The Gospel according to Peter (Thiel)

It’s a period of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI destiny sequence is driven by productive altruism, a doctrine that has lurked about the fringes for years but lately burst into the mainstream since its adherents are embedded throughout the AI industry, from Anthropic to newly appointed AI safety watchdog METR. EA is a utilitarian method to philanthropy premised on doing the most fine for the most group complete the longest time, and EA advocates see halting an AI-induced doomsday as crucial to preservation as many humans as possible.

But EA has an crucial and likewise apocalyptic competitor in the crosscutting cosmologies of the tech titans — a strain of Christianity finest represented by Peter Thiel, who believes EA volition bring concerning the Antichrist. It’s an matter on which the billionaire techno-capitalist is a self-styled expert, and, somehow, Thiel has rotate into America’s most provocative and apparent Christian theologian.

Thiel’s current fixation on the End of the World as We Know It is in theological tongue called eschatology, the study of the “last things.” His particular bête noire is the Antichrist, the villain of these end times scenarios. Thiel’s riffs on the Antichrist began a small complete three years ago, archetypal in a 2023 talk at the Catholic University of America but then, starting in 2025, lone in closed-door, invitation-only, multipart lectures out of San Francisco. While that secrecy is frustrating for those of us curious in how uber-rich and politically mighty tech titans see the forthcoming of our world, it’s additionally fairly savvy — no astonishment from the guy who started hugely prosperous ventures akin PayPal and Palantir. “It’s a beautiful fine promotion shtick if you desire everybody to comprehend concerning something, not to let anybody in the room,” Thiel reportedly told one San Francisco spectators final fall.

In March, he traveled to Rome for another private, four-part sequence on the Antichrist. Taking his shtick to the doorstep of the Vatican was guaranteed to create publicity, and it did.

Months ago, recordings of Thiel’s lectures were leaked to The Verge. We have listened to and peruse transcripts of all four of these lectures, which provision a opening into Thiel’s dizzying religious and sociocultural philosophy. He comes off as an intelligent magpie who somehow combines disparate elements into grave warnings against the AI and broad “safetyism” that he claims precedes the Antichrist.

“Peace and safety” — the motto of the Antichrist, according to Thiel — difficulty him throughout the lectures. In the first, he wonders if we’re headed toward World War III or Cold War II, and afterward, potentially, an unfair peace, the corollary to an unfair war:

We are publishing an inspection of these lectures now since Thiel published a type of these identical ideas in the traditional religious diary First Things in July. You can peruse alongside for yourself. Titled “The Pope and the Antichrist,” the composition fills in the huge gaps in Thiel’s thinking and allows us to improved comprehend his ideas, specified as they are.

The base row is that following sifting through all of the arcane references and esoteric exegesis, it turns out that Thiel — a Protestant who likes to depict himself as a “heterodox Christian” — offers a fairly standard-issue American evangelical worldview, and fairly a fundamentalist one at that.

He’s small a coherent religious thinker than a repackager of recognizable ideas — dressing them up in the rhetoric of a tech nerd turned theological hobbyist — which he uses to advance his own ideology. He says everything from the Bible to pre-papal writings of a forthcoming pope to Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel Lord of the World to semi-obscure Scottish poesy alongside an eye toward his own, sometimes shockingly literal explanation of the Antichrist’s arrival (ideally, he should create his mark, as it were, additional quickly than Jesus, who died at 33 and a few months — although Thiel allows in his third address that perchance “in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33”). While his mashup of religious concepts and authoritative assertions on dubious interpretations create him audio akin an undergrad who fair took his archetypal doctrine category and afterward a few too many hits on the bong, the goal of his eschatology is the identical as all apocalyptic visionary: to distinct the earth between the saved and the damned. And Thiel is, clearly, among the righteous.

