New York Times, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley:
When tech luminaries talk about their Christian faith, people listen.
Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God.
The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar bumps, mimosas and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing kingmaker, delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness and Jesus Christ. The guests were enthralled.
“The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian,’” recalled Michelle Stephens, Mr. Stephens’s wife. “‘He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?’”
That reaction — eyebrows raised, curiosity genuine — gave Ms. Stephens an idea: Gather influential people, including in Silicon Valley, to talk about Christian belief. Last year, she started a nonprofit called ACTS 17 Collective, which holds events where the bigwigs of the tech and entertainment industries discuss their faith. For those seeking not just spiritually but also professionally, it’s a chance to get close to industry demigods.
Mr. Thiel was the featured speaker at the first ACTS 17 event last May, at the San Francisco home of Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator. He talked about how Christian theology informs his politics and which of the Ten Commandments he finds most meaningful. (The first and last: Worship God, and don’t covet what others have.) A D.J. added ambience, mixing worship beats for the more than 200 attendees.
In October, the nonprofit hosted another talk at Mr. Tan’s home, this time with Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, who has long talked about how he reconciles science with his Christian faith. Ms. Stephens is planning more events in San Francisco, as well as one in Los Angeles, and has reached out to potential speakers like Pat Gelsinger, the former chief executive of Intel, as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist and Muslim turned critic of Islam who converted to Christianity.
The name ACTS 17 is an acronym (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), but it also refers to the biblical chapter in which Paul the Apostle crisscrosses Athens and Thessaloniki to spread the Gospel among Greek “kings and queens of culture,” as Ms. Stephens puts it, the eminent and affluent demographic that she aims to minister to today. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive Christian calling, she acknowledged.
“We were always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized,” Ms. Stephens said. “I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”
Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to chasing the elusive — fortune, breakthroughs, power — but God has not tended to rank high on the list. The Bay Area is one of the least churchgoing parts of America, where people have been more apt to meet their spiritual longing with meditation, ayahuasca, intermittent fasting or cold plunges. An episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley” once satirized this with a gay entrepreneur aghast at being “outed” as Christian. In a place built on stretching human limitations, where people exert dominion over everything from fertility to outer space, even turning mortality into a business opportunity, the divine has seemed, to some, obsolete.
Mr. Thiel has long been an exception to the atheism and agnosticism of his peers. He has said his Christian faith is at the center of his worldview, which he expounds upon with a heterodox approach — fusing references to Scripture and conservative political theory, parsing ancient signs and wonders for their connection to tech wonders today. In recent podcast interviews, he draws on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential threats like artificial intelligence and nuclear war but bring something much worse: one-world government. (Mr. Thiel declined to be interviewed through Ms. Stephens; his spokesperson did not return an email.)
Other tech and entertainment gurus also seem to be embracing religion. Last year, Joe Rogan talked about the importance of faith in multiple podcast episodes, saying he had at times been “pretty atheist” but became more spiritual after the death of his grandfather. “As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure,” Mr. Rogan said in an episode last February. “A lot of very intelligent people, they dismiss all the positive aspects of religion.”
Elon Musk, in a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, a psychologist who has become a sort of manosphere guru, said he was a “big believer in the principles of Christianity.” Mr. Musk summed this up in a ditty on X: “Atheism left an empty space, secular religion took its place,” he wrote. “Maybe religion’s not so bad to keep you from being sad.”
ACTS 17, which is nondenominational, aims to give people an easy, approachable introduction to religious belief. Its website deploys the hallmarks of millennial direct-to-consumer branding, featuring pretty people in puffy jackets talking and smiling alongside floating sans serif promises about “redefining success for those who define culture.”
If religious rituals offer up old ways of muddling through newly tumultuous times, it’s unsurprising that they’re resurging now in Silicon Valley, which seems to be going through its own cycle of rebirth. Pride-themed trivia nights and Black History Month playlists have given way to tech moguls feting President Trump, decrying the snowflakery of their young workers and crusading for a return to a bygone era of higher birthrates.
This political flip has prompted some skepticism about the new religiosity in the tech community, with even some Christian thinkers questioning whether some of it might be more self-serving than sincere. “When you look at the Bible, it’s all about supporting the poor, helping the other, inviting the stranger in,” said Anne Foerst, a theologian and computer scientist at St. Bonaventure University in New York and the author of the book “God in the Machine.”
“There’s a certain attitude with some evangelicals that when you accept Jesus as your savior you are saved,” she continued. “Then you don’t have to worry — about drone building, rejecting foreigners, rejecting wokeness, all that sort of stuff.”
But many Bay Area clergy make the case that theology and Scripture offer something vital to people whose technological work touches on white-hot ethical and existential questions.
“We really feel a burden to help people consider how the model of Christ might help them think about how they change technology,” said Paul Taylor, an Oracle employee turned pastor who leads the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech, another group helping to bring religion to technologists. “How do they think about technology for the sake of the good of the world, for the sake of people who might not have a voice?”
With ACTS 17, Ms. Stephens’s mission seems more tactical, less pointed. Start-up and tech workers are used to kneeling before the powers of venture capital and Big Tech. Why not get them bowing also to God? …
After the first ACTS 17 event, an attendee approached Ms. Stephens and said he was shaken by the profession of faith from Mr. Thiel, whom he called a professional “idol”: If Mr. Thiel was worshiping Jesus, perhaps he should be doing the same.
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