Hello and welcome to the Speak Life Podcast. Today it's reaction time with Glenn Scrivener, engaging with news and culture from a Christian perspective. You can watch this reaction and more on our YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash speaklifemedia.
SPEAKER_01In his interview of Louise Perry, Jordan Peterson said this. If untrammeled sexual access to a young woman is a crime, in order for that to be recognized as a crime properly, it has to be viewed as something that will bring the males on her side to her defense in principle. Now, maybe not, right? Because you could say, well, maybe we could set up a society where merely, quote, transgressing the rights of a woman to say no is sufficient. But it's not obvious to me that that's sufficient.
SPEAKER_04Which understandably made people say, This is utterly insane.
SPEAKER_00The entire under underpinning of his argument is rape apology and rape denial. It's gross and it's horrible, and end of story.
SPEAKER_04But then Louise Perry went to the heart of it all with these six words.
SPEAKER_02Feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity.
SPEAKER_04And when you understand why she says that and the truth behind it, it could change your life. Seriously. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We try to see all things with Jesus at the center. Recently, Louise Perry, who's been a fantastic guest on this channel, was on Jordan Peterson's channel. You might have missed that she was on Jordan Peterson's channel, even if you're a subscriber to Jordan Peterson. That's because when he interviewed her, she got to speak for only about 25 minutes out of an hour and forty-five minute interview. That's less than a quarter of the airtime. She was the guest, uh, she was being interviewed, but the interviewer did all the talking. And then whoever did the thumbnail for the video uh continued this trend because uh they didn't manage to find any space at all for Louise. Now, I'm gonna be critical of Jordan Peterson in this video. My first criticism is this please can we have more of this, Jordan Peterson? I mean, look at him listening to Slavoj Zizek. That's the posture of good listening. On the other hand, uh this interview was not good interviewing. It was not good listening, and it was a failure to hear a voice Jordan Peterson really needs to hear. Why? Because they were talking about men, women, equality, sex, and consent. Now here is a genuine trigger warning. This video discusses sexual ethics, and at times we will describe the wickedness of rape. Uh, that might well be triggering for you, understandably. You might want to tap out at this point, because we will talk about not so much rape, but what makes rape so heinous. We're doing so not to shock, but precisely so that we can preserve the egregious evil of sexual assault, so that we can continue to have a meaningful category that names the wickedness of rape. And my big point here is, well, it's threefold. Are you ready? Uh Jordan Peterson in this video does not name the evil of rape properly. Second, Peterson's online opponents also cannot name the evil of rape properly. Third, Louise Perry can. Why? Because she names Christianity, and that makes all the difference. It's Christianity that provides the framework that both Jordan Peterson and his critics lack. Okay, let's dive into the video. Uh Peterson begins by acknowledging that Louise Perry's book, which is fantastic by the way, makes a moral case. And instantly Peterson seeks to do what he's always known for doing. He takes more transcendent claims and he tries to translate them into the language of evolutionary psychology to show that they make sense from a scientific point of view. Notice the move here.
SPEAKER_01Your book makes a moral case, and moral cases aren't particularly popular now, but there are some interesting ways of discussing morality technically that I think might be worth delving into. So one of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested in knowing is that people pursue different mating strategies, so to speak. That's that's how evolutionary psychologists or biologists describe it. And you can make the same case in the animal kingdom to some degree.
SPEAKER_04So here Peterson wants to translate the ethical into the evolutionary. More than this, he wants to demonstrate that there is a bottom-up explanation for the ethical purely in terms of the evolutionary. And you've got to ask, is this possible? Well, you can get a certain ethic by treating us as one more animal in the animal kingdom, but it doesn't tend to be an ethic that we consider very ethical nowadays. Here is Justin Briley of the Unbelievable Podcast asking Richard Dawkins about what kind of sexual ethics can be derived purely from the evolutionary process.
