Tonight concludes Peter Thiel’s four-week private lecture series about the Antichrist at the Commonwealth Club. For the last three weeks, everyone on the outside of this event has been left wondering exactly what the billionaire tech magnate is doing delving into arcane Biblical texts and predictions of doomsday to a crowd of Silicon Valley acolytes.
Is Thiel a hero staving off the arrival of Armageddon? Or is he merely a messenger for techno-optimist true believers? Is he leading a “multi-generational Nazi project,” as writer Davi Ottenheimer has posited? Or is he, as some have suggested, the Antichrist himself?
For years, Thiel has been trumpeting his thesis about the end of days, cobbling together scripture, philosophy, and politics into a vision of total social upheaval. But even after all that talk, Thiel appears to have nothing particularly new or innovative to say through the lens of Christianity. When it comes to confronting the Antichrist, he apparently has little advice for his followers besides “worship God,” and don’t covet thy neighbor.
For theologian Brad Onishi, co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast and author of an upcoming book on religion and American monarchism, Thiel’s hodgepodge of prophetic proclamations proves just one thing: Thiel doesn’t want to lead a Holy War, or even to guide people to salvation.
For all his talk about the apocalypse, and his critics’ fixation on Thiel as a MAGA kingmaker, what has emerged from his lectures at various venues is that Thiel is not only inconsistent, but hypocritical. His self-proclaimed “heterodox Christianity” and obsession with the theories of René Girard aren’t a way forward for his followers, Onishi argues.
Instead, Thiel’s ideology is a bastardization of elements that support one final form: The only transcendence that matters is Thiel’s and Thiel’s alone.
“For Peter Thiel, it seems the only ‘good’ is innovation that leads to transcendence,” Onishi told me. “If you study his work, he sees himself as a rebel, not fighting for either side but finding a third way. He simply doesn’t care about you, or me, or being a hero.”
Thiel’s lecture series is hosted by the Christian group ACTS17, which was co-founded by Michelle Stephens, the partner of Trae Stephens, a venture capitalist who has worked closely with Thiel for over a decade. The initial vibrant protests outside the venue have receded into smaller anti-Thiel actions. There has only been one major leak from the event: Tech worker Kshitij Kulkarni was barred from the program after publishing notes from the first lecture which were eventually taken down. (An archived version can be found here.)
As Thiel has articulated repeatedly, he believes the Antichrist will be a figure that speaks of apocalypse, whether brought about by AI, climate change, or war, and who sells a false path to peace that depends on a fear of technology. According to Thiel, the Antichrist does this to create a one-world totalitarian government that controls our lives.
Onishi has closely tracked Thiel’s ideology and studied his previous talks for his upcoming book. He’s also spoken to attendees of the SF series, and notes that Thiel has toured the same spiel at the Hoover Institution in 2019, Oxford in 2023, and in an interview with economist and writer Tyler Cowen in 2024.
“Everyone has been like, ‘Oh my God, it’s about the Antichrist and it’s off-the-record. What the hell is he saying?” Onishi said. “There’s not much new when I read those lecture notes.”
Onishi’s perspective diverges from much of the narratives and think pieces framing Thiel as a new leader of the Christian right or a fascist leveraging Silicon Valley to mount a revolution. In many ways, such conventional political strategies are anathema to Thiel’s philosophy, Onishi says, pointing to Thiel’s obsession with the ideas of René Girard (1923-2015).
Much has been written about Thiel and Girard, the social scientist who rose to prominence with his theories of mimesis and scapegoating. In Girard’s analysis, social violence stems from humans mimicking each others’ desires and reactionary behaviors. This leads to the scapegoating of certain segments of society as the enemy, leading to violence to foment a temporary peace — one that eventually begets more mimesis and violence.
“Thiel is desperate to escape cycles. The cycle of having a nemesis and copy[ing] their desires. He also hates the historical cycle, like how we’re comparing America of the present to Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain,” Onishi said. “Thiel’s going to tell you ‘history doesn’t repeat itself.’ God created the world and the end of the world. It’s one straight line.”
Girard posits that the only way to break a cycle is to find a different path to peace. For Thiel, that path is in large part defined by thinkers like Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who critiqued modern liberalism as a way toward nihilism, and argued for a return to classical politics rooted in moral questions and spiritual authority. Thiel has also had a long fascination with Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the German legal scholar, and Nazi, who argued that liberalism, democracy, and the Enlightenment fail to confront humanity’s violent nature and the ways we collectively divide ourselves into allies and enemies in an existential struggle.
