‘I found God’: Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila talks finding peace in prayer, reading the Bible
The daughter of author and speaker Jordan Peterson recently revealed that she has come to believe in God and that her conversion to Christianity was “very sudden.”
Growing up with her dad, a famed clinical psychologist, she learned a lot about the psychological significance of the Bible, but “about a month ago, I found God … which I haven’t before … and it was very sudden,” Mikhaila said in her podcast earlier this month.
“I’m pretty new to this,” she said. “What I’ve been doing for the last like month or so is reading the Bible and praying. … And I guess, in a way, it’s ... Protestant probably. … And it’s been ... the amount of peace I’ve had I haven’t had before. It’s completely absurd. I can’t believe it,” she added.
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Mikhaila shared that she had been dwelling over four major problems in her life and had decided to travel to Austin, Texas, over the summer to see if she wanted to move there. Although she decided Austin wasn't the best place for her, while there, she met a Christian man who helped change her life. When she shared her struggles, the man told her to seek God, ask Him “to reveal Himself” to her.
“I went home that night, and I was pretty upset about these four major problems, and I was in bed, so I was praying, seriously praying … and the next day, all four problems cleared up in ways that made sense. It was logical [that] they could have cleared up [anyway]. But the likelihood of all four of them randomly clearing up that day was just too much,” she continued.
“I also woke up with this sense of calm that I hadn’t felt. And that was enough. I was like, ‘OK, that’s good enough for me,’” she said.
Mikhaila said there were moments when she felt that her experience could just be an emotional fluke.
“And then I had the most wild dream … woke up at 5:30 in the morning and I had a dream … This loud thundering voice just yelled, ‘Do it!’ And I woke up at 5:30 in the morning, thinking, ‘I think I just got yelled at by God. I think that just happened.’ That’s what it felt like.
“It occurred to me that I think what it meant was just go all in, don’t do this like 75 percent in. It’s been a wild month. I’m doing well. It’s just, I’m a little bit shocked,” she added.
In March, Mikhaila’s father, a Canadian thought leader who was raised Protestant and is unapologetically a “Jungian,” named after Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, choked up in tears as he spoke about Jesus Christ in a separate podcast, leading some of his Christian fans to pray for his faith journey.
He spoke about a variety of philosophical and spiritual themes, including the conscience and Judeo-Christian narrative.
“To some degree, because we are so social, if we don’t manifest an appropriate moral reciprocity, we’re going to become alienated from our fellows and we won’t survive. We’ll suffer and die. We certainly won’t find a partner and have children successfully. To some degree, the conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within, and that’s a perfectly reasonable biological explanation,” he said.
Yet the deeper one goes into biology it shades into something religious because, once the fundamental structure of the human psyche is analyzed, it “becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.”
Responding to a critic who asserted that the Christian Gospel is no more significant than the dying-and-resurrection stories of other mythological gods, the Canadian professor pointed out that Jesus was a real person who actually lived in addition to a narrative, and in a sense, Christ is the union of those two things.
"The problem is, I probably believe that. And I am amazed at my own belief and I don't understand it," he said.
“Because I’ve seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch. That’s Jungian synchronicity. And I’ve seen that many times in my own life and so in some sense I believe it's undeniable," he continued, choking up in tears.
