Jonathan Peugeot, a Christian artist and The Symbolic World host, retells fairy tales like Snow White—crowdfunding his book to counter Disney’s cynical, ideological twists—by weaving Orthodox Christianity’s "cosmic" vision into stories, using biblical motifs (e.g., the apple as scriptural symbol). A former secular Jew turned Orthodox, he critiques modern Christian media for moralizing over mythic depth, arguing Christ’s paradoxes demand richer storytelling. His shift from icon carving to graphic novels (like God’s Dog) bridges faith and secular audiences, predicting Christian narratives will dominate as alternatives to hollow mainstream trends. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we're going to talk to a rare bird, a Christian artist.
That's pretty rare in itself, but we're going to talk to somebody even more rare, an extremely talented Christian artist, Jonathan Peugeot.
Recently on the Friday Andrew Clavin show, I did a segment on deleting Jesus, this persistent habit among intellectuals, reviewers, filmmakers, some artists, of taking Jesus out of places where he belongs.
Anything from explaining his presence away in the novels of Dostoevsky to denying his existence in the thinking of the founding fathers, editing him out of biopics like the one about Johnny Cash or Louis Zampurini.
One place where this happens a lot is in critical readings of William Shakespeare, of course, one of my heroes, one of any writer's heroes.
The Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt once spoke about Shakespeare as a secular writer.
The critic Paul Cantor has tried to tease Nietzschean atheism out of reading the Roman trilogy by Shakespeare.
But for me, Shakespeare's treatment of religion is a model for how to write as a Christian.
That is, he includes all the Christian truths.
He includes Christian believers, but he never preaches, and he even makes fun of those who preach in a kind of stuffy way.
He allows life to play out the way it actually plays out in the real world with all its tragedy, sexuality, grotesquery, cruelty, without trimming it to look like one of today's faith-based movies where Jesus makes everything all right.
But now the thing is, Shakespeare was living in a world where everybody in the theater believed was some sort of Christian, probably.
And so he didn't have to preach, but in a secular world where Jesus is being removed even from the history of the European nations that were created by Christian faith, the question how to openly, whether and how to openly represent the truth of Christ becomes more complicated.
This is something Shakespeare didn't have to deal with, but people like me do and people like Jonathan do.
Christ And Mythology00:15:46
Jonathan Peugeot is an artist, an extremely talented artist.
He's a writer, speaker.
He's host of the Symbolic World podcast.
He's in the process of crowdfunding a new book called Snow White and the Widow Queen.
I'll tell you how to find it on the crowdfunding site.
It's absolutely beautiful.
You have to look at it.
Jonathan, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you again.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
You know, I've heard it pronounced Peugeot and I've heard it pronounced Peugeot.
Which one is it?
The first one is the best one.
Pejot.
Peugeot.
So the book looks great.
I have to say it is so lovely and the artist you have working on it is great.
I noticed you were looking to raise $27,000 and you've got $170,000.
So drinks are on you, first of all.
Tell me about it.
It's called Snow White and the Widow Queen.
Give me an idea what it's about.
Well, it really is, in some ways, it's not a reaction, but it is a, let's say, an active gesture of love towards culture, towards Western culture, towards the stories that underlie our own stories.
I've been watching now for the past 10, 15 years, maybe even more, the fairy tales, the myth, the story being deconstructed, twisted, cynically in this kind of postmodern storytelling.
Shrek was like the first example, but then it became even into things like Into the Woods and all these kind of weird retellings of fairy tales where we expose things through a kind of cynical power lens.
And it's become so bad now that we can barely recognize the fairy tales that are coming out of the big studios.
They can't even tell them anymore because they're so politically ideological.
So I thought, this is a great time, actually.
This actually seems like the best time to just dive into these stories with love and celebration and just retell them in a way that's just unabashedly celebratory.
So why is this happening?
And why are you the right guy to be doing this?
I mean, this goes back when I was a kid, there was a writer named Angela Carter who used to rewrite fairy tales from a feminist perspective.
It was unreadable, but she was incredibly well praised.
Why is this the right time and why are you the guy?
