Peter Thiel Returns to San Francisco To Make the Intellectual Case for Christianity

On May 5, PayPal co-founder and technology investor Peter Thiel returned to San Francisco to a warm welcome at a sold-out event, where he was interviewed by a pastor and made an intellectual case for Christianity.

The DJ iHearCanvas played worship music, bartenders served tacos and tequila, and around 200 people mingled and talked at Y Combinator president Garry Tan’s house, which is a former church. Although most of the attendees were from the San Francisco Bay Area, the event also drew people from places including Denver, Oregon, Philadelphia, Boston, Scottsdale, Dubai, Toronto, and London.

After an introduction and prayer by the health tech founder Dr. Michelle Stephens, who organized the event, Thiel was interviewed by Toby Kurth, the lead pastor at Christ Church in San Francisco, in a fireside chat.

“Many of you know Peter as a technology entrepreneur and investor, from companies like PayPal, Palantir, and of course Founders Fund. What some of you may not know is that Peter’s faith in God led him to an understanding of the world-historical importance of technology,” said Stephens, a co-founder of Oath Care, a health technology company.

The fireside chat was wide-ranging in its topics, from technological stagnation to artificial intelligence to San Francisco politics to the French philosopher Rene Girard, who Thiel studied with at Stanford.

Michelle Stephens told me that she organized this event after Peter Thiel gave a rare talk at her husband Trae Stephens’ birthday party in New Mexico in November about his relationship with Jesus. Trae Stephens and Peter Thiel work together at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. So many people found Thiel’s talk to be moving that they decided to do something like it again.

“After Peter gave his talk, which was profound, people were coming up and being like, ‘What church do you guys go to? Peter Thiel’s Christian? I didn’t know he could be Christian. Wow, I didn’t know he had this type of hope and this type of outlook that impacts his business,’” Stephens said.

During the fireside chat in San Francisco, Thiel expanded on his religious beliefs.

He discussed the Ten Commandments and which commandments he finds most meaningful.

“You always realize that you’re caught up in all these crazy dynamics. There are these bad cycles of imitation, status games that you get wrapped up in. The Ten Commandments, the two most important are the first and last on the list. The first commandment is, you should worship God. The tenth commandment is, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbor. In some ways, the first commandment is to look up, and the tenth commandment is you do not look around. And if you’re too much focused horizontally on all the people around you, that’s sort of the bad version you get caught up in. There are all these ways it’s intellectually true, and applying it personally is always just a lifetime of a work in progress,” Thiel said.

He made a similar point about the Ten Commandments at the end of an interview with the talk show host Dave Rubin in 2018 and in an interview with Eric Metaxas in 2020. The French philosopher Rene Girard, who Thiel studied with at Stanford, wrote about how people learn by imitating each other, but these cycles of imitation can become destructive.

Thiel contrasted the Biblical approach to history with the “never-ending cycles” of stories told by the Greek historians Thucydides and Herodotus.

“I always think that within a Judeo-Christian frame, God has some kind of a plan for history. Maybe it’s a hidden plan, it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life, He has a plan for history. I don’t know everything about it, but there is some kind of a character to it,” Thiel said.

He continued: “It’s very different from the Greco-Roman classical world, where history, the things that mattered were timeless and eternal. If you look at someone like Thucydides or Herodotus, the classical so-called historians, it was always never-ending cycles. Thucydides writes this account of the Peloponnesian Wars, and the Athenians go to Syracuse, and he invents all the speeches, it doesn’t matter what people say, because it would always happen. A great peace gives rise to a great war, it’s the rising power, which is Sparta, against the existing power, which is Athens, and then this is what happens in Germany versus Britain in World War I, or maybe it’s China versus the U.S. today, and it’s called the Thucydides trap because the things that matter are timeless and eternal.”

Historians claim that in the Thucydides trap, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, war most likely results. But to Thiel, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective, that is not automatically true.