It’s notable current that Thiel is coming from the bosom of what is arguably America’s latest, and most unexpected, religious revival — one concentrated among the Silicon Valley elite, like the ACTS 17 Collective, which is a citation to St. Paul’s preaching to the Greek pagans in the Acts of the Apostles and an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society.” But that movement presents an upbeat communication of self-improvement through Jesus, the benevolent that the clean-and-fit Bay Area assemblage tends to embrace. Thiel’s worldview is fairly different for Silicon Valley, and perchance particularly unexpected for a gay German billionaire; he’s correct at residence in the US tradition of apocalypticism.

The key to Thiel’s theological imagination comes at the extremely beginning of his most latest First Things essay, and it is his fixation on, and fear of, the Antichrist. The Antichrist has traditionally been connected with, as Thiel himself put it elsewhere, “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.” That is true, although Thiel says that the Antichrist interests him “mostly since nobody alternatively is talking concerning it.” That would be news to anybody alongside equal a passing familiarity alongside American Christianity.

In fact, the Antichrist and eschatology are arguably the chief religious encourage operating through American Christianity, and that concentration distinguishes the US from most another churches and cultures about the globe. In America, biblical doctrine lean to jump from the Ten Commandments at the commencement of the Old Testament to the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. The Gospels, the Beatitudes, all that provides the key doctrine of Jesus Christ is a footnote.

The enthusiasm for the end of the earth has been fueled in ample part by the sequence of sweeping revivals, or “Great Awakenings,” that have marked American religious former from the Colonial era up through the 1800s and, several would say, on into the 20th century. These revivals focused not lone on individual conversion but on dreary warnings concerning the “end times” as foretold in the New Testament, whenever Christ would come back to collect believers up to Heaven and those who remained would be stuck facing assorted tribulations on their own.

For American Christians especially, the quest to preserve souls from eternal damnation was increasingly driven by the fear that the Second Coming was imminent, so you’d improved regret now. New apocalyptic movements and sects and cults continued to flourish, from those first shelter revivals through the additional slickly tagged televangelists and, later, the enormously famous Left Behind sequence of novels in the 1990s. Forecasters variously took snippets in the Book of Daniel and another prophets in the Hebrew Bible and joined them alongside the frequently phantasmagoric gathering of visions from the Book of Revelation, and eventually what had been a confusing jumble of end times scenarios solidified into a extensively accepted timeline: expanding natural and human-made disasters, the Second Coming of Jesus, aka the Rapture of true believers, followed by the increase of the Antichrist and seven years of the Great Tribulation on Earth, ending alongside a final battle between fine and evil and a thousand years of peace.

Phew. Now act Peter Thiel. He is in consequence the latest in a lengthy row of apocalypticists, although his own rotation is that anxieties complete different new technologies akin AI volition immediate demands for greater regulation and that would be a grave, nearly apocalyptic, mistake. Given the latest warnings from AI leaders themselves that the new innovation could hazard individual extinction inside a decade, Thiel’s concerns run oppose to what you’d anticipate from an apocalypticist.

Thiel’s theological justification for criticizing this intuition toward what he derides as “safetyism” rests on a verse in St. Paul’s archetypal letter to the Thessalonians in which the apostle warns that many volition advance “peace and safety” to lull group into a false awareness of safety and afterward POOF, Jesus returns and the Antichrist appears and unbelievers are doomed.

Thiel identifies promoters of this benevolent of harmony and safety alongside a “restraining” power that volition be a sign of the coming of the Antichrist and which volition eventually pave the way for the Antichrist. He has pointed to Anthony Fauci as one example of specified a “restrainer.” And now the apostles of productive altruism, alongside their involvement for protecting as many group as possible, are in Thiel’s sights. Thiel uses the first Greek term for “the restrainer,” katechon, since of way he does. Deploying arcane conditions is part of the mystery that gives apocalypticism its allure, and prophets their power.

So who is really the Antichrist? Thiel at one item dismissed specified speculations as “down-market” behavior, but he himself cannot oppose weighing in. Viewing the Roman pontiff as the Antichrist or a collaborator alongside the Antichrist is a norm trope of end times theology, and in his First Things composition Thiel follows that tradition by suggesting that the delayed Pope Francis could have been the Antichrist. In earlier leaked snippets of Thiel’s talks he has accused the current American pope, Leo XIV, of being a “Chinese communist agent” or, additional recently, Beijing’s “useful idiot,” since he wants to control AI — all extremely Antichrist-adjacent behavior.

