Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And a couple days ago, Jordan Peterson said something really fascinating about liturgy and why he thinks young men are drawn to traditional liturgy in particular that I wanted to talk about because I think he's hammering home in his own way two important points.

But I want to make sure that we understand him in the right context. So I'm going to let him kind of present his case and see if we can draw two themes from it.

Well, you see one that young men are returning to the church and to more and to the more

traditional forms, right? So the more traditional the church, the more popular it's becoming.

And I think there's a reason for that. So I've attended a fair number of Orthodox services with my friend Jonathan Pazio. And they're very ritualized. And so unlike a Protestant ceremony, say, or service, which is much more dependent on the preacher. Well, you can't

criticize an Orthodox service. It's like going to a ballet and saying, like, what's going on here?

Well, that's a stupid question. What does that mean those dances on the stage? It's like,

the dance is the meaning. There's no, there's no,

there's no getting under that. You can not like it, but you can't, you can criticize it from within

its confines. You can see, well, I've seen better malays, but you can't say, well, what the hell is this?

Well, it's the same thing in an Orthodox ceremony.

It's ritualized.

It's a dance.

And it's not the words only.

It's the words in the architecture, in the images, in the history.

And so you're in it.

You're participating in it.

All right.

So the first thing to take away is that there's a draw towards traditional

worship, traditional forms of liturgy. Because precisely in that it's ritual,

it resists the kind of modern have it your way impulses. It's not dependent excessively

on the skill of the preacher, for instance. And I can speak to this, right?

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