Thiel said: “By contrast, Daniel in the Old Testament is the first historian where everything that happens in history that matters is one-time, world-historical, the succession of these unique and different kingdoms… You could say the Christian God was the first progressive where there’s some kind of a progressive, gradual character to the revelation itself that happens through history. The New Testament is new, there’s something new versus the Old Testament… There’s a progressive nature that revelation has.”

Thiel was also critical of the segments of society that are complacent that technological progress is simply automatic. He referred back to ideas from his 2014 book Zero to One.

He said: “There are all these versions where the story of the future is somehow, the Singularity is near. About 20 years ago, it was this exponentiating world, and all you have to do is just sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. I think these things don’t just happen on their own. One of the ways I happen to describe it, there are these four quadrants. You can be optimistic or pessimistic, or you can be determinate or indeterminate. Determinate is, you have some plans, some agency, some telos you’re working towards. Indeterminate is, you don’t really know what to do. And I always think you don’t want to be too extreme on one of these things.”

“There are certain ways three of the four quadrants can work,” Thiel said. “The quadrant that I think doesn’t work is indeterminate optimism, where you think the future will take care of itself, you don’t need to worry about it at all. That’s probably the one where if everybody follows that advice, you end up with a world where you don’t save, you don’t invest, you don’t build a better future, and all of a sudden, you end up in a worse place. There are a lot of different threads on this, but…the United States was dominated by this sort of ideology from 1982 to 2007. After 2008, the natural thing it tends to give way to is something like indeterminate pessimism, where you just start to think the future can’t be better. Somehow I want to get back to determinate optimism, working on things where you can make a difference, you can make it better… Extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, in some ways they always converge, they collapse into laziness, because you don’t take action. They’re diametrically opposite excuses for the same thing.”

In his book Zero to One, he praised definite optimists for making concrete plans to build the future–whether they built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Interstate Highway System or put men on the moon.

The interviewer, Toby Kurth, also asked Peter Thiel why Jordan Peterson has become so popular.

Thiel responded: “There’s some sense in which we need transformation. There’s some way where people need to find some way to change themselves. We don’t want to be completely stuck, and there’s some kind of a psychology version of this that’s powerful. I don’t think it ultimately works, but that’s sort of what it taps into it there. There are all sorts of people who feel stuck, you’re in a Groundhog Day, and there’s a question, how do you actually transform yourself. The religious Christian answer is always you need something like a religious conversion to have a personal transformation. Psychology emerged as this field to get people to change their behavior in a world where no one believes in God anymore. There are all these ways it can sort of work, but it can be sort of dangerous. My anti-psychology riff is always that it gets marketed as self-transformation, and after years of therapy, you sort of get exhausted, and one day you wake up, and you realize that you’re perfect the way you are, and it sort of crashes out as self-acceptance, which is the opposite of self-transformation.

“And then there are always ways you can increase the dosage. So maybe you can combine psychology with psychedelic drugs or parapsychology. There are all these ways you can increase the dosage, and maybe that works, but there probably are versions of that that get very dangerous too. I think the thing that [Jordan] Peterson taps into is that we don’t want to just be stuck in this Groundhog Day. There is this changeability. We don’t want to be anchored too much on nature. The word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament. There’s Christian concepts of sin or grace, there’s much more transformation. If there’s a Christian critique of these sort of utopian scientific movements, it should always be in the direction that they don’t go far enough. Transhumanism, radical life extension. It’s not that you shouldn’t live forever, but that it’s only transforming people’s bodies and not their souls and not the whole person or something like this.

“Another riff I have, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the evil mother Gertrude at some point, and Hamlet’s worried about how his dad got murdered, and she says, ‘All that lives must die.’ Is this just a law of nature, or is it a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And I think the Christian intuition is always that we should be on the side of transformation and not just taking the world as it is.”

Thiel’s presence in San Francisco in itself was meaningful, given that he had left San Francisco for Los Angeles in 2018, saying at the time that the Bay Area’s tech industry was too intolerant of conservatives.

Although Thiel moved his family office and the office for his foundation to Los Angeles in 2018, he kept the office for his venture capital firm Founders Fund in San Francisco, in a nod to San Francisco’s continued importance for startups. He opened a second office for Founders Fund in Miami last year.