Well, I think we're really exhausted.
I think that the big studios have just come to the end of their rope and even their own movies are failing and their own stories are failing.
People are checking out.
People are tired.
And so, you know, I've been meditating on these fairy tales for decades.
I've been thinking about them and speaking about them.
I've also been deeply delved into scripture, into the patterns of scripture, the patterns of myths.
And so it just seemed like the obvious thing to do was to dive back in and to kind of tell the story in a way that actually brings insight.
So there actually are two readings in the story.
There's a children's level reading and there's an adult level reading.
But the adult level reading isn't this kind of cynical, dirty jokes that you find in, you know, modern kids' movies now, but rather something which is hopefully bringing you towards more insight to why these stories are so important in the first place.
Is there a connection between fairy tales and scripture?
Definitely.
There definitely.
The style is very close to scripture.
There's very little hint at internal dialogue, very straightforward, very simple retellings, very little description.
There's also a kind of simple rhythmic aspect to the fairy tales.
And I think what in some ways we're dealing with the same level of truth in terms of storytelling.
Of course, the difference with scripture is that it's a story that you can actually live in, right?
You can live and you can become a saint.
You can follow Christ.
You can't follow Snow White, but you can with stories like Snow White, you know, it can actually help you understand some of the images in scripture.
In Snow White, for example, you have this image of the apple and eating it and falling asleep.
And you think, there's some relationship.
I can kind of see it from afar.
It's dim, but I can kind of see it.
And those are the types of tropes that through analogy and through references in the versions we're telling, we're trying to kind of, let's say, pinch on that a little bit more so that people can get some nuggets of insight into those little aspects of the fairy tales.
You know, William Blake, the poet, said that the Bible was the great code of art.
And one of the things that led me to Christ, I was a Jew, essentially a secular Jew, but it was I love stories so much and I kept seeing Christian iconography in stories.
I mean, I remember watching James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope when he beats up this white boxer and they carry him off the stage with his arms spread wide and he's obviously been sacrificed.
I mean, I remember seeing this again and again, thinking, what is this?
What am I watching?
And that's why I started reading the New Testament, just to find out what it was that was empowering Western writers, the writers I loved the most.
Is there a relationship between the fact that Christianity seems on the wane, that they keep telling us we're in a post-Christian culture, and the fact that Disney is using some of the best loved stories and movies ever told to sell things like, you know, let's call it deviant sexuality, things that basically the Bible has traditionally been against.
Is there a connection between those two things or is this two things happening on parallel tragedy?
There's definitely a connection.
You know, the twisting of the stories towards ideological means just doesn't, it doesn't work.
It leaves people feeling odd.
You know, it just, it actually will lose people's attention.
They'll almost have to force people.
And now you can see it in it.
They're guilting people into watching these movies.
They're saying, if you don't like this movie, you're this or that type of bigot.
And so the Christian story transforms storytelling in such a deep way that people have forgotten how deep it is.
You know, the ancient vision of the hero, the ancient Greek or Roman vision of the hero, it was just someone who did amazing things.
You know, Hercules could kill his own children and still be considered a hero.
But the idea of self-sacrifice, that kind of knightly image of the hero is one which really comes out of Christianity.
And there are very few, there are little sparkles of that in ancient storytelling, but it's really Christ that makes the idea that we have of someone very powerful that sacrifices himself for the weaker.
That is our vision of the hero.
And that comes from the Christian story.
You know, that's one of the things that so appealed to me about Christianity as a non-Christian was its tragedy, its tragic force.
I noticed that so much, you know, Christianity inspired the greatest works of art ever made.
I mean, when you look at the Sistine Chapel, you see something that has never been done before.
It's incredible.
Although I think, was it you who didn't like the Sistine Chapel?
It was because you're an Orthodox, you rotten.
Yeah, I have this criticism to Michelangelo.
Okay, I'll go with that, but still as a work of art, it's a brilliant piece of work.
Schopenhauer said that Christianity had become what did he call banal optimism.
And that seems to me to be very true when I go to the movies and I see what is supposed to be a faith-based movie.
When you create works of art, what are you thinking?
