Why Peter Thiel is talking about the Antichrist and Armageddon

Plus: got rid of my iPhone, a First Amendment violation, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. As a reminder, I’m writing a new book this fall. Please read about it, and:

---

Why Peter Thiel is talking about the Antichrist and Armageddon

(Albrecht Dürer, “The Apocalyptic Woman,” 1498, via)

During my normal writing time this week, I was hosting an in-person gathering with my team from Christianity Today. I didn’t want to skip a week, so I decided to share this piece I wrote about the faith of Peter Thiel. It was originally commissioned by an outlet, which is why it’s a little tonally different from my usual posts here. The editor decided to kill it in part to pivot to Charlie Kirk coverage, but I found the research interesting and would still like it to see the light of day.

The Christian faith of Peter Thiel is no secret. It’s been apparent in his academic work for more than two decades and was reported in The New Yorker in 2011. Those attentive to the tech billionaire’s exploits know that his companies are all named for characters from the Catholic-authored Lord of the Rings; that he studied with Christian philosopher René Girard; that he funded an app called Instapray.

Yet Thiel’s beliefs came to new attention in 2025 thanks to a fugue in three parts. First, stories at The New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Christianity Today documented a curious revival in the Bay Area. Suddenly, Christianity is the talk of the town from Fremont to Palo Alto. Think church, kinda—with caviar.

The second movement was an interview Thiel gave to Ross Douthat at the Times. After requisite discussion of Donald Trump and decadence, the conversation turned to the Antichrist: Why is Thiel giving talks on this evil figure from arguably the murkiest book of the Bible?

Third was the news that Thiel is by no means done with the subject. He’s giving four off-the-record—and, naturally, sold-out—lectures on the Antichrist this fall. Hosted by the evangelical ACTS 17 Collective at San Francisco’s exclusive Commonwealth Club, the lectures started last week.

Amid all this, Thiel’s been cast as a novice Christian. Stories like this reporting for The Free Press on “how intellectuals found God” rank him among those expressing new respect for Christianity (Elon Musk, Richard Dawkins) or converting outright (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth).

This classification is a mistake. Thiel has long professed his faith in an increasingly voluble and public record. He does not typically speak to the basics; I can’t say, for instance, whether he’d recite the Nicene Creed. And he’s famously inarticulate—even apparently scripted speeches come out a chaos of um and well and I think and you know. But wade through the detritus and you find consistently Christian language and frequent return to the same thinkers and themes.

Thiel talks about envy, for instance, in near-verbatim terms in a paper originally presented at Stanford in 2004 and an interview with evangelical pundit Eric Metaxas 16 years later. Over and over, he references Shakespeare and Locke, Aquinas and Westphalia, Romulus and Remus vs. Cain and Abel, the “political atheism” of Christ, and above all the omni-explanatory and sometimes apocalyptic Girard. In this context, Thiel’s interest in the Antichrist is no shocking turn.

These details of Thiel’s faith are discernible, and he’s said Christianity is “the prism with which I look at the whole world.” Still, the bigger picture remains blurry. In that 2011 New Yorker profile, Thiel described himself as a “somewhat heterodox” Christian, but in 2024, he labeled his views on the Bible “pretty fairly orthodox.” Asked by Metaxas what he means when he says Christianity is true, Thiel responded: “I believe in the resurrection of Christ—the bodily resurrection of Christ.”

On the denominational front, Thiel is clearer: By upbringing and current profession alike, he’s Lutheran—and, emphatically, not Calvinist. He is, or aims to be, a regular churchgoer, though what kind of church is unknown. Thiel is sometimes labeled an evangelical, some Lutherans are evangelical and others aren’t. Confusingly, the main U.S. branch of non-evangelical Lutherans is called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which may be a source of uncertainty about Thiel.

