Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion

It’s mid-October in San Francisco, and a crowd of 200 or so congregants—some seated in pews, others standing below cathedral windows at the back—bow their heads in prayer. Over cranberry-apple cosmos and plates of Burmese food served by black-shirted waiters, a DJ plays a thumping soundtrack of remixed worship music. This is not a church service or even a Bible study. It is, instead, an entirely new kind of event in Silicon Valley.

We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion. The event is called Code & Cosmos, and its underlying thesis is that the fields of science and technology, once considered diametrically opposed to religion and spirituality, might converge with the teachings of the Bible. In other words, business networking for the spiritually curious.

“What is the real basis of morality?” Collins asks the crowd. “Why am I here? What happens after I die?” Collins, a thin, owlish man, gazes solemnly at the crowd, which already seems to have a sense of where this is going. “Science,” he says, “can’t really give you an answer.” But there is another answer to these questions, and it has to do with one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom Collins encountered as a 20-something medical student grappling with the limits of atheism. Ever since, he said, “I’ve never really hit a situation where what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I believe as a Christ-centered Christian are in conflict.”

“I GUARANTEE YOU,” ONE CHRISTIAN ENTREPRENEUR TOLD ME, “THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT ARE LEVERAGING CHRISTIANITY TO GET CLOSER TO PETER THIEL.”

That this conversation is taking place not at a church but in Tan’s home—which, incidentally, happens to be a converted church a stone’s throw from Dolores Park—may seem, as Tan tells us from the stage, “a little bit unusual.” There was a time, Tan says, when such a gathering would be “maybe even reviled in San Francisco.” Many in the room, myself included, remember vividly the period to which Tan is referring. It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life. For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”

Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness.

Near trays of sticky rice laid out on white tablecloths stood a woman with substantially false eyelashes, who, when I asked if she worked in tech, eyed my press credential nervously. “I’m an investor,” she said, “in tech.” When I prodded her further on what sectors she invested in, she doubled down. “I told you,” she barked. “I invest in tech. Tech!” She opened up only slightly, when, to make conversation as we stood waiting to speak to Tan, I asked if she was a Christian. Yes, in fact, she was, and had been for many years. And while she did not feel, in response to my suggestion, that she was unable to speak openly about her faith, it was a topic she avoided bringing up in professional settings—until the past year or so, when she began to sense a change. In recent months, she felt so comfortable as to wear her cross in public, and here she gestured to her neck—around which dangled a sparkly cross charm the size of my pinkie fingernail.

Nowadays, Christianity is rarely met with direct hostility in Silicon Valley. But there is still the lingering sense—at least in intellectual circles—that practicing it is a “faux pas,” said Michelle Stephens, who is Trae Stephens’s wife and the founder of the organization hosting the Code & Cosmos event, ACTS 17 Collective. (The organization is named after a passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which the apostle Paul visits ancient Greece and preaches the gospel to intellectuals.) “Like, how are you a smart person,” she asked, “and a Christian?”

Part of the problem is that for most of Silicon Valley’s existence, its overarching monoculture privileged a certain type of “smart person.” It was the kind of smart person who campaigned for Barack Obama, marched for gay rights, and built a custom prayer stool to complement their priest fetish at the Folsom Street Fair. The subject of ethics was brought up frequently, but almost exclusively in the context of their nonmonogamous relationships. Black Lives Matter signs sprouted from their yards, and if they strayed beyond the strictures of atheism into spirituality, it was of the Eastern variety. Being Muslim was actually kind of cool, because if you were against that, you were probably xenophobic. And Judaism was all right too, because antisemitism was not yet in vogue.

Maybe you know this person, or maybe you are this person, because it’s a personality that, while largely original to the Bay Area, has saturated mainstream consciousness so thoroughly as to become stripped of all its original subversion. Go to most any party of millennials in Los Angeles or New York and you’ll find the same iridescent-sheathed package of psilocybin-studded chocolate being passed around. What was once radical is now mundane: Burning Man is slouching toward Coachella, Richard Dawkins is a farce, and an uneasy realization is dawning that, while we all thought we were locked arm in arm in humanity’s cheerful march toward progress, we were only wandering into swift-approaching regression. Even hard-nosed progressives had begun to sense that something rotten was simmering in the tepid cultural waters. Could it be that what society needed was a return to an ethical framework that had survived throughout millennia?

You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “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.”)