What is your relationship to Christ?
How does your relationship to Christ inform what you're doing?
Well, for me, it really is about jumping into the story of Christ more than the theological pronouncements we make about him.
And you see that that's often why the Christian movies are so bad is because we're just trying to convert people, which is that's not, nobody wants to watch a movie or a story where you're trying to convince them of something, whether it's Christianity or anything else.
But the story of Jesus, the story of Jesus is an insane, crazy story.
There's such deep ironies in that story.
Christ also is the amalgamation of all these character types from ancient myth that just come smashing together.
You know, the king, the servant, the criminal, the hero, the shepherd, all of these characters just come crashing into his story.
And so it's actually a story that's difficult to look at because of how much it has inside it.
And I think that's why, you know, it's much easier to take a kind of moralizing approach and just want people to believe in Jesus so they can get to heaven rather than dive into the deep ironies that happened at the crucifixion.
There's some very, very dark things that go on there.
So that's my approach.
My approach is really to look at the story of Christ as a story, as like the story of stories, and let that feed back into my storytelling through the Old Testament too.
Like seeing the Old Testament has all these threads and amazing stories that kind of lead up to Christ, but then feeding that back into storytelling.
Interesting.
Now, I mean, this plays in, I guess, to the Sistine Chapel, but you're an Orthodox Christian, right?
Yeah.
Can you explain the difference, key differences?
I don't want you to alienate everybody, but still, go ahead.
All right, go ahead and alienate.
My wife says my whole plan of life is to alienate every single person.
Explain it, though, to someone who doesn't know very much about Orthodox Christianity, how that approach is different, the approach to Christ is different.
And I might, maybe I'll explain it also in a way that connects to what we're talking about through my own personal story, which is I studied to be an artist as a Protestant at the time, and I just couldn't get all of the things to connect.
I couldn't get contemporary art to connect to my Christianity, and I couldn't get the painting and the artistic part to connect to my kind of evangelical Christianity in a way that was coherent and world-building, you could say.
And it was in really in discovering ancient Christianity, the web of analogies that exist between scripture, then apocryphal texts, and then the hypnography, the architecture, the visual iconography.
There's this amazing language, right?
This kind of visual poetry that moves back into the musical and into The different correspondences through the stories.
And it's really falling in love with that amazing language that made me move towards Orthodoxy because it was the place where it was the most alive, both in terms of the fullness of the liturgical life, but then also the visual language of the iconography, which had been maintained and preserved and enhanced through the centuries.
And then the connection between all of that.
When you go into an Orthodox church, there's this cosmic game that's being played.
The way the images are placed in the architecture is actually theological.
And then all the hymns are reflecting, let's say, off the images into the scripture readings, into the Old Testament references.
So there's just this amazing web of analogies that then you can just take that and you can actually put that into stories.
And it's actually, it's almost like, you know, there is this amazing world-building device that we've had in Christianity for centuries.
And through the Enlightenment and kind of more rationalistic type Christianity, we've kind of brushed that aside.
All the weird elements, all the stuff that's bothersome, kind of brush it aside.
But there's a treasure trove there.
And that's one of the reasons, at least, that brought me to Orthodoxy was to kind of be able to live in that amazing kind of that, I use the word mythological in the C.S. Lewis sense, like that to live inside that kind of amazing mythological world.
Yeah, no, and it's interesting how many of those contradictions come back in science now and quantum physics and things.
And I don't mean to make any simplistic comparisons, but just the fact of the contradictions, the fact of the paradoxes that used to be used to dispel Christianity actually seem to be built into the world a little bit, the ways that consciousness interacts with the world and so forth.
You know, whenever I read about Orthodox Christianity, it seems to have an internality about it that Western or Roman Catholicism doesn't have.
Yeah.
Talk to me about how storytelling enhances that.
Well, there is a Orthodox Church is a very mystical, and I say that it's not in a vague sense, but in the sense that the Orthodox Church sees the reason for creation as to be united with God.
That is, God created the world to unite it with him.
And we go far in the way we describe that.
We talk about theosis, which is deification.
