Having apparently exhausted his interest in seasteading and blood transfusions from young people to ward off aging, gay Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has found a new topic to explore: the anti-Christ. 

Since last fall, Thiel has been touring a four-part lecture series on the figure mentioned in the New Testament as the primary opponent of Jesus in the final days before his second coming. If that seems like an offbeat topic for a Silicon Valley millionaire, Thiel has always been known for his esoteric interests. 

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Thiel’s interest in the anti-Christ may date back to his own upbringing, as he was raised an evangelical. He now describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian.” 

The concept of the anti-Christ is based on a handful of passages in the epistles of John and Paul in the New Testament. “Children, it is the last hour!” reads one passage. “As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this, we know that it is the last hour.”

As with any biblical passage, the language has been the subject of a dizzying range of interpretations.

The version of the anti-Christ that has taken hold in right-wing evangelical circles is a messianic figure who emerges after the rapture has taken all true believers to heaven. The anti-Christ imposes a one-world government and a ban on would-be Christians in the final battle for Earth before Christ’s second coming. The concept was popularized in a series of books written by anti-LGBTQ+ minister Tim LaHaye, several of which were turned into movies.

While recording or taking notes during Thiel’s lectures is forbidden, excerpts of his presentations have made it into the press. They are, to say the least, confusing and heavily dependent upon a bleak view of the world. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of anti-Christ: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times,” Thiel said, according to one account.

Thiel seems to equate the anti-Christ with a one-world government. He points to what he sees as the growing threat of the environmental movement, as well as fear of AI and nuclear war, as clearing the way for the rise of the “anti-Messiah.” He worries that the world will settle for an “unjust peace” that will make it easier for a leader to seize power in the name of security. The United States is “ground zero” for the emergence of the anti-Christ. 

A lot of what Thiel worries about is “stagnation,” which is a recurring theme of his. Ever the pessimist, he believes that the past 50 years have been 50 years of meh, not technological advancement. Thiel once famously complained that we were promised flying cars in the future and “instead we got 140 characters.” In a New York Times interview, he claimed that “we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years” of research on Alzheimer’s disease, which is probably a surprise to the scientists who have a vastly better understanding of it than they did in 1976. 

Conveniently enough, Thiel’s view of the threat from the anti-Christ dovetails nicely with the tech world’s desire for unbridled expansion and its own economic interests. He describes the anti-Christ as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” which, of course, throws a big wrench into Silicon Valley’s money machine. Among the “legionnaires of the anti-Christ” that Thiel mentions are Eliezer Yudkowsky, who advocates for safeguards around AI, and environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Thiel’s most recent stop was in Rome, the backyard of the Vatican. Early Protestant reformers branded the pope and/or the entire Catholic Church as the anti-Christ, something that right-wing believers and politicians are still prone to claim. (Thiel has contented himself with simply calling Pope Leo XIV the “woke pope.”)

Not surprisingly, the Vatican was not amused at the prospect of a self-taught theologian preaching in the neighborhood. In a column presumably approved by the Vatican, Catholic theologian Father Paolo Benanti described Thiel’s description of the anti-Christ as “a prolonged act of heresy against liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence.”

Of course, that’s pretty much in keeping with Thiel’s worldview before he started citing the Bible to support it. He once said that “democracy and freedom are not “compatible.” He also bankrolled the president’s 2016 campaign, at a time when most other donors wouldn’t touch it.

Ironically, Thiel apparently never mentions his own gayness in connection with his anti-Christ lectures. As it turns out, a lot of evangelicals think that the anti-Christ is gay. So far, at least, no one has hurled that accusation at Thiel himself.