Thiel has a slightly different association to the Catholic Church. True to the additional anti-papist strains of his tradition, he worries that Pope Leo XIV is a “woke American pope” who volition associate alongside American liberals to create a tyrannical “Caesaro-Papist fusion.”

At the identical time, the German-born Thiel’s record-breaking financial assistance propelled JD Vance, a comparatively latest Catholic convert, to the US Senate and now a heartbeat distant from the presidency. Thiel has additionally made a little-known Catholic written theorist from France, René Girard, a religious guide for America’s governmental correct — although lone by completely inverting Girard’s celebrated instruction concerning the scapegoat mechanism by which a community eases inner divisions by blaming a sole individual or subgroup of group for their problems.

Thiel’s latest composition is additionally unusual, or inventive, in that fairly than denouncing the papacy as the Whore of Babylon — a traditional fundamentalist Protestant trope drawn from a stark depiction in Revelation 17 — he tries to co-opt one pope, the delayed Benedict XVI, into his extremely American and Protestant worldview and against the papacy and the Catholic Church itself.

“I did not arrive to Rome to try to be additional Catholic than the pope, but I did hope, equal as a Protestant, to be additional Catholic than the average Catholic,” Thiel says. His aim is to use Benedict — who resigned as pope in 2013 and died in seclusion in the Vatican in 2022 — as the one Catholic chief who understood the imminent danger of the Antichrist and the end times, the one Catholic who got it right.

Granted, Benedict is the one pope who provides Thiel alongside the benevolent of opening, nevertheless tiny, that Thiel could run with. Benedict was “a decided Augustinian,” as he wrote during his before days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and he shared St. Augustine’s fairly pessimistic perspective of humankind. Thiel spends much period on the young Ratzinger’s dissertation on St. Bonaventure’s theology of former — a recondite topic in which the 13th-century Italian Franciscan rebutted the odd apocalyptic writings of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian abbot who lived a hundred years before St. Bonaventure.

Thiel somehow says Ratzinger’s endorsement of Bonaventure complete Joachim of Fiore as a sign that Ratzinger saw the apocalypse coming fairly than what Ratzinger really wrote and meant. In his third address Thiel extrapolates wildly on this theme from a citation inside a footnote, saying:

The evidence that forthcoming Pope Benedict was as focused on the literal end times as Thiel? That he would never conversation concerning it, of course.

What Ratzinger really wanted was to evade the idea that humanity could bring harmony and fairness to this earth through our own efforts — a preview of his decadeslong run against what he saw as Marxist-influenced freedom theology, not on behalf of the Antichrist. Yet Thiel continues to choice out assorted comments on eschatology — “breadcrumbs,” Thiel calls them — from Ratzinger’s lectures and writings as the decades progressed and Ratzinger’s own theological imagination admittedly grew darker and additional conservative. He interprets Benedict’s resignation from the papacy — unprecedented in contemporary times — as one of Benedict’s “winks and hints” that the Antichrist is coming.

This ventriloquizing is as bizarre as it is morbid, but Thiel is convinced that whenever it comes to talking concerning the Antichrist “these apocalyptic paroxysms create Benedict audio akin a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist.”

That comment shows Thiel’s essential problem, which is that he wants to perspective Roman Catholicism through an Evangelical Protestant lens that sees the end times as a earth apocalypse anywhere the “saved” volition be rescued — and confirmed in their righteousness. Ratzinger, and afterward as Pope Benedict, was a thoroughgoing Catholic churchman who was small concerned concerning the end of period than he was “anxious concerning the end of a historic era of the Catholic Church,” as the Italian theologian Marcello Neri put it. Ratzinger saw Catholic liberals who would dilute chapel doctrine and dogma as the apocalyptic threat, and it’s a danger to the Catholic Church, not the planet. History volition go on, Ratzinger believed. It’s the church’s destiny that’s small certain, gratitude to intrusion by modernist currents. Thiel is making a category error that undermines his complete argument. It’s representative Thiel.