SPEAKER_05Okay, but but ultimately your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six. I mean, you could say that. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04In the animal kingdom, you don't have rape. Animals simply follow their natural instincts and are not expected to restrain or repress or redirect those instincts. Humans are meant to resist their urges. We have wills, wills that at times ought to oppose our instincts. But the question arises, if we are merely animals, if you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, what follows from this? Saying, you and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals, so let's honor one another's sexual boundaries at all times, uh is a confused philosophy. Let's put it that way. From a purely evolutionary point of view, survival and reproduction are our imperatives. And historically, there are some who have really pursued this. So in the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan impregnated so many women that 16 million men today are the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and perhaps 0.5% of the global population today are related to Genghis Khan. If passing on your genetic information is the imperative, then nature tells you, be more Genghis. But wow, talk about rape culture. And yet rape culture would not have made any sense to an ancient Mongol. For them, it's not rape culture, it's culture, it's natural. But perhaps you're saying, well, look, we have free will, we have autonomy, we can and we must choose to honor the autonomy of other the autonomy of others. Consent is, after all, uh a uniformly prized value in our day, and I agree, 1000% consent is vital. But two things on that. One, we need to figure out its origin, we'll do that in a minute, and two, we need to figure out its limits. What such a value can and can't achieve in its resistance to rape culture. Let's consider that second point first. In this interview, Peterson and Perry unmask how thin the value of consent is when taken by itself. Consent is necessary, vital, but it is not sufficient if you want to build an anti-rape culture. Here's Peterson talking about how thin it is.
SPEAKER_01If you have a party and you're a college student and you're male, and you invite some women over, including the ones that you might be attracted to, and you serve copious amounts of alcohol, and you know perfectly well that if you get a young woman drunk, you're more likely to get her into bed. Are you manipulating her? Or is she an autonomous entity fully capable of making her own sovereign decisions, who knows the ground rules of the game when she enters the door and is there for responsible for her own actions? And the answer is a little of column A and a little of column B. And that makes the whole issue of consent extraordinarily complex. You know, if you consent well drunk and you regret it the next day, is that true consent? And of course, that's being thought out in legal minefields all across North America. And I think the reason it's being thought out, thought out, is because it's actually a complicated question. What does it mean to give consent? How old do you have to be? Like if you have three drinks, can you give informed consent? Or maybe you couldn't for a medical procedure.
SPEAKER_04Could you if you had one drink? Peterson is very attuned to the biological facts. Women, on average, are smaller than men, weaker than men, and will bear a far higher burden if sex leads to pregnancy. Louise Perry adds important facts. On average, men have a higher sex drive. On average, women are more agreeable than men and therefore often find themselves okaying things that they are not okay with. Then add alcohol into the mix, then add the pill, where now the woman can't dissuade the man with the risk of pregnancy. What is the line of defense between all of that and a woman vulnerable to rape culture? It it better be a thick line of bulletproof resistance. But in our culture, in practice, it's a slogan, no means no. And for sure, that ought to stop every unwanted sexual advance. But is consent the only defense we are going to erect against all those forces? And so that's why Peterson brings up marriage as something stronger than mere consent.
SPEAKER_01And so you add some alcohol into the mix, and you think, well, did the young woman give consent? And the answer to that is, well, what the hell is consent? And then one answer is, well, you have to have a legal document, and then you think, well, you might as well just get married then, because that's the whole point. And but here's an open question. Like, I really wonder, I really think this might be true. Marriage is consent. That's what marriage means. Marriage is full informed consent, and it's the only form of full informed consent. All things being equal, given how dangerous sex is in the most fundamental sense, given how socially destabilizing it is, given how difficult it is to integrate into a full personality across time, given how much is at risk for children and women in particular, that the issue of consent is so important that it basically devolves into something approximating marriage by necessity. Marriage is consent?