“This is where the future is being built,” Thiel said of San Francisco. “There is this model of the city like New York or London, the global city, where it was going to be the center of globalization. San Francisco, Silicon Valley is more about technology, advancing progress–versus the globalization, the spread of technology, the distribution of that throughout the world. If I had to pick one of the two, one contrarian take I have is the technology questions are more important than the globalization questions.”

In his book Zero to One, Thiel had contrasted the forces of technology, or “doing new things,” and globalization, or “copying things that work,” and argued that technology was more important. So calling San Francisco a center of technology, and contrasting it with New York City and London as centers of globalization, was a compliment of San Francisco.

Thiel also talked about the dark side of technological progress.

“You have to at least ask, is the end of history actually the end of the world? Does it end with a whimper or with maybe a bang? There is an element of the meaning of history in a Christian context that’s apocalyptic, terrifying, and quite scary. And this is of course an undercurrent of what changed in these progressive concepts of science and technology, where it’s exponential progress that was also an exponential ability to inflict more violence. Something went very haywire with World War I, and when you get to nuclear weapons and things like that, you start to have this idea that maybe science and technology are some kind of a trap that humanity is building for itself. There’s this dimension to the meaning of history that’s pretty scary,” Thiel said.

Thiel’s concern about the possibility of an apocalyptic future for humanity dates back to his 2008 essay “The Optimistic Thought Experiment,” where he noted that there could be “50 nuclear powers in 2050.” But recently, Thiel has been making the case that a one-world government, which some experts have been subtly proposing to prevent existential risks like nuclear war, is an even worse risk than armageddon. Thiel has noted that the Antichrist forms a one-world government in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, in the name of “peace and safety.”

“There are all these reasons it is understandable why Silicon Valley has been so bad at trying to deal with the meaning of history, the meaning of technology, what it all means, and my intuition is that it’s better to ask these questions than not,” Thiel said at the San Francisco event.

After the interview ended, many of Thiel’s fans surrounded him, asked him questions, and took pictures with him. Then he quietly left.

When I asked Josh Raines, the DJ iHearCanvas’ manager, what the good news of Jesus means to him, he responded that it means this: “Jesus loves you. There is nothing that you have to do to earn His love. There’s no test, there’s no SAT. He accounts for all of your mistakes, and He’s still right there with you. Even in my life, it’s a true testament to that, I’m only here because of God’s grace. Because of His love through all the terrible mistakes we all end up making through life, He truly still loves us and still calls us his own. To think about someone that has this unconditional love for you, that to me is the good news of Christ.”

Michelle Stephens told me that she and the iHearCanvas team have built a nonprofit called “ACTS 17: Acknowledging Christ in Technology & Society.” The name is a nod to Acts, Chapter 17, in the Bible where Paul goes to various cities, such as Thessalonica, Berea, and Athens, engaging in intellectual discourse with philosophers and preaching the Gospel, converting many people. They plan to initially go to 17 cities across the U.S. and abroad. While Toby Kurth might interview Peter Thiel again, the general format will be to have a pastor or theologian interview a successful businessperson like Peter Thiel about their Christian beliefs. The idea will be that even beyond their wealth and power, there is something greater and that’s Jesus.

“Why does someone who is a billionaire who has this success in this world look to Jesus? We are here to actually give a highly intellectual case for Christ. We are here to reach the folks that wouldn’t go near or even smell a church. Christianity can be just as highly intellectual as it can be really simple. Jesus is for all people. I think people are seeking intellectual rigor to a faith in Jesus,” Stephens said.

“Even with all of the money, the fame, the power, the success, we all need a savior. And all of that stuff will not save us. Jesus is the perfect savior,” Stephens said.

If you want more resources on Peter Thiel discussing his religious beliefs, you can check out the following YouTube videos:

The Misconception About Jesus Christ and Politics — Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck (youtube.com)

Peter Thiel on the Bible and a Straussian Jesus — Conversations With Tyler — YouTube

Peter Thiel on the Bible (youtube.com)

Peter Thiel on Political Theology | Conversations with Tyler (youtube.com)