Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Science
= the ACTS17 Collective. ACTS stands for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Science”.
Discussion
Pat Kane:
"How can all these Silicon Valley tech bros ultimately line up with all these Christian nationalists? The former like to “move fast and break things” with their machines. They love to transform their bodies and minds by means of strange substances, insertions and extensions. The latter want hard limits to all this unlimitedness.
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Take the ACTS17 Collective. ACTS stands for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Science”. But it also refers to one of the Bible’s Acts of the Apostles, in which Paul preaches the gospel to Greek intellectuals in Thessalonica, Berea and Athens. The missionary intent is clear.
Those involved in ACTS are tech heavy-hitters. Founder Trae Stephens is also a co-founder of Anduril, supplier of virtual-reality tech to the US military (and was up for the role of secretary of defence under Trump).
Below the title “Code and Cosmos”, major venture capitalist Garry Tan of Y-Combinator spoke at an ACTS event about a “touch grass” moment that all these vaulting techpreneurs might require. Christian belief could help them realise they’re working for “something beyond themselves”.
Depends on what that “something” is. Stephens jokes at one of his events (to general laughter) “I’m literally an arms dealer”. How does any devotee to the prophet of peace, love and equality make light of his collection of swords (not ploughshares)?
This guides us to a figure that the British philosopher Jules Evans describes as the “Cardinal Richelieu” of this techno-Christian emergence – the inventor and investor Peter Thiel.
If anyone is trying to stitch together Christianity and technology in an infernal new arrangement, it’s the elitist, intellectual and secretive Thiel.
His recent speech to an ACTS17 event was hieratic enough. On the topic of transhumanism – the agenda of human enhancement by tech that Bannon so violently objects to – Thiel said: “We don’t want to be anchored too much on nature.”
He continued: “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.”
Some earlier quotes illuminate how Thiel sees the future as inherently guided by Christian faith. This, from 2015: “Judeo-Western optimism differs from the atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered.”
Thiel went on: “Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame [“eschatology” meaning to see reality in terms of its ultimate endpoint]. 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.”
Perhaps relatively innocuous so far. But Thiel also perceives that the Antichrist – that’s literally his term – is at work to subvert this vision.
“The political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety”, quipped Thiel at an event called Hereticon in 2024.
It’s quite scary what he actually means here. On the Uncommon Knowledge podcast from October last year, Thiel proposes that the two apocalyptic spectres which Christianity anticipates are either “Antichrist” or “Armageddon”.
In Thiel’s reading (he has a book coming), Christian theology suggests that “we will avoid Armageddon [AI, nukes, climate meltdown] by having a one-world state that has real teeth, real power. The biblical term for that is the Antichrist. The Christian intuition I have is: I don’t want Antichrist, I don’t want Armageddon. I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both.”
The coup de gras here is Thiel’s contempt for democracy as a way down this path. From 2020, as he glosses the thought of philosopher Rene Girard: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”
(https://patkane.substack.com/p/pk-in-the-national-techno-christians)