The purpose of the why God became man was so that man would become God, you know, in participating in his life.
And so there's, it takes that very seriously.
And so once you see that, what happens is you're in this grand cosmic story.
You know, there is a sense in which my own transformation participates in the transformation of the world.
This vision of the saint as kind of the pillar of reality and how all of this is kind of working towards this cosmic revelation where God will become all in all.
That is in some ways the power of this kind of cosmic vision of Christianity that Orthodoxy seems to be, have preserved the most, let's say.
Obviously, the things that you're talking about go against the tide of the times.
I mean, this is something that's been true from the beginning, right?
This is, you know, Jesus says you're going to have trouble in the world.
You know, I've overcome the world.
Artists, I know a lot of artists who are getting badly, badly hit, badly hit by cancellation, badly hit by being ignored.
The entire idea of Christ, the word Christ, the word Jesus, has become almost taboo in certain sections of our elite community, the clericies, the people who kind of set opinions and decide what gets reviewed in the New York Times or the review of books.
How do you live with that?
And I ask you on behalf of all these artists who keep asking me, because I've never, I've sort of survived in this kind of crazy way, but it has been crazy.
I mean, people look at my career and think, gee, that's not an ordinary career and it's not.
What's your experience been?
Are you in Canada?
Yeah, I'm in Canada.
So you're in the worst place.
Well, I mean, my first return to art, let's say when I converted to Orthodoxy, it was actually to make religious art.
You know, I'm an icon carver at the outset.
And so I studied the internal language of Orthodox visual art, and then I began to practice it.
And so that is kind of how I launched my after my return to Orthodox.
That's kind of how I launched my artistic career was to make images for churches and to make images for people that were baptizing their children or whatever to celebrate and to participate in glorifying God, but to participate in the life of the church.
And it's in studying the deep analogies and structures within all of these stories and images that I then came to more secular storytelling.
And so you could say that my secular aspect or my more popular storytelling, because we also did, for example, we wrote a graphic novel that we published last year called God's Dog, which is, it's a retelling of the legend of St. Christopher, which in which St. Christopher, people don't know this, like a secret, that St. Christopher is actually a dog-headed man.
He's a cenocephaly.
You know, he has this dog-headed man.
And so we take all the weird stuff from Christian tradition, all this weird stuff, and we created this epic story, you know, in which all of this kind of happens.
It's like kind of token, but in the actual Christian mythos, not in like the pagan mythos.
And the thing is that secular people like it.
I mean, I would say half the people that buy the book are secular people because I'm not doing it in a way that is preachy in any way.
You know, I'm not trying to convert you.
I'm trying to just get you into a wonderful story that celebrates things that you don't know about, these strange tropes and strange aspects of the Christian tradition that you've forgotten.
The Future Of Storytelling00:01:42
And so I think there are plenty of ways of doing it.
And I think, but we have to, first of all, be willing to put in the work.
You know, it's like, how much of the Christian legendarium do you know?
You know, how much of that can you integrate into the stories and surprise people with?
So I think it's possible.
Obviously, not through Hollywood, not through the big companies.
We also have to plow our own way.
And we have to, let's say, create our own venues.
That's why we're self-publishing right now, because in some ways, I have total control over what we're doing.
But I do think it's possible.
And not only do I think it's possible, honestly, and this, I say this straightforwardly, this is the future of storytelling because everything else is falling apart.
And so those that are able to grab this moment right now and to tell powerful stories, even within the Christian mythos, or at least taking Christian ideas and putting them into stories powerfully, that's going to win because it's the best story.
I don't know what to tell you.
It really is the best story.
Jonathan, I'm glad it's you saying it because I've said it till I'm hoarse and I think it's apt.
I could 100% agree with you about this.
The book is called Snow White and the Widow Queen.
You're raising, how do people find your fundraising?
So if you go on Kickstarter and you write Snow White and the Widow Queen, you'll find it.
It's there until July 6th.
We're trying to get as many funds as possible because it's also to start a publishing company.
And we're going to do a whole series of these books and we're going to start to publish more stories with beautiful illustrations, really trying to make world-class level books.