Or Thiel himself may be the source: He didn’t object when the right-wing commentator Glenn Beck dubbed him an evangelical in 2014. But in 2021, The New Yorker reported that Thiel denies his parents raised him evangelical (after reporting a decade prior that they did).

One thing, however, is clear: Thiel has grown increasingly bold in his beliefs. Where once he shied away from “convinc[ing] other people” of Christianity’s truth, calling himself “quite uncomfortable identifying as Christian” and admiring religious courage in others, Thiel in the 2020s does public faith rather differently. He’s talking more openly, more often, and with greater urgency about agency and apocalypse.

“It’s just a few core ideas I come back to,” Thiel explained in 2024, “and it’s something like this wonderful and terrible history of the world that we’re living through as Christianity’s unraveling our culture, and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side.”

This sense of “unraveling” has two senses for Thiel. One is the spread of what he calls “hyper-Christianity” or “ultra-Christianity,” which in more colloquial language is something like wokeness. Thiel’s analysis here is sometimes mistaken for an attack on Christianity. It isn’t. It’s a soundbite-unfriendly version of the “post-Protestant ethic,” a critique from Christian thinkers like Joseph Bottum.

Thiel’s telling, inevitably, draws on Girard. The idea is that Christianity is unique among religions in siding with victims—the widow, the orphan, the poor, Christ on the cross—and, often, vindicating them as innocent and therefore undeserving of the evil they suffer. But where orthodox faith ties this solidarity to robust condemnation of sin and a duty of forgiveness, Thiel says, “hyper-Christianity” keeps the moralizing and dumps the mercy—and God himself. Applied to politics and public life, this has an unraveling effect, an effect that isn’t Christianity’s doing but that couldn’t happen in a pre-Christian world.

This is a punch left for Thiel. Yet though he admits to being pulled more toward the ditch on the right side of Christianity than the left, he’s pretty adamant about rejecting both ditches. For all his expressed exhaustion with U.S. politics, Thiel calls for sticking with the “tried-and-true ideas of classical liberalism,” democracy, and peace. It’s normie stuff.

Talking up the Antichrist is part of this project and that second sense of unraveling. This too begins with Girard, who taught that Christianity unravels society by exposing the violent lies—the scapegoating of innocents—on which it’s built. We now see those lies for what they are, but as we haven’t fully replaced them with the peaceful gospel of Jesus, we find ourselves in a perilous position, careening toward an uncertain, even apocalyptic future.

The good news, Thiel says, is that we have real agency in this precarity. The bad news is that we’re very conscious of the risk of apocalypse, and we often suppose our choices are only two: One world or none? Or, in Christian terms: Antichrist or Armageddon?

Thiel thinks these are the same choice and that where the latter is endlessly hyped, the former is downplayed or dismissed. Worse, he argues, it is by incessantly talking about the danger of Armageddon—by “telling us scary millenarian stories”—that that a one-world totalitarian state, or Antichrist, would gain power. He is talking about the Antichrist, therefore, in pursuit of those same normie ends.

“The Christian intuition I have,” Thiel explained last year, “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.” That narrow path, for Thiel, not only may but must be chosen. It is not merely an option but a responsibility. His choice of biblical language to “envision a third way,” though strange to the modern ear, is intended to be hopeful, expansive, an invitation to act.

“Not only do our actions matter,” Thiel contends, “I believe they matter eternally. If we do not find a way to take the narrow and moderate path, then we may find out that stagnation and decadence were all that kept immoderate men from stumbling into the apocalypse.”

---

Odds & ends

• I’m less than a week into getting rid of my iPhone in favor of the Light Phone 3. So far, so good! Still working out some logistics and having intermittent trouble with group texts, but I like it. Will probably write about it at greater length eventually, assuming I’m able to stick it out.

• “Charlie Kirk’s AI resurrection ushers in a new age of digital grief,” by Jack Jenkins for Religion News Service

• “The FCC should let Jimmy Kimmel be,” by Robby Soave for Reason

---