This is a heady blend of political thought, but Thiel’s grasp on the material — or lack thereof — has confused not just theologians like Onishi, but those who study Girard. On one hand, Thiel claims he wants to break free of humanity’s pointless cycles of violence. On the other, he builds a company like Palantir that aids and abets war, and actively scapegoats people around the world.
Even Thiel’s ties to Schmitt and Nazism are blurry at best, Onishi says. In fact, in his 2007 paper The Straussian Moment, Thiel writes critically of Schmitt and his disastrous attempt to leverage Hitler and create authoritarian stability (or “peace”) in Germany. While there is no doubt that he is “Nazi-curious” and is game to meet with white supremacists, Thiel isn’t committed to any one path, according to Onishi. This doesn’t negate the harm Thiel is capable of, Onishi said. But a pioneering thinker he is not, especially when it comes to Christianity.
Onishi should know. Growing up as an evangelical, he was told that communism would foment the Antichrist and the “one-world government” through brokering world peace (Think: the United Nations.)
“If you go back and listen to Billy Graham and others, what did they say? ‘God bless capitalism, God bless the individual,’” Onishi says. “All of Thiel’s supposedly original thought is the same version of the Antichrist from the Cold War and most of the 20th century.”
Most non-terminally online people learned of Thiel’s Antichrist obsession through an interview he gave New York Times columnist Ross Douthat earlier this year. Thiel was mocked online for stumbling over Douthat’s softball question of whether he believes the human race should survive. Thiel stammered, said ‘yes’ after a pause, then immediately pivoted to discussing transhumanism, or existence outside of a human body, with a bizarre metaphor about trans people. (Elsewhere, he rambles that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist because she advocates for collective activism.)
Ultimately, Onishi sees Thiel's contradictory, internally illogical views as merely perpetuating his image of himself. This is someone who sees himself as a chess prodigy, a self-styled grandmaster who not only controls the pieces on the board but his opponents’ mind. In action, however, Thiel is all over the place, railing against AI “doomers” like the philosopher Nick Bostrom while also throwing cold water on dreams for the so-called AI singularity.
Within his own circles, Thiel has avoided the kind of public embarrassments of his friend and occasional business partner, Elon Musk. One reason for this is Thiel’s choice to operate from the shadows and influence founders rather than being the face of any one project. As Onishi points out, this puts him in prime position to scapegoat all manner of acolytes if something goes wrong, as he did with Musk in his interview with the Times’ Douthat.
Thiel’s politics and professed Christian beliefs lead to inherent hypocrisies in his strategy. Where Girard, his guiding light, calls for a rejection of scapegoating because it is historical mimesis at work, Thiel has leaned into the exact opposite, using his capital and influence — including over his protege, Vice President JD Vance — to victimize and blame minorities and immigrants as the reason for disorder and danger in America.
It’s why Thiel has drawn criticism from Girardian scholars in particular, including Wolfgang Palaver, who first met Thiel more than a decade ago. Palaver observed to Wired that despite Thiel’s portrayal of himself as a strident man of God fighting a totalitarian, one-world regime, Thiel happens to be building a global surveillance network and empowering a despot in Trump.
“There’s a tension between those two things, and in some ways he goes along with both of them,” Palaver said. “It’s a good strategy, if you have the means — to have something at stake on all the sides.”
Taken as a whole, Thiel’s history paints a picture of inconsistent cherry-picking, not brilliance. The habit relates to Thiel’s need to seek individuality at all costs; even during his studies at Stanford University, Thiel realized that being a Christian could put him in defiance of elites, whether in academia or Silicon Valley. That desire for idiosyncrasy has persisted, but Onishi also argues Thiel doesn’t want to be worshipped.
“Jesus Christ, for Thiel, is not a hero figure,” says Onishi. “But Christ died to save us from the sin of mimesis — the cycles that had persisted. If that’s the view, the way to relate to Christ isn’t to think ‘Well, I need to help the poor and make people healthy and ensure peace.’ That’s trite hero bullshit to Thiel,” Onishi concluded. “He’s only going to relate to Christ as a true innovator.”
Jesus, the first anti-hero founder? It may be the one original idea Thiel ever had.
