The Gospel according to Peter (Thiel)

It’s a time of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI doom cycle is driven by effective altruism, a philosophy that has lurked around the fringes for years but recently burst into the mainstream because its adherents are embedded across the AI industry, from Anthropic to newly appointed AI safety watchdog METR. EA is a utilitarian approach to charity premised on doing the most good for the most people over the longest time, and EA advocates see halting an AI-induced doomsday as critical to saving as many humans as possible.

But EA has an important and equally apocalyptic rival in the crosscutting cosmologies of the tech titans — a strain of Christianity best represented by Peter Thiel, who believes EA will bring about the Antichrist. It’s an issue on which the billionaire techno-capitalist is a self-styled expert, and, somehow, Thiel has become America’s most provocative and visible Christian theologian.

Thiel’s current fixation on the End of the World as We Know It is in theological language called eschatology, the study of the “last things.” His specific bête noire is the Antichrist, the villain of these end times scenarios. Thiel’s riffs on the Antichrist began a little over three years ago, first in a 2023 talk at the Catholic University of America but then, starting in 2025, only in closed-door, invitation-only, multipart lectures out of San Francisco. While that secrecy is frustrating for those of us interested in how uber-rich and politically powerful tech titans see the future of our world, it’s also rather savvy — no surprise from the guy who started hugely successful ventures like PayPal and Palantir. “It’s a pretty good marketing shtick if you want everybody to hear about something, not to let anybody in the room,” Thiel reportedly told one San Francisco audience last fall.

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

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

“Peace and safety” — the slogan of the Antichrist, according to Thiel — trouble 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 unjust peace, the corollary to an unjust war:

Somehow, it’s very strange how the first Cold War from ’49 to ’89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace. Where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have World War III, it will be an unjust war. If we have Cold War II, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace.

Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time? The fourth possibility is that Cold War II will end an unjust peace. And it’s because the Antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know World War III will be an unjust war, that pushes us very hard towards peace at any price.

What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the Antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s “peace and safety,” the unjust peace. And then what Christ says in Matthew 24:6, the full verse: “And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, see that ye be not troubled.” If you’re too troubled, will we always end up with very unjust peace? Or something like this.

We are publishing an analysis of these lectures now because Thiel published a version of these same ideas in the conservative religious journal First Things in July. You can read along for yourself. Titled “The Pope and the Antichrist,” the essay fills in the huge gaps in Thiel’s thinking and allows us to better understand his ideas, such as they are.

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

He’s less 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 promote his own ideology. He reads everything from the Bible to pre-papal writings of a future pope to Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel Lord of the World to semi-obscure Scottish poetry with an eye toward his own, sometimes shockingly literal interpretation of the Antichrist’s arrival (ideally, he should make his mark, as it were, more quickly than Jesus, who died at 33 and a few months — although Thiel allows in his third lecture that perhaps “in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33”). While his mashup of religious concepts and authoritative assertions on dubious interpretations make him sound like an undergrad who just took his first philosophy class and then a few too many hits on the bong, the goal of his eschatology is the same as every apocalyptic visionary: to divide the world between the saved and the damned. And Thiel is, clearly, one of the righteous.

It’s notable here that Thiel is coming from the heart 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 reference 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 message of self-improvement through Jesus, the kind that the clean-and-fit Bay Area crowd tends to embrace. Thiel’s worldview is quite unusual for Silicon Valley, and perhaps especially unexpected for a gay German billionaire; he’s right at home in the US tradition of apocalypticism.

The key to Thiel’s theological vision comes at the very opening of his most recent First Things essay, and it is his fixation on, and fear of, the Antichrist. The Antichrist has traditionally been associated with, as Thiel himself put it elsewhere, “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.” That is true, though Thiel says that the Antichrist interests him “mostly because nobody else is talking about it.” That would be news to anybody with even a passing familiarity with American Christianity.

In fact, the Antichrist and eschatology are arguably the central religious impulse running through American Christianity, and that focus distinguishes the US from most other churches and cultures around the globe. In America, biblical teachings tend to jump from the Ten Commandments at the beginning 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 teachings of Jesus Christ is a footnote.

The enthusiasm for the end of the world has been fueled in large part by the series of sweeping revivals, or “Great Awakenings,” that have marked American religious history from the Colonial era up through the 1800s and, some would say, on into the 20th century. These revivals focused not only on personal conversion but on dark warnings about the “end times” as foretold in the New Testament, when Christ would return to gather believers up to Heaven and those who remained would be stuck facing various tribulations on their own.