SPEAKER_04Okay. This is a problem. And we'll see why it's a problem as this video develops. But first, let's understand why Peterson wants to say that marriage is consent. He wants to strengthen consent with something else, something stronger and more enduring. And that's why he mentions marriage. Now, I will disagree strongly with the idea that marriage is consent. But here's one thing we can say. Consent is very much related to marriage. In fact, it grew out of a strong view of marriage. But they are not the same thing, and we have to get the order right. So let's do some history. Let's go back to the sexual revolution that has really shaped our world. And it happened 1900 years before the swinging sixties. The real sexual revolutionary was Jesus, who absolutely equalized the sexes as regards our sexual expectations. Jesus in Matthew chapter 19 taught that men must be as restricted as women had always been in the sexual domain. They must commit themselves to one woman and to their children for life, no casual sex, no hookup culture, no playing the field, no sex before marriage, no sex outside marriage, no adultery, you commit to one woman, the marital doors are locked and no one gets out alive. In the words of historian Kyle Harper, all the diffuse erotic energy of the world was to be cramped into this one frail sacred union. Or less poetically, in the words of evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrik, the church, through its marriage and family program, reached down and grabbed men by the testicles. This restraining and training of male sexuality was an incredible achievement in the context of ancient society, because in the wild, male society looks like, well, for elite men it looks like Genghis Khan. For the rest of men, it means angry involuntary celibacy, because Genghis has all the women. For women, it's misery, and for everyone, it's rape culture. But with Jesus, there is a revolution, because with Jesus, there's something more robust than mere consent to oppose the tsunami of rape culture. We need consent, but we need so much more. And Jesus gives us covenant. There is a covenant relationship called marriage. It's not a contract, it's not tit for tat, it's not conditional, it's about mutual belongingness and unconditional commitment. It's all that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with you. It's weighty, it's lifelong. And in Matthew 19 and 1 Corinthians 7, the Bible adds that there's something even more weighty. Singleness. And together these two honorable estates serve over time to equalize the sexes, largely because they restrain male sexuality. Consent can grow because covenant holds strong. You see, in 1 Corinthians 7, the Apostle Paul is able to say to married couples, your bodies belong to each other, and sex should only happen by mutual consent. Which is an unprecedented consideration in ancient society. It's so countercultural that it took another 1900 years before consent was brought into law within marriage. What the Bible had been saying in the first century had gone unheeded for 19th centuries, because unfortunately many people have followed Jordan Peterson's logic. Peterson wonders aloud whether marriage is consent. And that's absolutely a traditional view, widespread in human cultures around the world and down through history. But the Bible says no, marriage is not consent. Married people still need to give consent every single time. Covenant does not replace consent. Covenant supports consent, but it does not replace it. And that's where Louise Perry goes.
SPEAKER_02The only proviso I would place on that is that one of the, I would say one of the really profound successes of 20th century feminism was in reconceptualizing rape, which in most traditional legal systems is understood as a crime against a woman's male kin, reconceptualizing it as a crime against the woman herself, which therefore makes it marital rape explicable in a way that it isn't in the old model. It clearly is the case that it is possible to be to be raped within marriage.
SPEAKER_04That's so important that Louise makes this point, especially given where Jordan goes later in the conversation. You can't call marriage consent, especially because often a woman is most vulnerable to abuse within a marriage, within a family. We must separate marriage and consent and insist on both. In the multiple choice question, when is sex permissible? Different answers can be given. Some say a with consent. Others say B with love. Still others say C in marriage. The progressive answer since the 1960s has been A. Consent is all you need. More romantic types go for B. But here's the point. The Christian answer is not C. C is the more traditionalist's answer. C is Jordan Peterson's answer, but it's not the Christian answer. The Christian answer is D, or all of the above. Marriage is not consent. Marriage still requires consent. And fifty years ago, the legal recognition of what One Corinthian said in the first century wrote into law a vital understanding of marriage, consent, equality, and personhood. When the 1970s caught up with that biblical truth, that was progress. It was so vital for Louise to have made that point. But having made it, she returns to where she agrees with Peterson. Consent by itself is not enough.
