Peter Thiel is one of the most influential people in American technology and politics. His recent essay on the Antichrist is more than an eccentric theological exercise—it offers a window into a broader political philosophy shaping today’s debates over AI, democracy, and power.
I wanna talk about Peter Thiel and the Antichrist today. And before I lose you thinking I have no interest in what some Silicon Valley billionaire has to say about the Antichrist, this is actually quite important. This week, Peter Thiel published an article in the journal First Things titled The Pope and the Antichrist.
The article is very strange and you’re welcome to go and read it if you’re interested. First things is a right-wing Catholic outlet and Thiel is not Catholic. Thiel and his research assistant Sam Wolfe, who is kind of credited as a co-author wrote this essay that gets into quite a bit of minutiae about the career of a Catholic theologian named Joseph Ratzinger. Most people would probably know Joseph Ratzinger more by the later name that he was given of Pope Benedict XVI, the pope who served before Pope Francis. But the article, the essay is about how Benedict understood the idea of the Antichrist.
Now I’m less interested in this particular article per se, which makes some huge jumps of logic and kind of elides a lot of important history and by my reading misunderstands Benedict the XVI’s thought.
The article is part of this broader effort that has rolled out over the last two or three years of Peter Thiel trying to invigorate Christian discussions about the Antichrist. And he claims in the article that the concept of the Antichrist interests him because no one else is talking about the Antichrist. He must not be paying very close attention to evangelical media because they are talking about the Antichrist all the time. And he’s given this series of four private lectures on the Antichrist in multiple locations.
These are closed door meetings, but the ideas and sometimes even recordings of the lectures have leaked out. So we get a pretty good sense of what he actually is saying and thinking in these. In March of this year, he took those lectures to Rome, to the neighborhood of the Vatican in order to deliver them right in Pope Leo’s backyard. And this was widely interpreted as a challenge to Pope Leo and an attempt to kind of get in his face a little bit.
Right now, Thiel is continuing to pursue this whole idea in the pages of a Catholic outlet and engaging with this past Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, and he has a whole discussion within this piece about whether Pope Benedict thought his successor, Pope Francis, was the Antichrist. Hint: Pope Benedict did not think that Pope Francis was the Antichrist.
Thiel kind of speculates along these lines, and he draws on obscure thinkers to paste together a thesis that is part biblical, but much more than that, it’s about Thiel’s own political philosophy and vision of humanity. What’s striking is the essay in most of Thiel’s lectures from what we know about them, about the Antichrist, they have virtually nothing to say about Jesus or about the character of God, right? There’s not much Christ in his Antichrist. Instead, the intense focus is on humanity and on our apocalyptic present and future.
In my book coming out in October Defying Tyrants Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, I do talk quite a bit about the idea of the Antichrist. I’ve actually given a lot of thought to the idea of how Christians use this concept of Antichrist and what gets left out of those debates and you’re welcome to go and pre-order my book now if you want to think more about that but I want to think more today about what happens when billionaires dabble in theology, particularly apocalyptic theology. So Peter Thiel is not just someone’s quirky uncle ranting on about the Antichrist on Facebook. Thiel is one of the most influential leaders in Silicon Valley today. He was the co-founder of PayPal, part of what is sometimes known as the PayPal mafia that also includes Elon Musk and David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar.
Thiel was also the co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, the data integration firm that is now at the heart of modern US government surveillance, including of us. He was the first outside investor at Facebook, so he has had a very successful run in Silicon Valley, both as a kind of tech entrepreneur and as a venture capitalist. He is also important because he has been a mentor and a spiritual influence on the vice president on JD Vance.
Vance worked for Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital, and Vance in his recent autobiography actually credits Thiel with playing a very big role in Vance’s own conversion to Catholicism. And he says that Thiel is possibly the smartest person I’ve ever met. Thiel also is a billionaire donor to a lot of Trump-aligned Republicans. In fact, JD Vance, when he ran for the Senate in 2022, got $15 million in funding from Peter Thiel. He basically bankrolled all of J.D. Vance’s political career up until he became the vice-presidential candidate.
And Peter Thiel is a Christian. He calls himself a Christian, but he calls himself a heterodox Christian, as in one that doesn’t quite believe all the right things. He has this kind of idiosyncratic vision, but he does fancy himself a philosopher and a theologian. Now, I’m not going to get into all the details of Thiel’s vision of the Antichrist, which is pretty convoluted.