For American Christians especially, the quest to save souls from eternal damnation was increasingly driven by the fear that the Second Coming was imminent, so you’d better repent now. New apocalyptic movements and sects and cults continued to flourish, from those early tent revivals through the more slickly branded televangelists and, later, the enormously popular Left Behind series of novels in the 1990s. Forecasters variously took snippets in the Book of Daniel and other prophets in the Hebrew Bible and joined them with the often phantasmagoric array of visions from the Book of Revelation, and eventually what had been a confusing jumble of end times scenarios solidified into a widely accepted timeline: increasing natural and human-made disasters, the Second Coming of Jesus, aka the Rapture of true believers, followed by the rise of the Antichrist and seven years of the Great Tribulation on Earth, ending with a final battle between good and evil and a thousand years of peace.

Phew. Now enter Peter Thiel. He is in effect the latest in a long line of apocalypticists, though his own spin is that anxieties over strange new technologies like AI will prompt demands for greater regulation and that would be a grave, almost apocalyptic, mistake. Given the latest warnings from AI leaders themselves that the new technology could risk human extinction within a decade, Thiel’s concerns run counter to what you’d expect from an apocalypticist.

Thiel’s theological justification for criticizing this instinct toward what he derides as “safetyism” rests on a verse in St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians in which the apostle warns that many will promote “peace and safety” to lull people into a false sense of security and then POOF, Jesus returns and the Antichrist appears and unbelievers are doomed.

Thiel identifies promoters of this kind of peace and safety with a “restraining” force that will be a sign of the coming of the Antichrist and which will eventually pave the way for the Antichrist. He has pointed to Anthony Fauci as one example of such a “restrainer.” And now the apostles of effective altruism, with their concern for protecting as many people as possible, are in Thiel’s sights. Thiel uses the original Greek term for “the restrainer,” katechon, because of course he does. Deploying arcane terms is part of the mystery that gives apocalypticism its allure, and prophets their power.

So who is actually the Antichrist? Thiel at one point dismissed such speculations as “down-market” behavior, but he himself cannot resist weighing in. Viewing the Roman pontiff as the Antichrist or a collaborator with the Antichrist is a standard trope of end times theology, and in his First Things essay Thiel follows that tradition by suggesting that the late Pope Francis could have been the Antichrist. In previously leaked snippets of Thiel’s talks he has accused the current American pope, Leo XIV, of being a “Chinese communist agent” or, more recently, Beijing’s “useful idiot,” because he wants to regulate AI — all very Antichrist-adjacent behavior.

Thiel has a somewhat unusual relationship to the Catholic Church. True to the more anti-papist strains of his tradition, he worries that Pope Leo XIV is a “woke American pope” who will join with American liberals to create a tyrannical “Caesaro-Papist fusion.”

At the same time, the German-born Thiel’s record-breaking financial support propelled JD Vance, a relatively recent Catholic convert, to the US Senate and now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel has also made a little-known Catholic literary theorist from France, René Girard, a spiritual guide for America’s political right — though only by completely inverting Girard’s famous teaching about the scapegoat mechanism by which a society eases internal divisions by blaming a single person or subgroup of people for their problems.

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

“I did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope, but I did hope, even as a Protestant, to be more 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 leader who understood the imminent threat of the Antichrist and the end times, the one Catholic who got it right.

Granted, Benedict is the one pope who provides Thiel with the kind of opening, however tiny, that Thiel could run with. Benedict was “a decided Augustinian,” as he wrote during his earlier days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and he shared St. Augustine’s rather pessimistic view of humankind. Thiel spends much time on the young Ratzinger’s dissertation on St. Bonaventure’s theology of history — 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 century before St. Bonaventure.

Thiel somehow reads Ratzinger’s endorsement of Bonaventure over Joachim of Fiore as a sign that Ratzinger saw the apocalypse coming rather than what Ratzinger actually wrote and meant. In his third lecture Thiel extrapolates wildly on this theme from a quote within a footnote, saying:

The TL;DR: My belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.

Is there evidence for this? There’s all sorts of subtle hints. Writing the 1959 professorial dissertation on Bonaventure, he uses all this colorful language on the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon. What does one make of this? In a footnote, it’s sort of the most cryptic, esoteric way to write it. Not in his own words but quoting another professor, Ratzinger wrote — obviously before he’s Pope — quoting this other professor: “In the case of Bonaventure, we see how difficult it is to succeed in placing the proper limits on apocalyptic images. Apocalyptic images are like a torrent of water that overflows the banks and it’s difficult to keep in bounds. And regardless of all efforts to mollify the imagery, the apocalyptic tone predominates. Even a Mozart cannot make a trumpet forget to sound like a trumpet.” So it’s sort of like you are saying, if you think about this stuff, you can never, ever talk about it. If you talk about it even one peep, it will dominate everything and you can’t say anything else.