SPEAKER_02We are forced to draw bright lines when it comes to the law. We're forced to say that, you know, the age of consent is 16, that X amount of alcohol in the bloodstream constitutes, you know, above the legal driving limit, et cetera, et cetera. We're forced to draw bright lines. We have to also recognise, and we all know intuitively, that those bright lines are fallible, and that there is a huge amount of grey space between what is legally permissible and what is good. And I think that the problem with basing any kind of system of sexual ethics on consent as a bare minimum is it it becomes impossible to talk about that grey space. And what you often find actually is women, particularly during Me Too, women who would talk about distressing sexual experiences, which actually normally didn't meet the legal threshold for being criminal, but which they nevertheless experienced as upsetting, as disturbing, as whatever, often involving alcohol, as you say. Briefly on that point, one of the things that a lot of people don't know is that there's a cognitive bias in men where they tend to overestimate a woman's sexual interest in them. And that it and it's not the other way around. And that bias is exaggerated by alcohol. So you have men who are very drunk and who really do read signs of sexual interest from women who are, in fact, not sexually interested in them and who are incapacitated by alcohol, and it all ends up being under rough, you know, we're talking about teenagers who have raised on porn and have, you know, it's a complete disaster. Like the whole cauldron mix is basically perfectly designed to produce these scenarios. And often you have women who are coming under these scenarios feeling really distressed, but they can't they don't have the moral language to talk about it because they don't want to talk about, they don't want to use terms like chivalrous, they don't want to talk about gentlemen, they don't want to talk even about morality and good and bad. What they have in their vocabulary toolkit is consent. And so you will say that that XYZ encounter wasn't consensual, whereas actually that's not the best way of describing what went wrong. And trying to just further embed the consent model, which often just what consent workshops are really is just they're sort of their attempts at ideological interventions. The idea is that we you know we sit kids down and we tell them in words of one syllable, don't rape each other. But of course, we know that's not how social interactions work. That's not actually a kind of intervention that's really going to make a difference because the the the would-be rapists aren't listening, for one thing. And also because that's you know, the complexity of sexual relationships is just so, so too difficult to sum up in that kind of simple message. But that's all we've got. And so, and so this emphasis is just on reiterating and reiterating.
SPEAKER_04So, brilliant. Louise says to progressive culture, no, consent alone is not enough. And I think she makes a devastating case. The progressives who are skewering Peterson for his comments in this video would themselves be skewered by Louise. Their consent alone model does not work. But when Louise said that marital rape is a category because women possess full personhood in their own right, that triggered the now infamous thoughts of Jordan Peterson. He first hints that he's going to say something about it here.
SPEAKER_01We should return to this idea that rape is a violation of male property rights in a moment, because I want to explore that a bit.
SPEAKER_04No, you really shouldn't. But he does.
SPEAKER_01And here it is. You know, you talked about one of the advantages of the sexual revolution was the transformation of the idea that rape was a property crime, let's say, into a crime against the woman herself. And I would say, look, I have plenty of sympathy for that perspective. And I think it's fundamentally true, but but I'm gonna push back because, you know, all this is all very complicated. You know, it isn't obvious to me that that offers women enough defense, you know, and so the counter-argument might be if untrammeled sexual access to a young woman is a crime, in order for that to be recognized as a crime properly, it has to be viewed as something that will bring the males on her side to her defense in principle. Now, maybe not, right? Because you could say, well, maybe we could set up a society where merely, quote, transgressing the rights of a woman to say no is sufficient. But it's not obvious to me that that's sufficient. Like maybe sufficient means not only do you violate the integrity of the woman in a fundamental sense, but you enrage all of her male protectors. And then that's enough of a barrier, because God only knows how much barrier we need. There it is.
SPEAKER_04Now, it's very confusing because Jordan does say that Louisa's perspective is fundamentally true, that the rape of a woman is a transgression of her personhood. He actually affirms that twice in this clip. Okay, good. But in order to strengthen the defense of the woman, he very much wants to default to the older model of rape, which earlier in the interview he described as a violation of male property rights. Okay, so on the one hand, he's saying women have personhood in their own right. But he also wants the older model where violations of women enrage the woman's protectors. He doesn't say owners, as though the men own the woman, so let's try to be fair to the words he uses, but he is consciously making an argument for the more traditional understanding of rape, because Well, that's what Peterson does, isn't it? He like he makes arguments for unpopular traditional views. That's his thing. He values tradition because he believes that evolution must have favoured these ancient ways for a reason, and he's constantly seeking biological explanations for the ways of our fathers, so to speak.
