Jordan Peterson on The problem of hell
Peterson reads hell less as a literal post-mortem location than as a psychological and social reality — the state humans construct when they betray the Logos.
Jordan Peterson's treatment of hell, developed across 12 Rules for Life (2018), his 'Biblical Series' lectures on YouTube, and We Who Wrestle With God (2024), is not the traditional doctrinal picture. Peterson typically reads hell as a psychological and social state — the condition that individuals and societies fall into when they systematically lie, resent being, and refuse to take responsibility. Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulag are, for Peterson, historical instantiations of hell; so are the private hells that individuals construct through chronic deceit and bitterness.
This is a self-consciously non-literal reading, and Peterson has been pressed on it repeatedly by interviewers. He tends to resist the binary of literal and metaphorical, arguing that the psychological reality of hell is as real as any physical state, and that the biblical imagery captures something genuinely true about the trajectory of lives oriented against truth. Whether that commits him to a post-mortem hell in the traditional sense is precisely the question he most often declines to answer directly.
Peterson is cautious about the polemical use of hell to condemn unbelievers. His framework emphasises individual responsibility and the moral shape of a life, not the assignment of souls to eternal states by decree. For atheist critics, this is either a refreshing reinterpretation or an evasion of the doctrine's actual historical content; Peterson himself treats it as the deepest available reading of the tradition.
“Hell is a place you can really get to. It is a destination. People go there. It is the psychological and social consequence of the systematic pursuit of the opposite of the good.”