If Jordan Peterson is now the West's most famous living public intellectual - and even his detractors rarely dispute that claim anymore - then the narrative he offers to explain the eccentricities of our culture's political order matters to everyone.

My feeble cavilling at Peterson's wisdom in this short piece may not be heard amid the ocean of (often deserved) encomiums to him out there on the internet, but someone has to say it: Peterson's genealogy of identity politics does not stand up well to scrutiny.

In a lecture at the University of British Columbia Free Speech Club, Peterson explained that, in his view, Marxist assumptions undergird both postmodernism and its primary political manifestation, identity politics:

What happened [after Marxism had failed as an ideology] was that postmodernism was invented - and so it's a slight of hand as far as I can tell - and with postmodernism, identity politics. And so the postmodern transformation is, well, we were a little wrong with the working class thing. Turns out that Communists kill them all, and capitalists make them all rich, and that's actually exactly the opposite of what we predicted. But maybe there's a way this can be salvaged. How about if we don't say 'working class/capitalist', we say 'oppressor/oppressed'?

Here Peterson, slowly pacing behind the podium, stops and moves his hands back and forth as if readying himself to give the air - and the facts that undermine Marxist ideology - a massage. "We can play the same damn game under a new guise," he said. Thus was born what the rightwing blogosphere calls "cultural Marxism."

Peterson cites Jacques Derrida as one of the inventors of this game. Herbert Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" could have done the job as well, and, without a doubt, since the 1960s many Western critics have employed certain Marxist categories in working from postcolonial, feminist, LGBTIQ and other perspectives. A glance at these literatures makes it clear why Peterson thinks what he does.

But is Peterson correct that the origin of identity politics is tied up with Marxism? He contends that the two ideologies have similar understandings of suffering (as caused by the person or group in power rather than as intrinsic to life on earth), and concomitant theories of power (as inherently oppressive). But what else is similar about them?

To the untrained eye, almost nothing. What is important for one - personal identity, race, sexuality for identity politics, class solidarity and worker control of the means of production for Marxism - is uninteresting to the other. Further, Peterson is surely aware that real Marxism has lost all credibility. No one in the West actually believes that story anymore. Identity politics, by contrast, has until very recently held unquestioned sway in nearly all the West's culture-creating institutions.

But most importantly of all, Peterson does not need to reach for Marxism to explain the rhetorical poignancy of identity politics. There is a narrative even closer to hand that can account for both of them. That is the narrative of Christian theology.

Stop me when all this becomes painfully obvious. The Christian story is meaningless without an eschatology, an ending when everything is made finally right and the people of God who have endured evil and persecution finally live and reign in that new order. Part of this story is the transvaluation of values. Despite appearances, it is, Christians say, good to be poor, meek and merciful because it is, in fact, such people, rather than the rich, violent and self-serving, who will triumph in the end. In the kingdom of God, some of the last really will be first and some of the first last.

Marxism's translation of this narrative into materialist language hardly needs to be spelled out. The people of God are the proletariat. Despite appearances, it is good to be a worker and to be a part of the political community of workers because one day - it is a matter of debate when, or if we can hurry it along - workers everywhere will seize the means of production. Eventually the state will wither away because there will be no need for it anymore. Justice will finally reign; the last shall be first and the first last.

Identity politics follows more or less the same pattern. The people of God are ethnic minorities, women, LGBTIQ persons and others. Since in late-capitalist societies it is no longer believable that being actually poor could be any kind of advantage, spiritual or otherwise, those belonging to groups who have historically had lower social capital band together in political communities, structured around their excluded identities, and work to overthrow those white heterosexual males who have run the world for so long. One day, if liberals keep working for justice, these formerly marginalized persons will call the shots; the last shall be first. (And the first last?)

If the reader senses the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy looming here, allow me to note that it is not important to my argument that Christianity be the cause of identity politics. (To be fair, Peterson also manages to avoid this pitfall.) My argument is rather that identity politics, like Marxism before it, is dependent for its plausibility upon the fading rhetorical power of the Christian story. It is, one might say, living on the fumes of Christian theology. Think about it. Where other than historically Christian nations has identity politics taken hold? Where did Marxism originate and where did its eschatological aspect capture the imaginations of the most people? The answer is: in the wreckage of Christendom.

Even Peterson's observations about suffering and power as seen by Marxism and identity politics fit here. When Satan and the "principalities and powers" of the present age are defeated, Christians have always said, then suffering will be too. "Every tear will be wiped from their eyes," as the book of Revelation says. And Christianity too might be said to think of power abstracted from the mandate of God as inherently arbitrary or oppressive. Marxism and identity politics, it turns out, are really only alike in that they cling to this understanding of power while trying to destroy its theological root system.

What then, some might ask, is the take-home value of my argument? Why should we waste our time picking on Peterson for such an error? His war with identity politics is being fought over YouTube, after all, not in the academic journals, and that is not normally the place to parse out such intellectualist distinctions.

I bring up Peterson's just-so story because, if the Canadian psychologist succeeds in linking identity politics to the crimes of Marxist ideology in the public mind, the political ramifications are potentially enormous. If identity politics becomes guilty by association, that allows the right to struggle indefinitely against "Marxism" by gutting government programs for those who need them most. That will certainly not make the poor rich.

And this is not even the worst that could happen. If identity politics, as I think, is not convincing outside of cultures shaped by Christian theology, then one must ask what will happen to its influence as Christianity ebbs in the West. Will concern for the other, human rights and care for the downtrodden still mark our politics? Almost certainly not. Identity politics is a laughable idea outside of a culture influenced by Christianity. After all, why should one care for the poor? For what reason should we allow immigrants who may "threaten our way of life" to live among us? What is a "human right" anyway, and why, if we are in power, should we simply dole them out (in the language of Donald Trump) to "bad hombres"? Without the teaching of Jesus Christ, who even now haunts the politics of the Western world, we have no reason at all.

If Peterson succeeds in destroying the credibility of identity politics - and I, for one, hope he does - but fails to replace it with another narrative that ontologically grounds care for the marginalized, he will leave the massive numbers of young, white, disaffected males who revere him with no reason to concern themselves with the plight of minorities. Worse, those young men may well associate that lack of concern with their war against "cultural Marxism" and gain confidence from shadowboxing against an enemy of their own making. And so might the Western tradition of working for the disenfranchised go the way of all the earth.

Rene Girard saw clearly that identity politics created the conditions for this situation. "In trying to usurp the place of Christ," he wrote of institutions under the influence of identity politics:

the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.

In doing so, however, they cut the ground from under their own feet.

In 2016, when Jordan Peterson made the first YouTube sallies in his war against identity politics, he may rightly have sensed his opponent to be a paper tiger. Perhaps that edifice, which so recently seemed entirely impregnable, is about to come down. But, if so, what is to replace it? Presumably, it will not be a political philosophy that remembers the Christian commitment to the poor and the stranger, or one that sees reason to view history from below. In fact, it is not entirely clear that Peterson wants the West to remember that aspect of its history - and this, at least, should give his Christian supporters pause.

Joel Looper is a doctoral candidate in divinity at the University of Aberdeen.