SPEAKER_03You might recognise my voice as the guy who does the filler bits on the podcast. It's part of my job to think of how we can include you more in the work of Speak Life and bring you behind the scenes, if you will. And so we have a very exciting thing called the Speak Life Discord server. It's an online platform where you can interact with other Speak Life supporters and the Speak Life team. We have bonus content, creative theological discussion, and lots of fun along the way. So if you want to join that, you can just go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash give and just sign up to receive our update emails, and you'll get invited to join the server there. Speak Life is supported entirely by the generosity of people like you, and we're so grateful for your support, be it through prayer or financial means. And if you're a regular giver, we'd love to give you access to the members zone of our Discord. In the members zone, you can see early drafts of our videos, you can give feedback, and say what you'd like to see from Speak Life. Plus, there's even more bonus content. So after setting up a regular donation, you can request membership access on speaklife.org.uk forward slash give. Okay, back to the podcast.
SPEAKER_04Peterson is always explaining the ethical in evolutionary terms, giving biological and psychological explanations for why we have developed the traditions that we have developed. But Jordan, sometimes you have to reject tradition. Sometimes you have to reject the ways of your fathers. Sometimes you have to reject the rape culture of an uncaring natural order. But what could possibly bring about such progress, such a revolution? Louise is so brilliant here.
SPEAKER_02I have a slightly um unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism. In general, um feminists, modern feminists, set themselves up in opposition to Christianity, particularly on the issue of abortion, the handmaid's tale kind of Neo-Puritan outfit being the uniform now of American feminists and so on. I am of the view, though, that actually feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity. And that the fundamental idea in Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions, that weakness is strength, that the first shall be last, that there is something valuable about being small and vulnerable rather than something despicable about it. I think that feminism completely relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly wasn't shared by the ancient Roman culture from which Christianity sprung. And so if you're operating in, say, an ancient Roman culture which doesn't see women as inherently vulnerable, which actually sees female vulnerability as something to be despised potentially, and which sees prostituted slave women as entirely available for male sexual consumption, that cannot really conceptualize the idea of a slave woman having being able to be sexually violated. You know, it's just not kind of within the moral system, it's not understandable. Into that comes the Christian idea of sexual equality, at least at the spiritual level. And the idea, therefore, that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her against sexual violation, which of course a slave doesn't, she is nevertheless worthy of that protection. It kind of socializes, is maybe the wrong word, but it it shares that duty of protection among the community and among women. I think that's basically what feminism is, and says that actually we should be bestowing on these friendless women the same protection that a woman with high connected male kin has. It's a very difficult system to enforce. To some extent, we we try and use police, criminal justice system, whatever, to do that job. It's a hard job to do, but that is basically the modern project, and I think it is born out of Christian morality.
