Jordan Peterson on Religion and societal harm
Peterson argues that while religion has caused harm, the attempt to build society without it has produced far greater catastrophes.
Jordan Peterson's response to the 'religion poisons everything' thesis is one of his most developed and forceful arguments. He does not deny that religion has been used to justify atrocities — the Inquisition, the Crusades, the persecution of heretics. But he argues that the twentieth century's great experiment in building societies explicitly without religion — Soviet communism, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge — produced human suffering on a scale that dwarfs anything in the history of organised religion.
Peterson's key claim is that religious structures serve a deep psychological and social function: they provide a framework of meaning, a set of shared values, and a constraint on the will to power that every society needs to function. When these structures are destroyed — as they were in the atheistic revolutions of the twentieth century — they are not replaced by rational humanism but by ideological possession, totalitarianism, and mass murder.
This does not make Peterson an uncritical defender of religion. He acknowledges that religious institutions can become corrupt, authoritarian, and abusive. But he insists that the alternative — a society with no transcendent moral framework — is consistently worse. The question, for Peterson, is not whether religion causes harm, but whether the harm it causes is greater or less than the harm caused by its absence.
Peterson's position draws on Dostoevsky's famous dictum, which he frequently paraphrases: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. He reads the twentieth century as a terrifying confirmation of this insight — a demonstration of what happens when human beings attempt to construct meaning and morality from scratch, without reference to the accumulated wisdom encoded in religious tradition.
“The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history, and the worst atrocities were committed by people who had explicitly rejected the idea of God and replaced it with an ideology.”
“People don't understand the role that religion plays in holding societies together. They think you can just get rid of it and nothing bad will happen. That's historically illiterate.”