PK in The National: Techno-Christians are less long-haired radicals and more ironic arms dealers
'End Times' will be imminent if this newly emerging alliance fully coheres - and we must be alert to the potential dangers
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, April 5th 2025
WE’RE all looking for cracks in the rising wall of authoritarianism that is the Trump regime. And until recently, one fissure seemed obviously there and ready to widen.
How can all these Silicon Valley tech bros ultimately line up with all these Christian nationalists? The former like to “move fast and break things” with their machines. They love to transform their bodies and minds by means of strange substances, insertions and extensions.
The latter want hard limits to all this unlimitedness – bodies and minds firmly under control (women at home, men at business or war), one God to believe in (not a woke New Age melee of beliefs and therapies). Maybe an “End Times” gloriously imminent.
In January, the Christian nationalist par excellence, ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon, had already targeted the tech bro supreme, Elon Musk, as “a truly evil guy”. Popcorn seemed appropriate. Prepare to watch the coming disintegration of the MAGA coalition'.
Er, not quite. American commentary has lit up in the past several months, with major voices observing a newly emerging alliance between technologists and Christianity in California and Washington. It’s fragmentary and contradictory – but if it ever fully coheres, we should be extremely worried.
There’s a few phenomena to point at. Firstly, there are versions of the classic San Francisco networking and social organisations – the key means of doing business there. Except their favoured practices aren’t ketamine and polycules, but Jesus DJs and bible schools.
Take the ACTS17 Collective. ACTS stands for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Science”. But it also refers to one of the Bible’s Acts of the Apostles, in which Paul preaches the gospel to Greek intellectuals in Thessalonica, Berea and Athens. The missionary intent is clear.
Those involved in ACTS are tech heavy-hitters. Founder Trae Stephens is also a co-founder of Anduril, supplier of virtual-reality tech to the US military (and was up for the role of secretary of defence under Trump).
Below the title “Code and Cosmos”, major venture capitalist Garry Tan of Y-Combinator spoke at an ACTS event about a “touch grass” moment that all these vaulting techpreneurs might require. Christian belief could help them realise they’re working for “something beyond themselves”.
Depends on what that “something” is. Stephens jokes at one of his events (to general laughter) “I’m literally an arms dealer”. How does any devotee to the prophet of peace, love and equality make light of his collection of swords (not ploughshares)?
This guides us to a figure that the British philosopher Jules Evans describes as the “Cardinal Richelieu” of this techno-Christian emergence – the inventor and investor Peter Thiel.
If anyone is trying to stitch together Christianity and technology in an infernal new arrangement, it’s the elitist, intellectual and secretive Thiel.
His recent speech to an ACTS17 event was hieratic enough. On the topic of transhumanism – the agenda of human enhancement by tech that Bannon so violently objects to – Thiel said: “We don’t want to be anchored too much on nature.”
He continued: “If there’s a Christian critique of these sort of utopian scientific movements, it should always be in the direction that they don’t go far enough.
“Transhumanism, radical life extension … It’s not that you shouldn’t live forever, but that it’s only transforming people’s bodies and not their souls and not the whole person or something like this.”
Some earlier quotes illuminate how Thiel sees the future as inherently guided by Christian faith. This, from 2015: “Judeo-Western optimism differs from the atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered.”
Thiel went on: “Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame [“eschatology” meaning to see reality in terms of its ultimate endpoint]. God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth – in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.”
Perhaps relatively innocuous so far. But Thiel also perceives that the Antichrist – that’s literally his term – is at work to subvert this vision.
“The political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety”, quipped Thiel at an event called Hereticon in 2024.
It’s quite scary what he actually means here. On the Uncommon Knowledge podcast from October last year, Thiel proposes that the two apocalyptic spectres which Christianity anticipates are either “Antichrist” or “Armageddon”.
In Thiel’s reading (he has a book coming), Christian theology suggests that “we will avoid Armageddon [AI, nukes, climate meltdown] by having a one-world state that has real teeth, real power. The biblical term for that is the Antichrist. The Christian intuition I have is: I don’t want Antichrist, I don’t want Armageddon. I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both.”
The coup de gras here is Thiel’s contempt for democracy as a way down this path. From 2020, as he glosses the thought of philosopher Rene Girard: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”
I hope you’re well warned. In their idealistic recent history, the techies believed they were moving towards a Singularity – a take-off point when computation would bountifully transform our world.
Instead, we are in what I’ve called a Caligularity – where eccentric tech elites pursue their whim-laden, often drugged-up stratagems, without much regard to the populace.
Part of the Caligularity is the wilful, heedless incoherence of its actors. We must note that Thiel co-founded Palantir (with the wild-eyed Alex Karp). This is a surveillance tech firm that aims to be the leading instrument of population control for powerful states – if not yet a one-world state. But surely it’s his “Antichrist” system in waiting.
Is this just crazed? Or is it an example of what the Russian strategist Surkov used to do for Putin – which was to create a cause, then create its opposition, then reveal he’d created the opposition … Leaving the Russian citizen entirely confused and dispirited about the public realm. And thus suppressed/depressed.
As Bannon once pithily advised as the best media strategy: “Flood the zone with shit.”
This “shit” can be elegant neo-Christian theology, as much as anything more odious. So we need to establish better “zones”. By which I mean forms of community where technology serves the direct needs and articulated aspirations of people.
Enabling projects – energy, food, housing, culture – that have us largely face each other; in which our devices weave the social fabric, not tear it up. All with a view to playing our part in a fairer, calmer world.
There’s a Jesus who would agree with all that. “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other”, the man from Galilee once said. “You cannot serve God and money.”
Connect that long-haired radical to bullshit merchants posing as ironic arms dealers for a new military-technological complex? You ultimately can’t do it. The new techno-Christians may eventually blow their threatened hegemony. We should keep that popcorn box to hand.
Subscribe to The National here.