Let me sketch just kind of a broad outline for you. This idea, or even the phrase, the word, the Antichrist, does come from the Bible. It’s there in the New Testament. It actually only occurs in one small little dusty corner of the New Testament in the epistles of 1 and 2 John, these very short letters that come at the very end of the New Testament. But even where it occurs there, it doesn’t have much specificity. It’s more often used in the plural in the Bible.
The anti-Christs refer to a group of contemporary people in the times of the New Testament.
I argue in my forthcoming book that when the New Testament authors use this word in the plural, they are referring to Christians who have abused power in Jesus’ name. These are Christians who claim alignment with Jesus, with Christ, but are doing the opposite of what he taught and therefore they are anti-Christs. But.
Since at least the second century, the singular, the antichrist, the idea of a single antichrist, a kind of future or present figure, has fascinated Christians. There’s been rampant speculation. It is a crazy list of people who have been accused of being the antichrist. There are too many popes to count.
We would be here all day if I went through the history of all the popes who have been called the antichrist.
The prophet Muhammad has been called the antichrist,
Napoleon,
Bill Clinton,
Mikhail Gorbachev,
Barack Obama,
Donald Trump,
and Elon Musk.
All of these people have been considered in this speculation about possible antichrists.
You see, the antichrist concept belongs in the realm of Christian speculation about the apocalypse, the end of time, and the final unveiling of God’s plan in the world. The pattern that I’ve observed throughout Christian history is that Christians have typically interpreted the Antichrist concept to refer to whatever they personally or theologically oppose in their own time. This both creates a hateable enemy, a clear opposite that you can oppose and challenge, and it makes the Christians themselves feel cosmically important that they are living in this kind of biblical time, this kind of apocalyptic time where they are the ones resisting the Antichrist.
Speculation about the Antichrist has often therefore functioned as a form of Christian megalomania, making the Christians feel better about themselves.
For instance, if Islam is emerging in the seventh and eighth century and is perceived to be a threat to the Christians, well then Muhammad must be the Antichrist. Even though Muhammad and the Quran only have good things to say about Jesus and honor him as a prophet.
In the Protestant Reformation, many of the Protestants accused the Pope of being the Antichrist because that’s who they were opposing. That was their opponent. He must be the Antichrist.
Growing up as a Republican evangelical in the 1980s and 1990s, within my family, within my church, there was open speculation about whether Bill Clinton could be the Antichrist because we were opposed to Bill Clinton. We felt good about ourselves and our theology because we were standing against the cosmic evil that was the Clinton administration.
So that’s the use of the Antichrist concept in Christian history.
I’d argue that Peter Thiel’s use of the concept actually very much fits the same pattern. You see, Thiel’s ideology is what we could call techno-libertarianism. He basically believes in the unmitigated and unregulated growth of technology and that that will save humanity from itself. And he’s very interested in ideas of transhumanism and AI and potentially having human beings live on in cyberspace after their death, kind of moving beyond this embodied human existence. His message is, we should trust the oligarchs and let the march of technological progress lead us into the future. He’s willing to bulldoze anyone getting in the way of AI or the power of Silicon Valley.
For Thiel, the Antichrist might be a person, but more than that, the Antichrist is a style of politics that wants to regulate or challenge AI and challenge that tech oligarchy.
Anything that tries to unite humanity against these potential apocalypses, well, that must be the Antichrist in his mind.
Anything that regulates technological progress, that checks the growing power of AI or warns of potential environmental collapse, that is part of the Antichrist tendency. And he’s even speculated that Greta Thunberg, this famous young woman who is an environmental activist, she might be the Antichrist because she’s trying to unite humanity in opposition to climate change.
You see, Thiel’s greatest worry is that there will be a one world government that will regulate AI and technology in the name of peace and justice.
He’s recently begun squaring off against Pope Leo because Pope Leo put out this encyclical, this kind of papal document trying to grapple with and think through the Christian tradition about morality and ethics in relation to AI.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this month, Peter Thiel said that the Pope, “must be working for the Chinese communists by proposing any sort of moral or ethical limits on AI.” Not exactly clear how that works. Thiel has given up on the idea of democracy. He has given up on that for quite a long time. In 2009, he wrote an essay where he states openly that he no longer believes that democracy and freedom are compatible.