The proof that future Pope Benedict was as focused on the literal end times as Thiel? That he would never talk about it, of course.

What Ratzinger actually wanted was to avoid the idea that humanity could bring peace and justice to this world through our own efforts — a preview of his decadeslong campaign against what he saw as Marxist-influenced liberation theology, not on behalf of the Antichrist. Yet Thiel continues to pick out various comments on eschatology — “breadcrumbs,” Thiel calls them — from Ratzinger’s lectures and writings as the decades progressed and Ratzinger’s own theological vision admittedly grew darker and more conservative. He interprets Benedict’s resignation from the papacy — unprecedented in modern 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 when it comes to talking about the Antichrist “these apocalyptic paroxysms make Benedict sound like a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist.”

That comment shows Thiel’s basic problem, which is that he wants to view Roman Catholicism through an Evangelical Protestant lens that sees the end times as a global apocalypse where the “saved” will be rescued — and confirmed in their righteousness. Ratzinger, and later as Pope Benedict, was a thoroughgoing Catholic churchman who was less concerned about the end of time than he was “anxious about the end of a historical era of the Catholic Church,” as the Italian theologian Marcello Neri put it. Ratzinger saw Catholic liberals who would dilute church doctrine and dogma as the apocalyptic threat, and it’s a threat to the Catholic Church, not the planet. History will go on, Ratzinger believed. It’s the church’s fate that’s less certain, thanks to infiltration by modernist currents. Thiel is making a category error that undermines his entire argument. It’s typical Thiel.

At the end of the day, and of his essay, Thiel’s grandiose language and project is shown to be a rather ordinary ideological one. “Thiel is above all a political theologian operating at the very heart 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 handful of Western values — “competition, technology, the individual” — resulting in outcomes “radically divergent from the common democratic project.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor elaborate on that theme in their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

If liberals want to “immanentize the eschaton,” as William F. Buckley once put it, by focusing on doing good in this life instead of being anxious about the world to come, conservatives tend to focus on personal salvation ahead of the apocalypse. That end times theology is a perfect match for them because it tends toward a libertarian ethos like Thiel’s; Jesus is coming back soon, let’s not get bogged down in overregulating or overthinking. “We moralize way too much,” as Thiel said in a podcast last month with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. “If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore you’re actually maybe kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.” Instead, Thiel suggests, let’s make hay — meaning, bushels of money — while the sun shines. Climate anxiety? Your worries about the future show a lack of faith! That’s why, in addition to the previous pope and the effective altruism movement, Thiel has also been reported as suggesting climate change activist Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.

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

The Book of Revelation tells us, sort of, the Antichrist will abolish financial freedom. Revelation 13:16–17: “He causes all, both great and small, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads, that no man might buy or sell save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

There’s this whole constellation of things, where over the last 25 years — this uneventful, Groundhog Day 21st century since 2000 — under cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed. And all these tech fortunes are downstream of this vast system. You have the illusion of power and autonomy, but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment. It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.

He admits that “this Antichrist-like system, this machinery” moves at a different speed than a human Antichrist (who, again, should probably be 33.5 or younger), but insists it was set up “not overnight but relatively quickly, and there’s a feeling it could be activated at the flip of a switch.” If that all seems like a definition of the Antichrist that only a billionaire could love, he assures his listeners it’s more than that.

And then, of course, it’s not just a financial system. It’s also, in some sense, an ideological system. The Antichrist won’t stop just at money. Money is not enough to stop the Antichrist and follows that he wants something more 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 around Nazi symbolism and libel online, and it’s Australian age verification laws, which all cobble together into a vision of the end of days that so transfixes him. It’s not exactly fire and brimstone, but to Thiel, it is.

For all of Peter Thiel’s prominence and brilliance — Vance called him “the smartest man I’ve ever met” — his spiritual preoccupations are ultimately quite mainstream. Vance recently spent part of a long podcast with a popular Evangelical influencer talking about the End Times and the Antichrist. It blew the mind of most Catholics, but as Vance’s friend conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher said, this is “a very, very common belief.”

These beliefs are also very representative of an increasingly DIY religious culture in America that is disconnected from traditional practices and flesh-and-blood congregations. When it comes to religion, seemingly everyone now does their own research and generates their own social media ministry.

The difference is that Thiel is an uber-wealthy influencer with political power. The theological thrifting by which he has sewn together his own apocalyptic vision would at one level be seen as quirky but innocent if not for the fact that he is using that vision to set himself up as a godlike judge between the saved and the damned — one might almost say a kind of Antichrist. That’s what eschatology has always done, but few apocalyptic preachers have wielded the kind of power Peter Thiel does, and he doesn’t seem to view many of us outside his circle as worthy of salvation.

Additional reporting by Tina Nguyen