Crucified Christ (ca. later 1400s) | Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
In the twilight of the secular Western project, as its elites scramble for a vision to forestall cultural entropy, Peter Thiel has emerged as one of its most articulate and celebrated prophets. In a remarkably candid interview with The New York Times, Thiel laments the stagnation of modern life—not just economic but spiritual. “The middle class,” he says, are “the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society.” He longs for a return to dynamism, to risk, to civilizational ambition—a society that builds moonshots, not metaphors. “We should be taking a lot more risk,” he declares, evoking the energy of early modernity, when “people thought we would cure diseases … when immortality was part of the project.”
In Thiel’s eyes, Christianity once gave Western civilization its soul, its eschatological boldness—but now it must be reverse-engineered. “If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection,” he muses, “science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.” For Thiel, the sacred is not to be worshiped but imitated, perhaps even outcompeted.
In short, Thiel gestures toward Christianity, founder heroism, and technological disruption as some form of civilizational CPR.
But what does he, Peter Thiel, offer, really? Salvation? Liberation? Emancipation?
No. He offers pugnacious hubris—self-satisfied intellectual pantomiming.
For all its rhetorical verve, Thiel’s vision is a profound act of self-deception: an attempt to salvage meaning from the wreckage of a secular Western culture writ large, a civilization that has dismembered the sacred in the name of reason and progress and then scattered the body parts beneath clumsy heaps of solemn proclamations and software stacks. And the ultimate irony? Thiel believes he is calling the West back to religion! But what he is really doing is using religion the way Silicon Valley uses everything: as a mere tool. As a means in the service of some disjointed ends.
This is the heart of a critique that must be made not only from within the secular West but also from the outside, in defiant opposition to this debased Christian civilization that has done so much damage to the rest of humanity.
In the Islamic world, in India, in Confucian East Asia, and in Indigenous communities that still remember how to pray, religion is not a metaphor nor is it a cultural inheritance to be mined for civilizational legitimacy or political strategy. It is the ground of life. It governs ethics, law, metaphysics, family, food, death, and memory. Of course, these religions aren’t monoliths, but the intellectual who is fond of delving into the fine and nuanced sectarial and doctrinal differences within these traditions should not lose the majestic forest for the dazzling trees: You go to any Muslim country, Sunni (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) or Shia (Twelvers, Seveners, Zaydis, Alawites, or Druze), and five times a day the haunting blare of the call to prayer asserts itself and reminds the faithful in ways that nothing in the Western world does at such a scale.
From the perspective of civilizations that never abandoned meaning, that never practiced religion ironically, cynically, sarcastically, that never turned the sacred into software, the gods—or God—are not a transactional strategy. For many people who live within such civilizations, the sacred is a reality, not an abstraction or an aspiration.
By contrast, Thiel wants Christianity without Christ, resurrection without repentance, grace without submission. His language is filled with sacred echoes: “transcendence,” “hope,” “resurrection,” “Antichrist.” But in his mouth, these words seem empty and bloated. His is not the voice of a man who bows in prayer. This is the language of a man who feels fear and trembling at the prospect of his own and his own kind’s mortality.
Thiel admires Christianity’s eschatological ambition but not its sense of human limits. He does not love Christ on the cross; he fears civilizational irrelevance, and he hopes that God can be reverse-engineered into a generator of meaning for a disenchanted West.
In this, Thiel reveals himself not as a Christian visionary but as a late-stage Western necromancer trying to resurrect a once-living tradition through techno-rituals, entrepreneurial myth, and reactionary pining.
Meanwhile, the many religious traditions he ignores—Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, and even Eastern Orthodox Christianity (what a coincidence that the members of BRICS hail from those traditions!)—are quietly preparing for a post-Western world, not by mimicking Silicon Valley but by grounding themselves more deeply in the sacred orders that have never been abandoned by many who live within those traditions.
Islam, in particular, terrifies thinkers like Thiel, not because of terrorism or extremism but because explicitly Islamic regimes present an existential challenge to secular Western spiritual exhaustion. Despite the efforts of modernizing Arab and Asian ideologues raised on Marxism and nationalism, Islam remains a living, breathing religion that binds metaphysics and politics, ethics and economy, into a coherent whole. It is not looking for transcendence. It already has it. One cannot go a day in an Islamic society without rubbing against spirituality a thousand times.
Thiel’s silence on Islam is no mere oversight; it is avoidance. To acknowledge Islam as a serious alternative would shatter Thiel’s project. Why? Because Islam does what Thiel wants Christianity to do: It infuses contemporary civilization with divine purpose. And Islam does so without irony, without nostalgia, and without the intermediary of “visionary elites.” It submits to God directly.
What does Thiel offer instead? He offers the tired, reedy, false theory of The Great Man Redux. The heroic entrepreneur and inventor as semidivine redeemer. The startup as sacrament.
The crowd is mediocre, he insists, and so the serfs must obey; the masses and the mobs must be subdued, for the visionary must lead.
But what if the very sacrilegious instinct to use religion, to activate it for civilizational energy, is the final confirmation that the secular West has no religion left—that the West, at long last, has no shame?
Thiel mistakes cultural exhaustion for metaphysical decline. His lament is specific to Western elites who believed they could build a future on reason alone and are now horrified to discover that the sacred spirit and its ghost are both gone from the Kantian machine.
The rest of the world is not waiting for Peter Thiel to revive Christianity or civilization as he narrowly understands it. No, the rest of the world is already anticipating futures built on sacred memory and a sacred present. It is reciting the Qur’an five times a day, chanting mantras before meals, offering incense to ancestors, and balancing ritual and reason—all without any hushed Rortyan irony or Nietzschean paradoxes.
The future belongs not to those who discover meaning in a lab or a startup but to those who live, build, and die by the sacred. Most of them have never heard the name Peter Thiel and would be hard pressed to grasp the nature of the anxieties that animate him. As they quietly step into history’s next chapter, they are not asking him, or Silicon Valley, for permission.
