Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God. The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar, mimosas, and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing kingmaker, delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness, and Jesus Christ. The guests were enthralled.
The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, “Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian.” “He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?”
That reaction — eyebrows raised, curiosity genuine — gave Ms. Stephens an idea: Gather influential people, including in Silicon Valley, to talk about Christian belief. Last year, she started a nonprofit called ACTS 17 Collective, which holds events where the bigwigs of the tech and entertainment industries discuss their faith. For those seeking not just spiritually but also professionally, it’s a chance to get close to industry demigods.
Mr. Thiel was the featured speaker at the first ACTS 17 event last May, at the San Francisco home of Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator. He talked about how Christian theology informs his politics and which of the Ten Commandments he finds most meaningful. (The first and last: Worship God, and don’t covet what others have.) A D.J. added ambience, mixing worship beats for the more than 200 attendees.
In October, the nonprofit hosted another talk at Mr. Tan’s home, this time with Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, who has long talked about how he reconciles science with his Christian faith. Ms. Stephens is planning more events in San Francisco, as well as one in Los Angeles, and has reached out to potential speakers like Pat Gelsinger, the former chief executive of Intel, as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist and Muslim turned critic of Islam who converted to Christianity.
The name ACTS 17 is an acronym (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), but it also refers to the biblical chapter in which Paul the Apostle crisscrosses Athens and Thessaloniki to spread the Gospel among Greek “kings and queens of culture,” as Ms. Stephens puts it, the eminent and affluent demographic that she aims to minister to today. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive Christian calling, she acknowledged.
“We were always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized,” Ms. Stephens said. “I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”
Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to chasing the elusive — fortune, breakdowns, power — but God has not tended to rank high on the list. The Bay Area is one of the least churchgoing parts of America, where people have been more apt to meet their spiritual longing with meditation, ayahuasca, intermittent fasting or cold plunges. An episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley” once satirized this with a gay entrepreneur aghast at being “outed” as Christian. In a place built on stretching human limitations, where people exert dominion over everything from fertility to outer space, the divine has seemed, to some, obsolete.
Mr. Thiel has long been an exception to the atheism and agnosticism of his peers. He has said his Christian faith is at the center of his worldview, which he expounds upon with a heterodox approach — fusing references to Scripture and conservative political theory, parsing ancient signs and wonders for their connection to tech wonders today. In recent podcast interviews, he draws on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential threats like artificial intelligence and nuclear war but bring something much worse: one-world government. (Mr. Thiel declined to be interviewed through Ms. Stephens; his spokesperson did not return an email.)
Other tech and entertainment gurus also seem to be embracing religion. Last year, Joe Rogan talked about the importance of faith in multiple podcast episodes, saying he had at times been “pretty atheist” but became more spiritual after the death of his grandfather. “As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure,” Mr. Rogan said in an episode. “There’s no agenda,” she said. “There’s no specific movement happening here. We are just creating a space for people to explore those big questions that they just aren’t finding solutions to in the current world, in the current social and societal order.”
She added that the group didn’t intend to discuss political issues, though she realizes they can’t be entirely avoided. “There’s nothing we guide the moderator to ask or not ask — everything is fair game,” she said. “We ask God to guide the moderators and speakers.”
Still politics, or at least a whiff of it, cannot be ignored when Mr. Thiel is part of the group’s origin story. An outspoken libertarian, Mr. Thiel was an early supporter of Mr. Trump in 2016, and Vice President JD Vance is among his acolytes. He seems also to recognize the strength that comes from an alliance between political and religious conservatives.
“The Reagan coalition was somehow the free market libertarians, the defense hawks and the social conservatives,” he told the economist Tyler Cowen in a recent interview. “What does the millionaire, and the general and the priest — what do they actually have in common?”
He continued: “Yet the coalition worked incredibly well, and the answer I submit that they have in common is they’re anti-communist, and they have a common enemy.”
It was the first Sunday of 2025 and Epic Church, in downtown San Francisco, was jammed. Mr. Stephens went downstairs to drop the couple’s 9- and 11-year-old sons at a children’s service. Ms. Stephens doled out hugs to other churchgoers. Then the two took their seats in the second row of the converted industrial space where Epic holds services.
Epic Church is nondenominational and got support from an evangelical Dallas-based network that places churches in “spiritually hard to reach” parts of the United States. Since it began weekly services in San Francisco in 2011, Epic has ballooned, drawing roughly 1,000 people — including some of the city’s poorest along with its tech wealth — every Sunday. It now has its own building: $12 million of office space.
Ben Pilgreen, Epic’s pastor, preaches a message that has resonated with San Francisco locals: He believes that any job someone does — ad sales, software engineering, H.R. — can be sacred. It’s not just clergy doing the Lord’s work. This is an appealing notion to those members of his congregation who want to believe the time they’re pouring into their careers has a higher purpose.
“If you’ve been called to be a graphic designer,” Mr. Pilgreen said, “that’s a sacred vocation.”
Mr. Stephens and Ms. Stephens became members of the church shortly after moving to San Francisco. It was in the Epic community that they sharpened their own thinking of how Christian faith should inform their Silicon Valley endeavors. For four years, until the end of 2021, they hosted a Faith and Work group, which met Tuesday mornings and discussed ways religion was relevant to their professional lives. Mr. Thiel and Mr. Tan were some of the high-profile guests who dropped in. (The group is starting up again this year.)
This Stephens-led small group sometimes studied the work of René Girard, a literary theorist who has become Silicon Valley’s favorite theologian. Mr. Girard’s name is invoked by Mr. Thiel in podcast interviews, by Mr. Stephens at ACTS 17 events and by Mr. Vance.
Mr. Girard, who died in 2015, was also a mentor to Mr. Thiel at Stanford. Mr. Girard’s books offer a view of religion that fits tidily into the belief systems of Silicon Valley. He theorized that all desire is mimetic — we want what other people want — and one person who broke that cycle of rivalry was Jesus Christ. Interpreting his work, readers conclude that a way to transcend petty desires is to convert to Christianity and try to imitate Christ.
Some of his readers and critics, like the historian John Ganz, say Mr. Girard frames religion as an antidote to the sorts of vices that are now exacerbated by social media: Is Instagram making you jealous of other people? No problem; keep scrolling, but remember you should only want to be like Christ.
Another explanation for Mr. Girard’s growing influence is mimesis itself. People want to mimic Mr. Thiel. As Augustus Doricko, a Christian start-up founder, put it: “Peter Thiel could crown a circus clown his favorite philosopher and everyone would trip over themselves trying to get face time with the circus clown.”
After the first ACTS 17 event, an attendee approached Ms. Stephens and said he was shaken by the profession of faith from Mr. Thiel, whom he called a professional “idol”: If Mr. Thiel was worshiping Jesus, perhaps he should be doing the same.
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