His words and actions strongly indicate that his material aims are in tension with orthodox Christian belief.

Last week, New York Times columnist and National Review contributing editor Ross Douthat interviewed the enigmatic billionaire intellectual Peter Thiel. Their conversation inspired Michael Brendan Dougherty to say that he appreciates “Peter’s attempt to be both an orthodox Christian thinker, while remaining an early modern futurist.” But the interview, Thiel’s professional activities, and his comments elsewhere suggest that he may be more interested in the latter than in the former.

The most recent evidence of this comes in the interview itself. Douthat is (rightly) skeptical of Silicon Valley transhumanism and other projects to overcome human nature. Douthat notes that many people on the AI vanguard view it as a means of “transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.” He asks Thiel if this is all “irrelevant fantasy,” “hype,” or “delusion,” or whether he is worried about it.

“Um, yeah,” is all Thiel managed in response initially.

Douthat follows up: “I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” The following exchange really ought to be watched for its full effect, but a transcript is below:

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel proceeds to critique transhumanism, including related phenomena such as transgenderism (“We can then debate how well those surgeries work,” he says, blithely). Yet his criticism is not for their transgressions against nature but for their being insufficiently transgressive. The proper Christian critique of these things, he believes, is that “they don’t go far enough” because transhumanism “is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.” For Thiel, Christianity “is about transcending nature” — specifically, our fallen nature.

Douthat accepts this particular claim — so long as the “perfected body and the perfected soul” come through God’s grace. He avers that most AI acolytes don’t view their task as being in spiritual cooperation with God. Yet Thiel is cagey about this. He seems more concerned that transhumanists are not “physically ambitious enough.”

In this interview, as elsewhere, Thiel is superficially esoteric. But you don’t need to be a Straussian or a Girardian to detect a decided this-worldliness to his preoccupations. Just look at some of his recent business activities. Thiel has backed the career and invested in a start-up of Noora Siddiqui. Siddiqui’s start-up, Orchid, is based on artificial reproductive technology that allows parents to “screen” embryos for desired characteristics — and to discard those that do not qualify. He has also invested in Nucleus, a company with similar aspirations.

This all smacks of eugenic practices that Christians have long opposed. In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton derided the eugenic assumption that its advocates “had a right to dragoon and enslave one’s fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment.” The Catholic Church opposes the IVF practices on which such neo-eugenic projects depend.

Thiel’s political profile deserves attention as well. In the 2010s, he financially supported the legalization of gay marriage. In 2016, when he spoke at the Republican National Convention, he called the culture war a “distraction from our real problems.” While leftist elites were hounding North Carolina for passing a bill that restricted restrooms by sex, Thiel derided the controversy as a debate about “who gets to use which bathroom.” He added, “Who cares?” Shortly after the 2016 election, Thiel doubted whether Roe v. Wade “would get overturned, ever.” The issues that motivate Christians in the public square aren’t really much of interest to Thiel.

Surveying explanations of his worldview he has made elsewhere help explain why. Writing for First Things in 2015, he urged readers to “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth — in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” And in a 2011 interview with the New Yorker, he described himself as a “somewhat heterodox” Christian.

All of this puts Thiel’s comments to Douthat in a rather different light. Especially his remarks about the Antichrist, the earthly agent of Satan whose appearance on Earth is associated with the end times. He believes the Antichrist will be not a force for technomodernity but an opponent of it:

The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

One could convincingly cite scriptural evidence (particularly Revelation 13:11-17) that the Antichrist will make full use of technology. Douthat pursues a similarly persuasive line of inquiry by wondering: Even if the Antichrist “used the fear of technological change to impose order on the world,” he might use “the tools” that Thiel is “building.” Thiel dismisses this, citing Scripture for his own purpose in response. He claims that 1 Thessalonians 5:3 suggests the slogan of the Antichrist will be “peace and safety” — ergo, to unleash the engines of progress entirely could hamper the Antichrist’s reign.

Here is that full passage:

Concerning times and seasons, brothers, you have no need for anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night. When people are saying, “Peace and security,” then sudden disaster comes upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.

Scripture deserves fuller citation than Thiel gives it. Start with 1 Thessalonians 4, just before Thiel’s reference. There, the Apostle Paul says to the church of the Thessalonians that they should “refrain from immorality,” that “each of you know how to acquire a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion as do the Gentiles who do not know God,” and that they should not “take advantage of or exploit a brother in this matter, for the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you before and solemnly affirmed.” Paul also consoles those who mourn the dead by reminding them of the promise of the resurrection:

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

It has been Thiel’s goal, throughout much of his life, to live forever. He has long been unclear, at best, whether he means this in the way Christianity promises eternal life. However he conceives his view, it is behind not just his investments in various and sundry life-extension technologies but also his self-serving and instrumentalized misinterpretation of The Lord of the Rings. It, of course, comes up in his conversation with Douthat:

Immortality was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet. Maybe it was anti-Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.

Well, if it’s immortality he wants, maybe he’ll get his wish. Consider Revelation 9:6: “During that time these people will seek death but will not find it, and they will long to die but death will escape them.”

Thiel’s words and actions strongly indicate that his material aims are in tension with his Christian beliefs. If this is Thiel’s “attempt” to reconcile the two, he should try harder.