"those who sleep, sleep at night"
There was an interesting interview last week between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel in The New York Times on the Antichrist, the apocalypse, and Silicon Valley. What emerges from the hour-long conversation is a vision of an apocalyptic present and future wrapped unconvincingly in the rhetoric of a Christian theology that fuses unrestrained capital with spiritual urgency.
Throughout the conversation, Thiel repeatedly references particular sections of the Bible. I’d like to focus on one of them. Toward the end of the conversation with Douthat, Thiel cites I Thessalonians 5:3, stating with conviction that the verse refers to the “slogan of the Antichrist.” The only problem is, well, that’s not what the section is describing. In fact, the book doesn’t mention the Antichrist at all.
An excerpt:
But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this Day should overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.
Here, St. Paul is directing a message to the young Christian Church in Thessalonica. It is widely considered to be one of the earliest books in the New Testament, likely written around 51 CE. What St. Paul is referring to is not the Antichrist—or even an antichrist. Rather, the phrase “peace and safety” is contrasted with the image of the imminent, and surprise, return of Jesus Christ, the “thief.” Here, those who do not believe, or choose not to believe, lead their lives in this state of “peace and safety.” These people are the ones who will not be prepared for Christ’s return. St. Paul’s goal here is to keep the Christians in Thessalonica on their toes—a way of reminding them that the end times could come at any minute, while asserting that identifying the exact timing of Christ’s return to earth is unnecessary. True believers must understand that there is no true “peace and safety” outside of the resurrection. They’ll lead their lives as if “labor pains” could befall the world at any time. It’s why he implores these churchgoers to “be sober,” and remind them that they are “sons of light and sons of the day.”
Thiel’s brand of Biblical hermeneutics commits the same mistake that has befallen one too many American wanna-be prophets of the end times: it retroactively searches scripture for keys to the identity of the Antichrist. Indeed, the term antichristos appears sparingly in the Bible, namely in the First and Second Epistles of John—two later books whose authorship is mysterious. Both texts invoke the term antichristos to establish barriers between right-believing Christians and those espousing heretical views around Christ. In 2 John 1:7, the author issues a warning regarding “deceivers . . . who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh” and names one who spreads this lie as “an antichrist.” 1 John 2:18 implies that to the extent there is a singular figure of the “Antichrist,” there were “many antichrists” paving the way by spreading their misguided beliefs. “He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son,” reads 1 John 2:22.
If I’m being an asshole, I could chalk this up to Thiel misunderstanding the passage and doing the obnoxious Silicon Valley thing of tech bros assuming that their wealth makes them capable of understanding complex philosophical issues better than anyone in the humanities. (Or who went to Bible school, to be blunt.) But while I’ve seen plenty of tech bros try to argue religion and fail miserably, I don’t think it’s that.
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A cursory investigation of the history of Thiel’s use of the phrase indicates that he has been attributing the slogan “peace and safety” to the Antichrist for years. During the 2022 Hereticon gathering, which Thiel’s venture capital company Founders Fund started and has described as “a conference for thoughtcrime,” Thiel said “[t]he political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.” In a 2023 article from Tara Isabell Burton, who’s written extensively on religion and tech, she quotes him as encouraging people to reject the “peace and safety of the Antichrist.” Later, in a Hoover Institution podcast from late 2024, Thiel invokes the phrase once again in order to explain its appeal. With regards to the Antichrist’s offer of “peace and safety,” he said, “You have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things.”
These references to supposedly false promises of “peace and safety” go hand-in-hand with Thiel's core concern of “stagnation.” Today’s Antichrist is more likely to be someone who asserts, Thiel says in his conversation with Douthat, that “We need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.” Instead of a “a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world,” Thiel believes that “[i]n our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg,” the young, left-wing environmental activist.
What’s telling is that the need for more risk is a burden that American society has to bear—one that Thiel and the acolytes of such escapist ventures as the “network state” have sought to disentangle themselves from for years. He attributes the failure on the part of university researchers to cure diseases, to invent groundbreaking and socially transformative technologies, and to travel further into space to stagnation. He fails to mention that amid his apocalyptic fear-mongering, his companies, such as Palantir, stand to benefit from the administration’s draconian schemes disrupting American life. Indeed, Thiel has nothing to say for his net worth, which has nearly tripled since June 2024. (So much for “stagnation.”) When it comes to Palantir's role in the administration’s authoritarian project, he’s practically mute.
There is a rich tradition within American society of misreading scripture for the purposes of building out an image of the Antichrist to mythologize the country's supposed enemies at the expense of centuries of Christian eschatology. Yet I have trouble seeing these apocalyptic musings as anything other than a theological justification for accruing wealth. For millennia, the rich have invoked the transcendent to justify their worldliness. Where today’s society stands to differ from earlier manifestations of this theologically-inflected greed is the sheer magnitude of our wealth gap and the environmental catastrophe that awaits us. Kings would once die in an earth-shattering apocalyptic event with the rest of us. Now, they want to escape to the stars.