A century ago, you needed a pulpit and a microphone to warn about the Antichrist. Now you can do it with a slide deck and venture funding.
The Guardian reported this week that Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most theatrical billionaires, has been delivering sold-out “Antichrist lectures” in San Francisco. Attendees describe a mash-up of theology, science fiction, and regulatory anxiety. Thiel supposedly suggested that a modern Antichrist might not show up with horns but rather with a clipboard—maybe a well-intentioned regulator promising to keep AI “safe.”
That’s the kind of line that sounds like satire until you remember how much money Thiel has invested in technologies that might need those very regulations. So when he warns that “fear of technological progress” could pave the way for a global power grab, it’s hard to tell if he’s predicting the future or protecting the portfolio.
Meanwhile, halfway across the country, a man in Michigan drove his pickup through a Latter-day Saints meetinghouse, opened fire, and set the building on fire while yelling that Mormons were “the Antichrist.” Four people died. Two scenes, worlds apart, united by a single word that has always carried gasoline on its breath.
The Antichrist, in American culture, never stays quiet for long. He just changes jobs. In the thirties, he wore a dictator’s uniform. In the seventies, he was an oil sheikh or maybe a politician with a fondness for détente. In the nineties, some people saw him in Saddam Hussein. Now he’s apparently an algorithm—or the person trying to regulate one.
Thiel’s warning that bureaucratic control could become “the Beast” fits a long tradition of American paranoia about centralized authority. It’s an idea that preaches well in boardrooms and Bible camps alike. And it’s not entirely crazy to question how much power unelected engineers and regulators might end up holding over daily life. The trouble starts when a metaphor becomes a movement.
Theology has always bled into politics in this country, but what’s new is the microphone. When a billionaire with a flair for provocation reframes AI policy as an apocalyptic test of faith, he doesn’t need an amen corner—he’s got a livestream. Every soundbite becomes a prophecy, every policy debate a cosmic war between good and evil. That’s how you end up with people confusing zoning boards for the Book of Revelation.
There’s a kind of narrative gravity to apocalyptic language. It simplifies chaos. If history is a battle between light and darkness, you don’t need to understand the Federal Register—you just need to pick a side. The risk, as the Michigan tragedy showed, is that some people pick up a gun instead of a ballot.
Still, Thiel isn’t entirely wrong that technology feels apocalyptic. AI does things that once belonged to myth—writing songs, faking voices, rewriting reality at scale. It collapses trust faster than it creates productivity. When that kind of power arrives faster than our ethics can process it, even a hardened atheist starts sounding like a preacher.
What worries me isn’t that people are talking about the Antichrist again. It’s that the metaphor now comes bundled with stock options and a venture-backed PR team. Once apocalypse becomes a brand story, every problem looks like an existential crisis, and every critic seems like the enemy of progress.
Thiel’s critics say he’s dressing libertarian politics in religious drag. His fans say he’s the rare billionaire who still believes in the soul. Maybe both are true. Either way, the sermon is working—tickets sold out, and headlines spread his message better than any gospel tract ever could.
The real Antichrist here might not be a man, a microchip, or a movement. It’s the instinct to turn disagreement into damnation. When every debate becomes a holy war, democracy starts to look like heresy.
We don’t need fewer warnings about AI or unchecked authority. We need more people willing to argue policy without pretending to fight dragons. Save Revelation for Sunday. On Monday, let’s get back to building guardrails, not gallows.