Two scenes from the past two weeks capture something unsettling – and familiar –about American public life. In San Francisco, a tech billionaire delivered a sold‑out, off‑the‑record lecture series on the antichrist. In Michigan, a man rammed his pickup truck into a Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse during Sunday worship, opened fire and set the building ablaze, apparently believing that Mormons are the antichrist.
The antichrist is clearly back. But perhaps he has never really left.
As a historian of American apocalypticism, I’ve traced how this symbol – a protean figure cobbled together from obscure biblical passages – has repeatedly migrated from pulpits to politics and back again.
Almost a century ago, fundamentalists mapped European dictators and New Deal bureaucrats on to biblical prophecy. During the cold war, evangelicals scanned Moscow and Jerusalem for signs of the Beast. In the first Gulf war, some Christians argued that Saddam Hussein was the antichrist who was rebuilding the Tower of Babel.
Whenever American power felt threatened or social change accelerated, antichrist talk surged. Today’s version arrives with AI, deepfakes and venture funding. And with bullets.
Peter Thiel’s “Antichrist” lectures, consisting of four sessions organized by the ACTS 17 Collective, were marketed as explorations of “the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist”. Tickets sold out. Reports and attenders who shared details with the media and online say Thiel warns that fear of technological progress and especially efforts to regulate AI could become the pretext for a charismatic power to centralize control in the name of “peace and safety”, a scenario he threads to New Testament warnings. One attender reported that Thiel went further, likening anti‑tech sentiment itself to the work of the antichrist.
Others have traced the same themes in Thiel’s recent interviews. This summer he suggested that an antichrist of our age would present as a humanitarian regulator – he even floated Greta Thunberg as an analogy – arguing that fixation on “existential risk” can be a gateway to consolidating authority. Thiel claims that warnings about Armageddon may seduce elites into empowering a one‑world administrative order, which is the very thing apocalyptic texts have long seemingly foretold.
The lectures have drawn scrutiny not only because of the content but because of the context. Notes from the first session leaked online before they were taken down; the attender who posted them was barred from the remaining talks. Meanwhile, protests outside highlighted the tension between a lecture on end‑times authoritarianism and the speaker’s stake in real‑world surveillance tools. (Thiel’s champions counter that AI anxiety, not AI itself, is the highway to the antichrist – a view that, whatever one thinks of it theologically, conveniently aligns with Silicon Valley’s anti‑regulatory instincts.)
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