This New Religion has many prophets already, of course; the most prominent, her Oprahness, can currently be seen playing an angelic being in the de-Christianized, New Age-ified adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” But the example of Oprah points to an interesting truth: When you think about the New Religion’s various cultural and (in the case of yoga) liturgical expressions, they generally skew female. Oprah’s roadshow of spiritual gurus includes men as well as women, but the intended audience for her revivals, as for the “The Secret” or “Eat Pray Love” or the collected works of Paulo Coelho, is very obviously feminine.

Meanwhile, men looking for post-Christian enlightenment seem to gravitate toward secular-rationalist cults like the New Atheism, or more recently toward toxic forms of alt-right politics. In this sense the post-Christian religious landscape is potentially taking Christianity’s gender gap and widening it, playing its own metaphysical role in the growing divergence and polarization of the sexes.

Which is why it will be interesting to see where Peterson and his male disciples end up going. To the extent that he has antecedents, it’s figures like the myth-theorist Joseph Campbell and the poet Robert Bly, whose “Men’s Movement” in the 1990s was a Jungian stew concocted as an antidote to fatherlessness and extended adolescence.

That’s what Peterson is offering too (his attempts to make his stew a system have inspired a certain amount of justifiable mockery; the New Religion is more convincing when it’s fuzzy), but with a particular stress on the idea that the men he’s trying to forge will be better men for women, and thus perhaps equipped to reverse the polarization of the sexes and the decline of not only marriage but even sex itself.

But can a Peterson man and an Oprah woman be happy together? Can they be at least as happy as Christian women and their somewhat-less-pious, prone-to-bolting Christian men?

A lot may hang on this strange question: the happiness of the next generation, the very existence of the generation after that.