SPEAKER_04Can I get an amen? That's glory, isn't it? It's true. Feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity. The equal view of the sexes is an outgrowth of Christianity because it says, yes, according to the flesh, according to biological reality, the average woman is smaller and physically weaker and must bear the immense burden of pregnancy and so much of child rearing, but for that reason they are to be protected and provided for. And at the same time, Christianity says to men, sure, according to the flesh, according to biological reality, you are strong and libidinous with certain Genghis like tendencies. But the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Weakness can be a strength, compassion is virtue, and every single soul is precious no matter how weak or friendless. And those who are least well protected should call forth our greatest compassion and concern. This is a fundamentally Christian worldview, which, as Louise says, is not shared by other worldviews. It is most certainly not shared by a purely evolutionary worldview in which the fittest survive and the weakest perish. But as we keep saying at Speak Life, Jesus is the revolutionary. Jesus is the fittest who perished on the cross, so that we the weakest might survive, and that we might more than survive, we might thrive and pass on his compassion revolution to the world. And one of the ripple effects of that compassion revolution is the equal personhood of all people, male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free. These ripple effects take centuries, millennia sometimes, but Jesus said his revolution would be like yeast through a batch of dough, like a mustard seed growing to become the largest garden plant. Christianity has grown and grown and grown. And and now, as my book, The Air We Breathe, maintains, we take for granted values like equality, compassion, and consent. Those are the first of seven values that I explore in the book. But they are the outgrowth of the Jesus Revolution. You can read more in the book if you want to find out more about that. But how does Jordan react to all of this, that this is the outgrowth of Christianity? Well, he does what he does, which is to try to translate the religious ideals that he's hearing from Louise into the language of evolutionary biology.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I think that's right, is that what what you're attempting to do is to replicate the protection that a very well-constituted family and community system would have for a woman who's highly functioning. You're trying to replicate that in abstraction in the entire social structure. And so that's why you have a legal structure that says, well, women have the right to bodily integrity. You're really trying to replace that protective structure with the force of law. Yeah, and I think that's an entirely laudable exercise. The question that we have to wrestle with is the question that you brought up at the end of that, which is that if a woman is unfortunate enough not to have, you know, let's say, close male associates, brothers, friends, fathers, um, available to her, to what degree is it even possible for the more abstract state and the body of laws to replace that? Might be a goal, but it's very difficult to realize in practical terms.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's it's basically impossible in practical terms. Practical terms amount to rape culture. What we need is a revolutionary resistance to rape culture. Question. Do you want to join a revolutionary resistance to rape culture? Well, don't join the progressives. All they've got is consent. That's not just bringing a knife to a gunfight, that's bringing a knife to a nuclear Armageddon. There's there's no true resistance to rape culture there. And don't join the Trads. The traditionalists will just pull a Peterson on you and you'll find consent, personhood, and equality absorbed into the family, the clan, the tribe, and biological realities. But if you can't join the progressives and you can't join the Trads, where will you find the revolutionary resistance movement to rape culture? Come to Jesus, because as a Christian, you can treat the weakest, the least powerful, the most friendless, the most despised woman who's been harmed. You can treat her as a daughter of the king. And you better not enrage the protector of protectors. Jesus says if you harm any of his little ones, it would be better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and for you to be thrown into the deepest sea. Do not enrage the protector of protectors. He will avenge all who harm his little ones the weakest, the least, the last, the lost. Those little ones are in a family with a powerful protector, and no one will get away with anything against those little ones. And that means as a daughter of the king, that woman has an intrinsic, inherent, inviolable worth, and a society is best that treats her as such. So there it is. The equality of the sexes is an outgrowth of Christianity. And Louise is able to see things more clearly than Jordan because she owns those Christian spectacles. While Jordan, like he has a pair of Christian spectacles, and he puts them on from time to time. But first he views things through Darwinian lenses, and then through Jungian lenses, and then finally Christian lenses. And listen, you can see the world biologically and psychologically too. Those lenses are definitely helpful. But if they lead you to contradict basic moral truths, like women are equal in their own right, you need to reorder and rethink everything. And if you have a profound sense that people simply are not property, that everyone is equal, that rape is a violation of something sacred, that inviolable values exist above nature, that the worth of the vulnerable is not a legal fiction, but a certain and eternal truth. If you know those things, then I invite you to really own those Christian spectacles you have on. Own it, confess it, say it aloud, Jesus is Lord. And enjoy that truth. Make your home in this view of the world in which all are welcome, the lowly are lifted, the lofty are held to account, and where compassion reigns from everlasting to everlasting, come home to the truth that Jesus is Lord. He's the one who makes sense of it all. Pick up a gospel and read of Jesus Christ. I think in him you'll find the source of your deepest longings. This is Speak Life, where our motto is Love Jesus, share Jesus. You might want to like and share this video, and please do subscribe to us if you want more of such content.