Evangelical conspiritualism and Jordan Peterson as a bridge to “manosphere” violence.

Conservative evangelicals have, through the 20th century, used highly violent, militarist language, to describe their relation to worldly society. They have, however, traditionally understood this language as figural because their struggle was understood as supernaturally oriented -- “spiritual warfare” conducted via prayer, proselytization and mission work, against “the spiritual forces of evil” -- and essentially defensive -- a deployment of “the full armour of God” (Ephesians 6:10-18). This paper explores the way that the ideational logic of conspiratorialism provides a vector for certain forms of the American evangelical imagination to metastasize across congruent cultural forms within the conservative mediasphere, allowing it to integrate rhetorics that enable the literalization of its discourses’ figural militancy. While most scholarly attention has been focused on conservative evangelical integration of White nationalist imagery and conspiratorial narratives (ie. “the Great Replacement” theory), this paper discusses a bridge figure who enables rhetorical integration of ideas from the “manosphere,” a corner of the internet devoted to legitimizing (mostly white) male grievance, persecution anxieties and violent revenge fantasies. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s social media friendly, conspiratorialist homiletic rhetorical style, his use of militant culture war imagery, and his invocation of populist affects such as fear, persecution anxiety, resentment and disgust, overlap with those prominent in certain forms of conservative evangelicalism, but also overlap with and thus enable, an integration of evangelical “spiritualized” militancy with the this-world oriented violence of the manosphere.

Conspiratorialism begins with the perception of a universal coherence behind seemingly unconnected phenomena, leading intuitively to the operative postulation that “everything is connected, nothing is as it seems and everything happens for a reason” (Barkun). Many evangelical traditions, especially Neocharismatic/Petacostal, foster such an incipiently apophenic interpretive perspective reined in with only weak forms of the traditional ecclesial guardrail of “discernment,” encouraging (often with reference to Matthew 10:29) their members to imagine that God is involved in and has a purpose for every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Conspiratorialism then often gravitates to the logic of “rejected knowledge”: the notion that ideas rejected by mainstream sources are more credible than “official” knowledge precisely because they have been rejected, their rejection signifying not their invalidity, but their disruptive potentiality. Similarly, in many evangelical traditions “rejection” of the Christian faith — usually in the form of rejection of the universal imposition of certain moral strictures — is understood as a warlike rebuke of truth by “the world” and the demonic forces that run it. Rejection of the faith, in this understanding, merely confirms Jesus’s admonition that if you follow him, “the world will hate you” (Matthew 10:22). The “hate” of “the world” validates the faith-held moral position. And like conspiratorialism, which has a narrative structure that accommodates a narcissistically grandiose form of agency for the conspiratorialist, evangelical (especially NPC) traditions encourage their communicants to understand that what “the world” thinks — its expert and scientific knowledge — does not provide a constraint on actual possibility, because if faith is strong and if prayer is sincere, miracles are always possible if one loves God (Romans 8:28). In such an imaginary, conspiratorial explanations and narratives of wondrous heroic resistance unbound from secular reality gain validity as articulating hidden truths and possibilities.

Fox News and other right wing content providers have cultivated a remarkably unified set of discourses that overlap broadly with those in conservative evangelical culture, while shaping it toward ends that do not particularly align with a traditionally Christian ethos. “Fox has two pronouns,” Megan Garber observes: “you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing.” The rhetoric of Fox and much of the rest of the conservative alternative mediasphere, in other words, invokes an organizing emotional structure of conspiratorial narrative and agentive possibility that overlaps with those of certain kinds of conservative evangelicalism. It invokes a sense of injustice that intuits hostility and responds with resentment, anger and reciprocal hostility, and it validates a form of oppositional resistant agency framed as heroism. In this way evangelical culture’s perception of the gender ideals described by complementarian theology being under attack aligns with the manosphere’s resentful sense of masculine grievance, with the effect of placing the spiritualized violence inherent in the evangelical rhetoric on a continuum with the explicit, if subjunctive, references to this-world violence — the rape jokes and death threats — that circulate in the manosphere. The only thing needed is a bridge enabling the two domains to map onto each other.

Since the late-’00’s psychologist Jordan Peterson has been the most persuasive public intellectual in American evangelical culture, in large part because he functions as this kind of bridge between evangelicals and imaginatively overlapping fellow travellers in the conservative mediasphere. Peterson is the beneficiary of the longstanding American evangelical amenability to pseudoscientific expertise, in which figures with expertise in one domain — ie. in clinical psychology and Jungian theory — are granted credibility in other domains — ie. self-help and cultural criticism. Though Peterson’s academic expertise is the source of his credibility, his rhetoric lacks academic rigour, peppered with value judgements and evidence-free assertions: he speaks, instead, a highly emotive, value-laden, absolutist moral vernacular shared with conservative evangelicalism. To the extent that evangelical culture has moved online, it has become even more disengaged from doctrinal guardrails, and an authoritative-seeming charismatic “preacher” such as Peterson can easily displace ecclesial authority. His charismatic brand of culture-war friendly, pop-psychology engages the anxieties and conspiratorialist, moralistic and homiletic, mimic modes of presentation valued in both evangelical and secular social media cultures. His critiques are easily integrated into conspiratorial narratives that appeal both to conservative evangelicals and denizens of the manosphere: the “natural” order has been corrupted by nefarious agents — feminists, “gender ideologists,” “Cultural Marxist academics, etc — and those usurped from their natural position in the hierarchy have to recognize their oppression and resist. His bridging function allows the real-world oriented violent language of contemporary online misogyny to be seen as a valid extension of the figural violence of evangelical spiritual militancy.