Following up on last month's post, New York Times, Seeking God, Or Peter Thiel, In Silicon Valley: Vanity Fair, Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion:
It’s mid-October in San Francisco, and a crowd of 200 or so congregants—some seated in pews, others standing below cathedral windows at the back—bow their heads in prayer. Over cranberry-apple cosmos and plates of Burmese food served by black-shirted waiters, a DJ plays a thumping soundtrack of remixed worship music. This is not a church service or even a Bible study. It is, instead, an entirely new kind of event in Silicon Valley.
We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion. The event is called Code & Cosmos, and its underlying thesis is that the fields of science and technology, once considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality, might converge with the teachings of the Bible. In other words, business networking for the spiritually curious.
“What is the real basis of morality?” Collins asks the crowd. “Why am I here? What happens after I die?” Collins, a thin, owlish man, gazes solemnly at the crowd, which already seems to have a sense of where this is going. “Science,” he says, “can’t really give you an answer.” But there is another answer to these questions, and it has to do with one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom Collins encountered as a 20-something medical student grappling with the limits of atheism. Ever since, he said, “I’ve never really hit a situation where what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I believe as a Christ-centered Christian are in conflict.”
That this conversation is taking place not at a church but in Tan’s home—which, incidentally, happens to be a converted church a stone’s throw from Dolores Park—may seem, as Tan tells us from the stage, “a little bit unusual.” There was a time, Tan says, when such a gathering would be “maybe even reviled in San Francisco.” Many in the room, myself included, remember vividly the period to which Tan is referring. It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life. For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”
Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. …
Nowadays, Christianity is rarely met with direct hostility in Silicon Valley. But there is still the lingering sense—at least in intellectual circles—that practicing it is a “faux pas,” said Michelle Stephens, who is Trae Stephens’s wife and the founder of the organization hosting the Code & Cosmos event, ACTS 17 Collective. (The organization is named after a passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which the apostle Paul visits ancient Greece and preaches the gospel to intellectuals.) “Like, how are you a smart person,” she asked, “and a Christian?” …
You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”).
And it’s not only Thiel. Last summer, in an interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk described himself, cautiously, as a “cultural Christian.” “I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise,” he said. To have two of the world’s richest technologists, worth a recently estimated $400 billion (Musk) and $14 billion (Thiel), speak admiringly about biblical teachings challenges the view that Christianity is anti-capitalist or even anti-intellectual. Meanwhile, downstream of Thiel and Musk are people like Tan, who is busy shepherding the Valley’s next cohort of entrepreneurs and who occasionally tweets scripture from his X account. …
Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted, and along with them, a factory-fresh founder prototype emerged. It used to be that the 20-something whiz kid who coded a viral game and dropped out of Stanford was a venture capitalist darling. “VCs used to throw money at that guy,” said a woman who manages communications at a top-tier venture firm. “Now if someone comes in and says, ‘I love my parents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work ethic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’” …
Another idea gaining steam among some of the Silicon Valley faithful is the notion that tech is not an inherent evil. Rather, tech produced by bad thinking—and by extension secular thinking—is. This was the general theory floated by entrepreneur Reggie James in October at Hereticon, a Founders Fund–backed conference for “creative dissidents.” (During its apocalypse-themed Miami gathering, Thiel spoke about the coming of the Antichrist.) There, James introduced the idea of “SecuTech,” or “secular technology” designed from a secular perspective. His primary example is social media, which, he told me over the phone, engenders “the postmodernist values of fighting over identity and representation. Everyone on social media is going through an identity crisis and some kind of disinformation campaign. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature of postmodern design.”
There is an antidote to SecuTech, says James, and it’s called “spiritual technology,” which is technology that, while not necessarily relying on a religious framework, is built with the understanding “that values across religions are different from postmodernist secular tech values.” …
When I took Tan aside to ask why he thought a Christian perspective was relevant to anyone working on artificial intelligence, he told me that it was imperative for people working in tech to realize that they’re building for “something beyond themselves: their families and communities,” he said. “Technology is so powerful right now that…you need to have this sort of ‘touch grass’ moment.
“People are so ready to make AGI their god,” Tan added. “What we’re trying to do with events like this is give them an alternative.”
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