Tammy Peterson is the wife of celebrated psychologist and co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), Jordan Peterson. Tammy has her own story to tell and her own wisdom to impart. Indeed, she has her own very popular YouTube podcast which focuses on the challenges women face in today’s world.

I was fortunate enough to meet Tammy at ARC, and she kindly agreed to grant me an interview for the Spectator Australia.

We begin by talking about her upbringing and career path. A very athletic type, she discovered yoga in her teens and practised it until her 50s, at the same time learning how to meditate. Despite lapsing in her practise of the faith (Tammy is a baptised Protestant, but left the United Church of Canada in her teens) she has always had awareness of the spiritual dimension, of the transcendent, if you will, even though she had not been taught it. Her parents, her father in particular, taught her to have a strong self-will.

Tammy then went to university and studied the science of the body, what universities in Australia would call sports science, and became a massage therapist. Tammy had her own practice for 25 years, being able to work from home and thus allowing her to be there as a mother for her children, from which she gained great satisfaction.

Women will gain satisfaction in life from doing so, however, it is the feminist narrative, Tammy declares, which has led women to believe that they are not worthwhile to society unless they are making money, and governments are very much at fault for pushing this narrative. Tammy calls for more family-friendly policies, such as those in Hungary, where women receive a discount of 25 per cent on their income tax once they have a child, which builds up to no tax payable for the rest of their life if they have four children. It is important, she says, to stop this demoralisation of men as well as women, which is, among other things, stopping us from having children.

Tammy addresses such issues and much more in her podcast, ranging from gender ideology to child trafficking. We cannot deny these things that we don’t want to face, she tells me, at the same time stating the darkness of feminism is what is leading to such self-doubt and cynicism.

It is this cynicism that led to her accepting the prognosis of death when her doctor told her, with his hands shaking, that a biopsy revealed she had a very aggressive form of kidney cancer in 2019, so aggressive that no one survives it. Tammy recounts that she then went home and told her son. In him she saw a profound grief, a son who had unquestioning love for her, a love far more than she could have imagined, since due to cynicism and self-doubt, she did not hold her own life as precious as her son did. It was at that point that she felt that cynicism and self-doubt lifted off her shoulders. That awareness of the transcendent was critical. Tammy felt filled with God’s love for the first time in her life, and completely at peace.

It was at this time that Tammy began her journey back to Christianity. Returning to the United Church of Canada was not an option. It has gone very woke; some of their churches even fly rainbow flags.

When Tammy was undergoing treatment in 2019, a cousin gave her a rosary, telling her it was her great-grandmother’s. ‘I thought it was a great sign,’ Tammy says, adding that her great-grandmother was a Polish Catholic, and Tammy will be received into the Catholic Church at Easter in Toronto.

Throughout her time in hospital, Tammy was in great distress and physical pain. ‘I was starving to death, I wasn’t getting any nutrition, I had to be fed through tubes directly into the heart.’ However, ‘It wasn’t necessarily that I prayed to be cured,’ Tammy recounts. ‘It was up to God whether I lived or died, I prayed to have acceptance, to not have self-pity, to help me be at peace with what comes my way. Faith taught her to find a way back to God, to have any resentment she felt be lifted, much like the figure of Job in the Old Testament.’

I ask her at this point about another high-profile conversion, that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who at ARC recounted her own spiritual journey from Islam to atheism and now to Christianity. I asked Tammy whether she agrees with Ali’s view about the nihilistic vacuum left by the world’s rejection of God.

Tammy says that the world is in chaos today, and will continue to be, because people are too willing to give up freedom and dignity – that inherent human dignity we are all born with – since they lack the awareness of the transcendent. This Christian ideal of the inherent dignity of each person means we all have to take responsibility to safeguard that key ideal from nation states and international institutions, who are far removed from where life really happens – at the local level, in our families, our workplaces and our schools.

This is what has moved her as well to do her podcast, to do something meaningful, in a similar way to her husband. It is instructive that he gets many congratulations and grateful ‘thank yous’ from clergy and theologians for not his work, for what he says. ‘It’s staggering.’ she states. ‘Jordan has a way of putting into words what we all know, and that has helped me tremendously.’

Tammy has travelled the world with her husband, listened to over 250 of his presentations, and each of the stories he has told has meaning, but the one thing that has remained in her mind to help her understand these stories is what he said when they got married, and that is, to always tell the truth. ‘That is my first spiritual value,’ Tammy says, ‘and everything that we say or do must be filtered through that.’ Wise words indeed.