And it’s not only Thiel. Last summer, in an interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk described himself, cautiously, as a “cultural Christian.” “I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise,” he said. To have two of the world’s richest technologists, worth a recently estimated $400 billion (Musk) and $14 billion (Thiel), speak admiringly about biblical teachings challenges the view that Christianity is anti-capitalist or even anti-intellectual. Meanwhile, downstream of Thiel and Musk are people like Tan, who is busy shepherding the Valley’s next cohort of entrepreneurs and who occasionally tweets scripture from his X account.

It’s a shift that follows the postpandemic economic tightening that emboldened some CEOs to publicly embrace right-leaning politics, write corporate statements in support of MEI—or “merit, excellence, and intelligence” as an antidote to DEI—and that earlier this year had Alex Karp, the CEO of the defense intelligence company Palantir, preaching at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness in DC against the “thin, corrosive, cancerous…pagan religion infecting our universities.” (Karp is, of course, referring to woke-ism—which many on the right view as an excessive fixation with political correctness, especially as it relates to identity. In recent years some influential Silicon Valley leaders have compared woke-ism to a religion obsessed with original sin but lacking in redemptive salvation.) This same evolution can be charted in the endorsements of formerly liberal venture capitalists. For instance: Chamath Palihapitiya, who after January 6 called President Donald Trump a “complete piece of shit fucking scumbag” and who, in June, cohosted a glitzy campaign fundraiser on the president’s behalf.

Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted, and along with them, a factory-fresh founder prototype emerged. It used to be that the 20-something whiz kid who coded a viral game and dropped out of Stanford was a venture capitalist darling. “VCs used to throw money at that guy,” said a woman who manages communications at a top-tier venture firm. “Now if someone comes in and says, ‘I love my parents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work ethic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’ ”

The inception of this platonic ideal could be traced to the publication of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s essay, “It’s Time to Build,” in which he argued that over the last few decades, American innovation has fallen short. Where, he asked, are our supersonic aircraft, monorails, and high-speed trains? Western life, specifically American life, was permeated by a sense of “smug complacency, [a] satisfaction with the status quo,” Andreessen wrote. This was a problem, in his eyes, that ran deeper than politics; our entire civilization had lost its way. It was time to return to the world of our “forefathers and foremothers” who built all the “things we now take for granted,” he continued. “It’s time for full-throated, unapologetic, uncompromised political support from the right for aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.”

Silicon Valley is now cultivating projects that embolden a vision slightly grander than that of subscription software, and these projects will be helmed not by some anemic ayahuasca-drinking softie but by a new kind of entrepreneur, a serious person with a serious vision for the future. The Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists are seeking entrepreneurs with “the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness,” writes Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm’s American Dynamism practice.

“No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” said that same venture capital communications exec. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’ ”

That venture capitalists are seeking a new sort of entrepreneur is an expectation felt palpably among the many aspiring founders at the Code & Cosmos event who, you get the sense, have businesses that are so far made up of a single pitch deck. You could see it in the gaggle of young, obviously elated entrepreneurial would-bes surrounding Tan, faces beaming, eager to make small talk about Christianity with one of Silicon Valley’s leading investors.

“Thank you for saving San Francisco!” a woman gushed, referring to Tan’s recent involvement in San Francisco politics. He smiled and nodded. The founders encircled Tan ever closer, until he was completely surrounded and backed against the wall. They began, at first, with inquiries relating to Tan’s talk, which spanned from the imminent arrival of an omniscient superintelligence to why we should deregulate its use (“we’re criminalizing something that’s basically doing matrix multiplication”) to the importance of attending church.

Pleasantries now out of the way, the founders got down to business. They asked Tan if he would connect with them on LinkedIn. (He did.) They asked for selfies. (He obliged.) And then, one by one, his hopeful disciples pitched their start-ups. “I’d love to tell you about my company,” they said, and Tan, listening on with an air of pointed graciousness that was indeed Christlike, continued his smiling and nodding, followed by variations on the reply “That’s a good idea. Do you have any customers?” or “Interesting concept. Do you have customers?” Invariably, the founders’ faces fell, a newfound sheepishness creeping into their voices as they replied “no” or “Not yet, but soon!” And Tan would say, “Reach out again when you have customers.” And then he would move on to the next founder. This went on for at least half an hour, eventually becoming so monotonous that I wondered how any venture capitalist might have the patience, much less the optimism, for any real innovation, and I stepped away.