At the end of the day, and of his essay, Thiel’s grandiose tongue and project is shown to be fairly a average ideological one. “Thiel is complete all a governmental theologian functioning at the extremely bosom of the Silicon Valley ecosystem,” the Italian Franciscan Paolo Benanti wrote in a sharp riposte to Thiel’s Rome talks. As Benanti explains, this ideology includes the “pathological radicalization” of a fistful of Western values — “competition, technology, the individual” — resulting in outcomes “radically divergent from the average delegate project.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor detailed on that theme in their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

If liberals desire to “immanentize the eschaton,” as William F. Buckley formerly put it, by focusing on doing fine in this existence alternatively of being concerned concerning the earth to come, conservatives lean to concentration on individual salvation onward of the apocalypse. That end times theology is a ideal equivalent for them since it tends toward a libertarian ethos akin Thiel’s; Jesus is coming rear soon, let’s not get bogged downward in overregulating or overthinking. “We moralize way too much,” as Thiel stated in a podcast final month alongside Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. “If you’re evil, you’re at smallest competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and hence you’re really perchance benevolent of fine since you’re at smallest getting item done.” Instead, Thiel suggests, let’s create hay — meaning, bushels of prosperity — during the sun shines. Climate anxiety? Your worries concerning the forthcoming display a deficiency of faith! That’s why, in supplement to the former pope and the productive altruism movement, Thiel has additionally been reported as suggesting climate alter advocate Greta Thunberg power be the Antichrist.

Or maybe, he suggests in one lecture, it’s the scheme that’s the genuine Antichrist — specifically the financial regulatory system.

He admits that “this Antichrist-like system, this machinery” moves at a distinct speed than a individual Antichrist (who, again, should likely be 33.5 or younger), but insists it was set up “not overnight but comparatively quickly, and there’s a emotion it could be activated at the flip of a switch.” If that all seems akin a definition of the Antichrist that lone a billionaire could love, he assures his listeners it’s additional than that.

And then, of course, it’s not fair a financial system. It’s also, in several sense, an ideological system. The Antichrist won’t halt fair at money. Money is not adequate to halt the Antichrist and follows that he wants item additional from you.

It’s also, per Thiel, the International Criminal Court and the way it has spooked Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and erstwhile members of the George W. Bush administration, and it’s Germany’s strict laws about Nazi symbolism and libel online, and it’s Australian age verification laws, which all cobble together into a imagination of the end of days that so transfixes him. It’s not exactly blaze and brimstone, but to Thiel, it is.

For all of Peter Thiel’s prominence and brilliance — Vance called him “the smartest man I’ve always met” — his religious preoccupations are ultimately fairly mainstream. Vance lately spent part of a lengthy podcast alongside a famous Evangelical influencer talking concerning the End Times and the Antichrist. It blew the intellect of most Catholics, but as Vance’s companion traditional Christian commentator Rod Dreher said, this is “a very, extremely average belief.”

These beliefs are additionally extremely delegate of an increasingly DIY religious civilization in America that is detached from traditional practices and flesh-and-blood congregations. When it comes to religion, apparently everyone now does their own investigation and generates their own social media ministry.

The difference is that Thiel is an uber-wealthy influencer alongside governmental power. The theological thrifting by which he has sewn together his own apocalyptic imagination would at one flat be seen as quirky but guiltless if not for the fact that he is using that imagination to set himself up as a godlike fairness between the saved and the damned — one power nearly say a benevolent of Antichrist. That’s what eschatology has continually done, but few apocalyptic preachers have wielded the benevolent of power Peter Thiel does, and he doesn’t appear to perspective many of us exterior his circle as deserving of salvation.

Additional reporting by Tina Nguyen