Peterson grew up in a Protestant church-going family, yet his family never imposed religion on him. His father appeared to be agnostic, visiting churches only for weddings and funerals. Many people in the middle-class America of Peterson’s youth in the 1960s and 1970s were Christian. At the age of 12, Peterson began attending Confirmation classes, an experience he grew to deeply dislike. He was put off by the overt religiosity of his classmates as well as his instructor’s failure to answer questions about the logical basis of scripture. Consequently, Peterson grew disenchanted with organized religion. In his late teens, Peterson stopped going to church entirely, a development his family had already accepted. Out of concern for the larger world and its inequality, Peterson joined student politics at the university, subscribing to socialist ideology. At first, he avidly believed that eradicating economic inequality would alleviate the world’s problems, but soon the notion began to seem too simplistic.

Peterson began admiring high-achieving political conservatives even though he was not a conservative himself. Simultaneously, he found that he did not admire the socialist peers whose ideology he shared. It seemed that all that his peers did was complain about the status quo, without pausing to reflect on or improve themselves.