Right-Wing Influencers Are Fighting Over What It Means to Be White
And then there’s Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who seems to have made a whole grift of an apparently looming conversion. Though notoriously cagey on God’s existence, Peterson widely and tearfully lectures on Christ. Last year, soon after slamming Pope Francis for calling his flock to social justice, Peterson was spotted in St. Peter’s Square with Bishop Barron, who calls the psychologist a “sign of hope” for the church. Peterson is currently on international tour for his book We Who Wrestle With God. In March, following months of intensifying anticipation of his conversion, he announced that his wife would be received into the Catholic Church on Easter. Tammy Peterson decided to give her life to Jesus after being “miraculously” cured of cancer. Just this past Sunday, Ms. Peterson was initiated with her husband by her side. Also on hand: a photographer from the conservative Catholic news network EWTN.
While allowing for the possibility of genuine devotion, some Catholics have wondered if the likes of LaBeouf, Ballard, and Peterson see the church as a refuge for bigots and abusers. They’ve also expressed concern about the red carpet treatment these personalities tend to receive. Writing for Black Catholic Messenger in 2022 about an interview in which LaBeouf confessed to Barron his initial awe of the Church, Gunnar Gundersen opined, “There is no excuse for an institution with a track record of institutionalized abuse to amplify and platform abusers—especially those still struggling with the attitudes and beliefs that led to that abuse.” Gundersen condemned Barron for “chuckling along” as LaBeouf spoke of supplanting a “soft,” “feminized,” and “Buddhist” Jesus with a more masculine one.
Whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity are becoming more tightly yoked in the public imagination, with people hyperinvested in one category apprehending a need to outwardly invest in the others. These are historically knotted categories, the very concept of race an outgrowth of gendered Christian thinking about Jews. As scholars like M. Lindsay Kaplan, Willie James Jennings, Magda Teter, and Tudor Parfitt have shown, conceptions of Jews as dark, weak, fleshy, and fated to servitude were extended to debase people of color and authorize their enslavement. American legal arguments about the inferiority of Black people, such as the Dred Scott decision, echoed European arguments about the inferiority of Jews.