After several stops in pivotal cities, America’s most theory-fueled tech titan, Peter Thiel, came to Nashville to deliver his four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. To make an extremely long story extremely short, Thiel portrays the Antichrist as a biblical figure we should take seriously — and think seriously about how to keep him off our timeline.
Thiel’s answer begins with America. In his telling, only the United States has the size and power to prevent the Antichrist's rise to global domination, thanks to our singular combination of relatively strong Christianity and relatively strong technology. It's the kind of counterintuitive position that has marked Thiel's second career as a public intellectual.
Obsessing over the Antichrist turns him into the perfect enemy, whose evil seems to justify monopolizing your attention. It's a hugely tempting way to forget all about Christ Himself.
For Thiel, the secret is that the Antichrist is not only anti-Christian — opposing Christ while seemingly usurping His role — but also anti-technology.
Herein lies the twist.
Reading St. Paul's warning about the promise of “peace and safety,” Thiel imagines an Antichrist offering protection through immense technological power, then opposing further technological progress that might threaten his own authority.
One seems forced to conclude that keeping the Antichrist at bay requires an open-ended commitment to both more Christianity and more technology. But to make this line of argument compelling, certain countervailing dynamics must be left on the cutting-room floor.
Even on its own terms, the Antichrist — or the Anti-Christian impulse — would surely embrace whatever tools best empower the wielder to “prove” that anything Jesus could do, he can do better. Those tools are obviously technological, especially the forms of tech used to make other tools still more powerful, all-consuming, alluring, and seemingly salvific.
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It's extremely difficult to mentally model the mysterious point at which the Antichrist or his forerunners would insist we halt technological progress. Why would another breakthrough necessarily expose their pretensions rather than increase their power? Why would the fiends suddenly fear the same machinery they used to make themselves seem rapturously godlike?
The problem is worsened by Thiel's related remark, in a conversation with Joe Rogan, that a civilization capable of faster-than-light travel would have to be a civilization of “angels or demons.” He was speculating about alien societies and the terrifying military power of hypothetical warp-drive weapons, not claiming that literal angels and demons pilot spacecraft.
Still, the comparison invites questions. If even a demonic civilization could command such technology, why would an Anti-Christian regime reject it? And if angelic power already dwarfs ours, why imagine our technological acceleration is the decisive defense?
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These questions have a place in the holy tradition of the Christian church. But for most Americans, amid the insane intensity of today's accelerating technological transformation, they are enough to make your head spin. Paying close attention to what's going on, especially if you're not paid to do so, is an invitation to being, as techies and gamers say, “one-shotted” by the experience — knocked out at a single stroke.
It's important that some skilled people devote serious energy to discerning how to avoid a smothering global control system that persecutes and seeks to replace Christ and Christianity. But listening to Christ Himself, for starters, it's essential that many more people at every socioeconomic level not devote their lives to identifying and defeating the Antichrist.
The Christian focus is simple: judging yourself before others; combating your own sin rather than obsessing over external enemies; trusting that God is in control rather than trying to build an independent victory system.
And funnily enough, much as the Lord promises that your temporal needs will be met if you seek first the eternally needful, the difficult practice of your own spiritual purification and endurance may be the best way to steer your neighbors away from false gods and false Christs. Not by lecturing or controlling them, but by silently attracting them to God with the fruits of godliness, as a flower attracts a bee.
Obsessing over the Antichrist turns him into the perfect enemy, whose evil seems to justify monopolizing your attention. It's a hugely tempting way to forget all about Christ Himself. Those with important things to say about preserving American sovereignty in an idolatrous and totalizing world would be especially well served by remembering the deepest reasons why silence is so golden.