Is Peter Thiel Right?

Fear Not: Peter Thiel on Religion, the End Times and Human Agency

I have just returned from a blissful week in the mountains. Just before I left I watched several interviews with Peter Thiel about technology, religion and human agency, even Tyler Cowen waded in with comments in an unrelated video. These thoughts have been playing on my mind all week. Will, as Peter seems to suggest, humanity, driven by a global superpower and technological disruption, return to religion and avoid Armageddon? There are lots of points between the lines in Thiel’s vision worth considering very carefully.

Momentum

The End Times. Armageddon. The Antichrist. These are terms that were once most comfortably at home within the realm of the religiously fervent, the eschatologically obsessed, and the footnotes of apocalyptic literature. They are, we tell ourselves, the lexicon of a bygone era, relics of medieval fearmongering, of firebrand sermons delivered to illiterate masses who cowered beneath their steeples. And yet, as Peter Thiel, one of the most sophisticated minds of our time, outlines over two conversations with Peter Robinson (here and here), these ideas may be more relevant now than ever before.

Thiel, who helped shape the digital age with PayPal, Facebook, and Palantir, and is an investor in SpaceX and many other companies, together with planting his colleagues firmly into several power positions with the current Trump administration (most notably his friend and former employee JD Vance), is not a man given to frivolous speculation. His musings are sharpened by intellectual rigor and a self-described contrarian instinct that refuses to settle for the comforting lull of received wisdom. His philosophical influences, spanning from Rene Girard’s theories of mimetic violence, the religion of Cardinal Newman, to the political insights of Carl Schmitt, have deeply shaped his worldview. What if, he suggests, the biblical framework of apocalypse is not merely symbolic, but in fact a strikingly prescient warning? What if the end times are not merely a matter of theological debate, but a subject of urgent historical and geopolitical concern?

In classic Thiel fashion, the argument begins not with mysticism but with technology. The Renaissance gave us an accelerating arc of human progress, a technological momentum that has continued, often heedlessly, into the present day. But this momentum, Thiel warns, has an apocalyptic dimension. Nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, engineered bioweapons, (he suggests gain-of-function research and Wuhan) these are not hypotheticals but present dangers, each carrying the potential to remake civilization or annihilate it altogether. “If nuclear weapons can rain down fire and brimstone and destroy the world,” he asks, “should we at least be asking questions about what this means in a biblical sense?”

Intellectual Void

If history is indeed heading toward an endpoint, the university, once the intellectual custodian of such questions, has largely abdicated its role. Thiel laments the fragmentation of knowledge, the balkanization of academia into hyper-specialized silos that render scholars incapable of grasping the larger whole. Where once scholars like Goethe or Hilbert could aspire to universal knowledge, today’s intellectual elite resemble the workers in Adam Smith’s pin factory, so specialized that no one can see beyond the next incremental step.

It is within this intellectual void that Thiel introduces the Antichrist, not as a sulfurous, horned beast but as a systemic force, a hegemonic world order that consolidates power under the guise of peace and security. Drawing from the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and the English Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, he sketches a picture of an Antichrist figure that is charismatic, hyper-rational, a man (or system) that promises to save humanity by uniting it under a single global regime. The historical resonance is chilling, this is not the stuff of medieval fever dreams but a plausible trajectory for a world in which existential threats justify ever-expanding control.

However, critics of Thiel’s vision might argue that his perspective leans too heavily on alarmism and disregards the stabilizing forces within globalization. To them, his view lacks recognition of the potential for cooperative frameworks to foster stability and prevent conflict. While the risks of unchecked technological progress are real, some contend that cooperative international governance does not necessarily lead to authoritarianism. Others, he says, argue that a one-world state, if properly regulated, could serve as a safeguard against existential threats rather than a harbinger of tyranny.

Seductive Logic

In response to such concerns, the United Nations was a first, fumbling attempt at such a governing body but is now a spiritually broken institution, with no real impact. Figures like Nick Bostrom argue that existential risks, be they nuclear, biological, or technological, necessitate effective global governance. The logic is seductive, in order to prevent catastrophe, we must consolidate power, standardize rules, monitor every keystroke. It is, Thiel argues, a precarious trade-off, one that raises the specter of an overcentralized authority governing under the pretext of safety. “One world or none,” as the 1946 documentary ominously suggested, but the unspoken corollary is this: The Antichrist comes before Armageddon, not after.

Yet Thiel is no Luddite. He does not retreat into the Benedict Option, that modern impulse to withdraw from society and cloister oneself from the encroaching tide. He remains convinced that humanity must walk a narrow path, one that neither plunges headlong into self-destruction nor surrenders itself to a totalitarian regime in the name of safety. Here, he invokes St. Paul’s enigmatic concept of the katechon, “that which restrains.” The katechon, as Thiel interprets it, is not merely an abstract force but a set of institutions, ideas, and individuals that hold back the descent into chaos.

Historically, the katechon has taken many forms. Some theologians argue that the Roman Empire functioned as a katechon, restraining total anarchy before its collapse led to the chaos of the Middle Ages. In more recent history, the ideological resistance to totalitarianism during the Cold War, particularly the U.S. containment policy, could be seen as a form of katechon, preventing the unchecked spread of communism. But Thiel warns that this restraining force is fragile. If the U.S. has historically functioned as a katechon, it is not immune to corruption. “One obvious candidate for the Antichrist is the United States,” Thiel muses. It is a chilling thought: that the nation that once restrained the tide of totalitarianism could, in its decadence and centralization, become the very thing it once opposed.

Optimism

So where does this leave us? Thiel does not offer easy answers. If technological globalization is inevitable, then the task is not to eliminate it but to guide and temper its expansion with clear safeguards. We must resist both the fatalistic accelerationism of unchecked technological progress and the suffocating control of a monolithic global state. We must, in short, avoid both Scylla and Charybdis, those mythological monsters and navigate between the horror of Armageddon and the frenzy of the Antichrist’s rule.

And yet, even in this grim vision, Thiel holds to a fundamental optimism. The closing refrain of the Book of Revelation is not despair, but an injunction: “Fear not.” The choice is not predetermined, the future not yet written.

“What I hope to retrieve,” Thiel says, “is a sense of the stakes, of the urgency of the question. The stakes are really, really high.”

To act in the face of these stakes requires more than passive awareness. It demands active engagement, intellectual rigor, political discernment, and a willingness to challenge the narratives of inevitability.

Individuals can take tangible steps. Engaging in informed discourse, supporting policies that promote decentralized governance, and ensuring that technological advancements remain tools for empowerment rather than mechanisms of control. Whether through scholarship, political action, or technological ethics, the responsibility falls on each of us to be vigilant, to resist both apocalypse and autocracy, and, perhaps, to forge a future where neither prevails.

Stay curious

Colin

Image from this Hoovers video