In the cutthroat world of venture funding, founders are often taught to have a competitive advantage—or what the industry calls an edge—against their peers. When Thiel said in 2015 that many of Silicon Valley’s successful entrepreneurs seem to have a mild form of Asperger’s, overnight “kids started putting on an autism effect to seem smarter,” one entrepreneur recalled. “Like, you’re not on the spectrum, you’re just socially awkward and you’re trying to seem smart.” These days, he argued, the same effect that engendered a class of people putting on neurodivergence is cultivating a new bent toward biblical altruism.

This could be especially appealing to anyone seeking to stand out in a monoculture in which polycules and ketamine are mundane but attending Sunday church service is subversive. “You know, in cities like San Francisco and New York, being a Christian is a little bit of a vice,” said a San Francisco consultant. In other words, the new religion is religion.

“YOU HAVE A DUTY AS A FOUNDER TO MAKE REALLY GOOD PRODUCTS AND GET THEM INTO PEOPLE’S HANDS. YOU’RE MAKING GOD REAL IN PEOPLE’S LIVES WHEN THEY EXPERIENCE THAT.”

One Y Combinator–backed entrepreneur told me with obvious distaste how BookFace, Y Combinator’s internal social network, has lately filled up with pro-Christian messaging. It is, as Arjun Sethi, the co-CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Kraken, said, only the latest prototype in a system crowded by identity politics. “It’s surface. It’s a fad,” he said. “I think they are trying to replace ESG”—the socially conscious investing principle that prioritizes environmental, social, and governance issues—“with Christianity.”

“I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told me, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

This is a reality not lost on Michelle Stephens, the founder of ACTS 17 Collective, who is well aware that Silicon Valley kingmakers might lure potential acolytes to Christian-adjacent events. In fact, it seemed that this is sort of the point of her organization. People in tech are “fundamentally motivated by money, fame, and power,” Stephens said. “People with a lot of clout or business acumen and cred is how you get them in the door.” These events are a collision of godliness and good old-fashioned hedonism: Amid caviar bumps and Champagne, you might find yourself shoulder to shoulder with someone like Thiel, who is, as Stephens points out, a gay billionaire, and who, at ACTS 17 Collective’s pilot event in May, spoke at length about his relationship with Jesus Christ.

“These juxtapositions highlight that Christianity doesn’t have to look a certain way,” she said. “The Jesus we know isn’t the Jesus of religion. He is the Jesus of the people. For the people. Honest Christianity—despite what you may have learned or heard—is a radically inclusive faith.”

Silicon Valley’s Christian awakening has no physical center, but one downtown San Francisco church, Epic, is gaining traction among the tech crowd. Its lead pastor is a lovely guy called Ben Pilgreen, who told me over the phone that, postpandemic, his congregation grew from 300 to more than 800. In a city that’s renowned for being spectacularly godless, the surge of interest is surprising, he added, but not entirely unexpected. “I think COVID did something to us,” said Pilgreen. “I’m still not sure about everything it did to us as a society or individuals. But it called people to think about what matters.” It helps, too, that Epic Church hosts a series dedicated to people working in Silicon Valley’s centers of innovation: CEOs and venture capitalists who regularly speak about how technology can be used in the glory of God.

There’s an ideological compatibility with the capitalist-friendly notion “that each person has a calling and a vocation and using your gifts to the max is a good thing and it’s what God would want,” said Toby Kurth, a pastor who has headed Bible studies attended by Thiel. Or, as Daniel Francis, the Catholic founder of the AI start-up Abel, put it, “You have a duty as a founder to make really good products and get them into people’s hands. You’re making God real in people’s lives when they experience that.”

Implicit in Silicon Valley’s religious fervor are its recent investments in serious people with serious visions, which accounts for the billions lately plowed into defense tech and artificial intelligence. Such fields raise big, nagging questions about not only morality but the nature of the human condition: Why is the Western view superior? Is it ethical to assert military dominance over other nations? If machines replicate human intelligence, and by extension, consciousness, what will account for our species’ exceptionalism?

These are catechisms you can easily complete with a Protestant perspective: The United States is superior because it is a nation founded on the Bible (despite what the Constitution may assert about the separation of church and state); our country has a moral obligation to assert global dominance in order to spread biblical values around the world; and humans are special because we are the pinnacle of God’s creation. This religious framework fortifies other vexing existential concerns as well, including the lingering sense that the technology industry writ large maybe isn’t such a great thing after all.

