Heaven or Earth
CrowdSource 3.31.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Silicon Valley and Christianity.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
Silicon Valley Loves Jesus
The San Francisco Standard, New York Times, Wired and now, Vanity Fair report that Christianity is on the rise in Silicon Valley. (We discussed this trend in our Christmas podcast.)
“To an Unknown God.” Spearheading this trend is the ACTS 17 Collective, named after the passage in the Acts of the Apostles where the Apostle Paul reaches Athens and dialogues with “a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers” and says, “you are ignorant of the very thing you worship.”
“Exploring the convergence of faith, science, and tech.” ACTS 17 sponsors Code & Cosmos, a happy hour featuring a DJ and a guest speaker. The most recent guest was former NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, author of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust (2024).
Believing is Seeing. Last December, the Italian daily la Reppublica interviewed Mauro Prina, Director of Thermal Dynamics at SpaceX, and Elon Musk’s direct report. “Seeing is not just observing, it is recognizing the profound value of what surrounds us, understanding the web of connections that binds us to the rest of the universe … For me it is faith, the encounter with the mysterious presence of Christ [that] helps me to see.”
The Silicon Calf. Says Y Combinator CEO and Code & Cosmos host
: “People are so ready to make AGI their god. … What we’re trying to do with events like this is give them an alternative.”
God Will Not Be Hacked
A few voices worry that Silicon Valley Christianity is not the genuine article.
“Take the Place of a god.” Generally not anti-tech entrepreneur (and Cluny Institute founder)
has concerns about “trying to map Christianity onto everything that Silicon Valley is doing,” because, in Silicon Valley, “there’s a strong strain in which they’re trying to create something that would take the place of a god.”“There Are No Bad Conversions,” writes essayist
, but “much of the faith’s central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class,” who confuse Christianity with “a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth.”Code of Ethics. Arjun Sethi, the co-CEO of Kraken: “I think they are trying to replace ESG with Christianity.”
Theology or Technology
There are definitely tensions between Christianity and the worldview of some tech leaders:
Is God god? Or is AGI god? Exodus 20:2-3: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Vox reporter Sigal Samuel argues that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “has basically told us he’s trying to build a god.”
Google co-founder Larry Page has called AI “a digital god.”
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has said: “The whole AGI rhetoric is about creating God. I don’t believe in God. I’m a strong atheist. So I don’t believe in AGI.”
Microsoft scientist Jaron Lanier has warned against AI idolatry.
Resurrection, or Life Extension? Philippians 30:21: Christ shall “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.”
has written memorably about Silicon Valley futurist Ray Kurzweil and her own experience with transhumanism: “I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I’d spent the past ten years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future or fixating on the optimization of my own body.”
Is Christianity Primarily about Ethics? Pope Benedict XVI: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
Self-professed “cultural Christian” Elon Musk: “While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise.”
Is Religion Merely Psychologically Useful? John 8:32: “you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Elon Musk has written: “Maybe religion’s not so bad/ To keep you from being sad.”
Thiel-ology
According to the Vanity Fair piece, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel is the most influential Christian in Silicon Valley. He also has the most developed, idiosyncratic and interesting theological opinions of anyone in tech.
Blessed Are the Meek, but Also the Strong. Peter Thiel: “I think Mother Teresa was a greater saint than Constantine. But there’s still a part of me that has a preference for the Christianity of Constantine, we still need something like that.”
Technological Progress Is Part of God’s Plan for Humanity. Thiel writes: “Science and technology are natural allies to … Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we 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.”
You Should Fear the Antichrist as Much as You Fear Armageddon. Or even more so: “… if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one’s worried about it. … in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first … It doesn’t quite work, the one world state doesn’t work, it still goes haywire. Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad and you still get to Armageddon.”
The Antichrist’s “One World State.” Thiel is referring here to a 2019 paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom which considers the creation of “world government” to address existential risks posed by AI.
“What is the Hope for Humanity?” Here’s a fascinating conversation from 2014 between Thiel, Anglican theologian N. T. Wright, and New York Times columnist
.“The Temptation of Peter Thiel.” In 2023, WoC contributor
critiqued Peter Thiel’s theology and worldview.
From the Crowd
“I have about as much empathy for Trump’s revenge campaign and its defenders as I have for Mao’s cultural revolution. My lack of empathy for them is exceeded only by their lack of empathy for the half of the country that didn’t vote for Trump.” This comment by
(in response to ’s account of a conversation with a DOGE employee) sparked an intense exchange with .- responds to our recent Live Debate about Romanticism:
… it’s better to be a self-directed, fulfilled person who freely chooses a restricted but worthy path than to be someone who casts aside everything to follow your deep yearnings. But it can be better to fight a society that can’t give your needs and impulses anything worthwhile to follow — even if you blow important things up in the process, even if you die — than to meekly follow along. And yet, it’s better to meekly follow along than to be the sort of person who just runs around carelessly with no worthwhile end in view.
Read the whole thing.
See you next week!
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Christianity in Silicon Valley is like cubism in modern art. You can see a Nude Descending a Staircase if you squint hard enough, but is it really a woman?
All the parts are there, perhaps, but refracted through the lens of a particular moment in history and reformed into angular geometric shapes instead of the soft curves of nature.
Is Christianity in Silicon Valley Elon Musk's gentle admiration for the ethical teachings of Jesus? A moral philosophy that makes us less sad? Or does it have the fiery temperament of the Old Testament prophets predicting great battles between good and evil, people enslaved to idolatry, and eventual Armageddon and Apocalypse?
Having lived in the liberal silo of the New York Times and NPR for most of my life, I was forced out of it by the manifest wrongs of transgender ideology, DEI, and critical race theory.
To say even in the privacy of my own mind -- let alone to my friends -- that Trump may be right about some things and that Elon Musk may be genuinely trying to save the republic for future generations by cutting the federal deficit, is pure heresy.
I don't remember living in times where such vitriol is hurled at those we love as well as those we despise. I also don't remember my intellectual Ivy- League-educated friends talking like evangelical Christians possessed by demons and ranting about the end of democracy as we know it, Trump as the great beast from the Book of Revelation, the slaughter of the innocents, and the demise of Western civilization.
I enjoyed this article, but I will keep looking for the humble St Francis who revered nature, and sought to sow peace where there is strife and pardon where there is injury.
Wonder how the newly discipled tech bros read Revelation 13:15?