Thiel has allied himself with figures like JD Vance and Donald Trump because he believes they will advance his quest for freedom, by which he means his own kind of self-actualization, and techno-libertarianism. The Antichrist in his interpretation is anyone or anything that could get in his way or opposes his priorities. This is not unlike Donald Trump’s approach to politics, where winning is more important than consistency. The outcome is what matters, not the process. So democracy, from this kind of authoritarian mindset, becomes the barrier to personal self-actualization or humanity’s self-actualization because all these other people, keep getting in the way of me doing what I want.
This is a problem endemic on the far right in the United States, but it also stretches into parts of the far left where people are starting to give up on democracy because democracy in their mind has become inconvenient. They have this vision of society or of humanity that supersedes democracy, be it Christian nationalism or communism.
And so democracy must be jettisoned in favor of what Thiel calls freedom, or in favor of technology’s growth, unclear to what end, or in protecting against the antichrist, as in humanity working together.
We should be paying attention to and thinking about is how much this is radically changing our politics right now. In the last decade, but especially in the last five years, Thiel and Silicon Valley have moved into the very heart of right-wing politics.
Think about Elon Musk and the role that he played with DOGE.
Think about JD Vance, this obscure, non-charismatic figure who is not very gifted politician, but is now the vice president because of the sponsorship of someone like Peter Thiel or the rise of crypto, the emergence of this hitherto largely unregulated spread of AI.
All of these things are crashing upon us right now and are empowering these Silicon Valley billionaires like Thiel. In democracy, we have to pay attention to the different power centers in our society, whether they be the realm of finance and capital and how money moves around and shifts our politics whether it’s the military industrial complex, whether it’s culture and celebrity.
Right now Silicon Valley and the whole world of technology is rising in its cultural capital and its political capital in utterly unprecedented ways.
We are living in unprecedented times.
AI is a technology unlike anything that we have ever seen, and it is going to shift and change our economy and our society in ways we can’t even anticipate.
Climate change is real, and it is destabilizing the world through heat waves and new weather patterns and creating migration crises around the world.
Democracies are crumbling right now, and authoritarian nationalist movements are on the rise around the world.
Apocalypticism flourishes in unprecedented times because it’s a way of dealing with trauma and chaos and of organizing the world around your narrative. Thiel sees the world in apocalyptic terms, but his is an apocalypse in which God does not seemingly intervene, where Christ has virtually no role. Humanity must save or damn itself in Thiel’s reading. It’s either Antichrist or Armageddon in his telling.
And underneath all of this talk about the Antichrist is actually Thiel’s vision of humanity, where he believes that some human beings are intrinsically moral and good, and they rise to the top and become tech overlords like Thiel and his friends, but humanity as a whole is a barrier to humanity’s perfection in his vision. He has this techno-elitist vision, and in his mind, we should distrust democracy and the wisdom of crowds and concentrate power in the hands of this techno-libertarian oligarchy.
Even in a crowded historical field of megalomaniacal Christians using the Antichrist as a focusing lens to describe their enemies, Thiel stands out as even more self-involved and craven than average, given his financial resources and the influence that he has with Vance and other Trump world figures.
I’m not worried that Thiel will convince other people to believe in his convoluted theories about the Antichrist. If you read the news accounts, most people seem to walk out of his lectures kind of scratching their heads and confused.
I’m more concerned that Thiel really believes this.
Apocalyptic reasoning can be used historically to set aside ethics and morality.
Pope Leo, is trying to push us to think more about ethics and morality within AI.
Apocalypticism sets all that aside and says, “Everything is existential right now, and I know how to save humanity, so I guess I just have to do that.”
Thiel’s anti-Christ isn’t actually anti-Christ in any real sense. There’s no sense of who Jesus was or is or how any value of Thiel’s value system is derived from Jesus in the first place. Peter Thiel is worried about the anti-Thiel, anything that could get in his way.
At this moment where democracy and human solidarity and dialogue and cooperation are so needed, Thiel’s ideology and influence are pushing in the opposite direction, towards a true technocracy where technologists reign supreme and the rest of us meager humans either get on board or get called the anti-Christ.
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