, even to the point of caricature. He’s recently struggled with drug addiction. He wears flamboyant ties and bright neon colors. By his own admission, his wife’s cancer diagnosis in 2019 sent him into a years-long nervous breakdown.

(And, for what it’s worth, his own room – seen in the background of his older videos – was usually quite messy. He even admitted to getting his start as an “influencer” by lurking around on the internet in the middle of the night, answering stranger’s questions on Quora.)

So what makes Peterson and his ilk so special to so many young people?

Dad, a Peterson Fan

A few years ago, I attended a Jordan Peterson lecture in-person in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. I wouldn’t have purchased tickets to this event, but a friend had one for me.

We arrived almost an hour early, and I had the chance to observe people filing into their seats. The event was almost sold-out, which means there were almost 1,900 people in attendance.

The audience appeared to be more than 90% male. And interestingly, a number of them were in attendance with men who appeared to be their own fathers. Even the friend who invited me had brought along one of his father-figures – an uncle who, I later learned, paid for our tickets (and then later our dinner) that evening. My own father, too, would undoubtedly have attended had he been in town, and he probably would have paid for my ticket.

Call me crazy, but I’m not willing to bet that these fathers were persuaded by their sons to attend Peterson’s lecture in order to learn all the things they failed to do, as fathers – all the truths they forgot to communicate to their sons. In fact, I think the opposite is true. I think these fathers are as much fans of Peterson as are their sons, and it’s because he more eloquently and persuasively communicates the same values they did, in fact, try to pass on.

So is Peterson just speaking to the choir? I think that’s probably more true than not, and, for that matter, true of most “influencers” (in other words, they really don’t influence much of anything). I’m unconvinced these types have really “moved the needle” much. But if we give even the smallest benefit of the doubt to the many voices (mostly online) who cite Peterson as a true, life-giving inspiration, then there’s probably something else going on, but it doesn’t correlate with some dearth of fatherly influence in the average young man’s life.

Here’s what I think: Jordan Peterson resonates now, more so than someone like him might have resonated in the past, because most young men do understand what masculine responsibility should look like. They learned it from their many male teachers and sports coaches and from their very-involved dads. They saw it on TV and on the big screen, too – many (even if not all) Hollywood father figures fit this mold. In fact, I think the idea of a strong, masculine father is almost innate and perhaps even more well-defined (and even exaggerated) today than in the past.

So I think what young men love about Peterson is, simply, that he can speak it. He knows what’s inside, and he brings it to the surface with long, rambling, and admittedly insightful monologues. Remember, he himself doesn’t obviously demonstrate many of the virtues he espouses, nor is he a picture of male strength and vitality (or even of health). But he’s an eloquent defender, with the microphone and the pen, of the things most men of all ages believe, for better or worse, are right and good. Somehow, young men today have a positive archetypical vision of the ideal father, strong and steady, that persists even despite all the alleged attacks on it from a “feminized” culture (though if you watch any popular Hollywood movie, the archetype seems to be very much in vogue – more often platformed, I think, than demonized).

And of course, Peterson frames all this in terms of a conflict – a heroic battle with oneself, with one’s demons, and with a broader culture that (allegedly) has it out for men who strive to be principled, “masculine,” and self-reliant. That’s exciting stuff!

Now, I’m not convinced our broader culture is really so opposed to the values Peterson promotes, nor do I think a reactionary stance is how he got popular initially. If I ever liked Peterson, it was when he pointed men to the enemy within, and not outward to (primarily political) figures like Kamala Harris, Greta Thunberg, or, hilariously, Pope Francis (that curmudgeonly embodiment of nihilism and self-centeredness, am I right?). Nevertheless, his framing is effective – it always raises the stakes to have a big, bad enemy lurking around the corner.

Anyways, I think most fathers can and do demonstrate masculine virtues sufficiently to their sons, and have done so without much variation for a very long time. It’s not all on dads, anyways. My own sons are incredibly forgiving of my flaws, and always seem to see the best in me because it’s what they desperately want to see. Being their “superman” isn’t hard, and I hope and suspect they’ll pick up enough of my better qualities before they inevitably age out of my fan-club.

But as they grow older (my oldest will soon be a “pre-teen”), I assume it will be harder for me to live up to their expectations. I imagine the more they understand who I am, the less impressed they’ll be with me (I’m nothing special, after all). Even if I practice what I preach well enough, the stresses of day-to-day and minute-to-minute parenting my five children are going to put me in a tough light – quite unlike the dozens of spotlights at the Peterson lecture that had him literally glowing on the stage.

I think the more time I spend with my kids, the harder it will be for them to look past my weaknesses. After all, as the research I cited above demonstrates, eventually they just quit listening. Perhaps spending more time with our teenage sons isn’t necessarily good for their psyches.

But no matter what, explaining and defending your values in front of a sometimes-hostile world will always paint a more compelling – even downright heroic – picture than whatever figure dear ol’ dad projects while he stands in line at Home Depot on a Saturday morning, flip-flops on and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in-hand. Real, day-to-day fathers simply don’t stand a chance against the freedom and mental acuity that empty-nester Jordan Peterson enjoys as he picks fights and demonstrates his impressive cultural vocabulary (one honed, of course, over decades of study at an Ivy League university while being financially supported by his wife).

I digress. The bottom line is this: our expectations of parents (fathers, especially) are distorted by very-modern and hyped-up archetypes that no real-life dad, no matter how present or competent, could fully embody. Figures like Peterson succeed not because they replace chronically-absent fathers but because they occupy an entirely different space – one made possible more by technology than by some cultural sickness (I tend to think the technology itself is the cultural sickness, but that’s for another essay). Peterson father-types are cultural symbols, unburdened by the messy, imperfect realities of day-to-day parenting. At 62, Peterson is more appropriately analogized to a detached grandfather dropping in with advice on Sunday afternoon (and bowing out before bedtime chaos begins) than to a struggling, 32 year-old dad trying to feed six mouths on a $50,000-plus-commission salary. Peterson may articulate truths that fathers try to convey, but he does not replace them anymore than grandpa living four states away can replace dad.

Oh, and it’s simply not true that modern men are uniquely un-fathered. There is no evidence of this. For the many young men, and many of Peterson’s fans, dad was (and remains) more present and engaged than ever. We just didn’t listen to him, and I think it would behoove us as men and individuals, and even as a society, to more readily admit that.