Like Leo Strauss in the past, Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson today present versions of Judaism and Christianity and conservatism that just so happen to enhance their own interests.
The formula is consistent across all three. Take a tradition with enormous cultural authority and accumulated moral weight, reduce it to the propositions you already believe, present those propositions as the tradition’s essential truth, and then occupy the institutional position that entitles you to transmit it. The tradition becomes a pulpit. The pulpit was the point.
Prager’s Judaism is Pragerism with Hebrew decorations. He takes a tradition of 613 commandments, Talmudic argument, halakhic obligation, and thick communal formation, and distills it into a set of conservative political positions that he would hold anyway, then presents those positions as what Judaism essentially teaches. The ordinary Orthodox Jew observing Shabbat, keeping kashrut, and davening three times a day would find Prager’s Judaism as foreign as a vegetarian finds a steakhouse. The formation Prager describes is not the formation Orthodox practice produces. It is the formation a bright conservative radio host produces when he reads selectively in the tradition for confirming material.
Peterson’s Christianity follows the same logic one step further removed. He does not even claim to be a Christian in any confessional sense. He claims to have decoded what Christianity really means, which turns out to be Jungian depth psychology combined with evolutionary biology combined with a self-help ethic of personal responsibility. The ordinary Anglican or Catholic or Baptist would not recognize their practice in Peterson’s account, for the same reason that Plato’s students would not have recognized Strauss’s Plato. The decoded version serves the decoder.
What Strauss, Prager, and Peterson share beyond the structural operation is the specific relationship to formation that Turner identifies. All three understand intellectually what thick formation does. Strauss wrote about it with sophistication. Prager gestures at it when defending Jewish continuity. Peterson talks about it constantly in the language of myth, ritual, and embodied practice. But none of them pays the cost. They want the authority that formation confers without the submission formation requires. The church they buy lets them preach without kneeling.
Their conservatism follows the same decoder ring logic as their religion. Conservatism as a living tradition carries enormous cultural authority, the accumulated weight of Burke, Kirk, the Anglo-Protestant inheritance, the claim to speak for what communities have built and preserved across generations. All three recruit that authority while gutting the substance.
Prager’s conservatism is talk radio liberalism with the cultural dial turned right. It defends American institutions in the abstract while showing no particular attachment to the specific historical, religious, and ethnic communities that built those institutions and that genuine conservatism would seek to preserve. Peterson’s conservatism is therapeutic individualism dressed in Jungian mythology. Clean your room is not a conservative proposition. It is a self-help proposition that flatters its audience while making no demands on them as members of communities, traditions, or inherited obligations.
Strauss’s conservatism was Cold War liberalism with a classical education. He voted for Stevenson. He wanted a muscular universal democracy capable of defeating its enemies. This is Woodrow Wilson with better footnotes.
What none of them conserves is the thing conservatism exists to conserve, the specific formations, practices, communities, and inherited ways of life that give particular people a particular identity across time. Their conservatism, like their religion, is propositional. It defends ideas rather than communities, principles rather than practices, abstract values rather than the thick formations that make those values inhabited rather than merely asserted. This is precisely what allows them to preach it. A conservatism that demanded formation, practice, and submission to inherited community would disqualify them as its spokesmen. The propositional version leaves the pulpit open.