“PEOPLE ARE SO READY TO MAKE AGI THEIR GOD,” TAN ADDED. “WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO WITH EVENTS LIKE THIS IS GIVE THEM AN ALTERNATIVE.”

Lately, a new, more thoughtful strain has entered my conversations with founders who express their off-the-record misgivings about the technology they themselves are building. These dialogues seem sincere in a way that is a frankly refreshing and novel reversal from the discussions I had with many of these same formerly fresh-faced entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups with bald enthusiasm only a few years earlier. They say the tech industry can no longer rely, as it did in the mid-2010s, on the uncomplicated notion that it is “making the world a better place.” (“Everyone hates tech now,” a venture capitalist recently told me, looking vaguely self-conscious as he said it.) For any principled technologist who may feel their industry is a wellspring of confusion and despair, it’s comforting to believe that God created people to make cool products and that making cool products, actually, is a good thing.

Another idea gaining steam among some of the Silicon Valley faithful is the notion that tech is not an inherent evil. Rather, tech produced by bad thinking—and by extension secular thinking—is. This was the general theory floated by entrepreneur Reggie James in October at Hereticon, a Founders Fund–backed conference for “creative dissidents.” (During its apocalypse-themed Miami gathering, Thiel spoke about the coming of the Antichrist.) There, James introduced the idea of “SecuTech,” or “secular technology” designed from a secular perspective. His primary example is social media, which, he told me over the phone, engenders “the postmodernist values of fighting over identity and representation. Everyone on social media is going through an identity crisis and some kind of disinformation campaign. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature of postmodern design.”

There is an antidote to SecuTech, says James, and it’s called “spiritual technology,” which is technology that, while not necessarily relying on a religious framework, is built with the understanding “that values across religions are different from postmodernist secular tech values.” But not every religious technologist is necessarily all in on Silicon Valley’s burgeoning embrace of Christianity. Luke Burgis, a Catholic entrepreneur who recently hosted a dinner at the Vatican dealing with AI, said there’s a “danger” in “trying to map Christianity onto everything that Silicon Valley is doing.” This is the goal, Burgis noted, of the 1626 novel The New Atlantis, which has piqued the interest of some Silicon Valley circles. The novel envisions a secretive, quasi-Christian society that, through technological experiments, controls the weather, overcomes aging, and builds heaven on earth. These godlike efforts are at work in industries like defense tech, which Burgis warned is “such brilliant branding” because “it’s not always used that way.” But, he added, there’s also artificial superintelligence, which is the idea that machines will soon compete with and eventually supersede human intelligence. “In Silicon Valley,” said Burgis, “there’s a strong strain in which they’re trying to create something that would take the place of a god.”

Few people have fueled that anxiety on the same order as Sam Altman, the OpenAI cofounder who believes that AI will usher in “massive prosperity,” as he wrote in one essay, and make us capable of doing “things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.” From the stage at Code & Cosmos, Tan tells us how only yesterday he spent five hours talking with Altman, whose treatise, he said with shining eyes, is “almost a work of faith itself of AGI and ASI potentially in thousands of days.” Tan continues, “Sam thinks we will actually unlock physics and the secrets of science and technology to a point where we will have abundance on tap.”

Some of what Tan had been getting at onstage reminded me of those Silicon Valley technologists that Burgis warned me about, the ones who are so eager to manufacture their own god. And admittedly, at one point in the reporting of this story, I started down a highly cynical, conspiratorial line of thought that some people in Silicon Valley, like Tan, were cloaking their ambitions to build a god under the guise of traditional religion. “Like a 21st-century version of Joseph Smith with a direct line to a godlike intelligence that performs technological ’miracles,’ ” I posited to Eliezer Yudkowsky, the cofounder of the Thiel-backed Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who has warned that the unchecked development of superintelligent machines will result in humanity’s certain extinction.

Yudkowsky was quick to throw cold water on that idea, arguing that religious thinking has little utility in uncovering the motivations and stakes of AI. “At the core of everything, there is a factual question: How much power does AI end up with in the limit? Can its makers control it?” he told me. “You can’t settle it by religious thinking. You can’t settle it by accusing other people of religious thinking. If someone could actually build a god for $20 billion and have it follow their orders, they wouldn’t need to be religious to want to do that.”

When I took Tan aside to ask why he thought a Christian perspective was relevant to anyone working on artificial intelligence, he told me that it was imperative for people working in tech to realize that they’re building for “something beyond themselves: their families and communities,” he said. “Technology is so powerful right now that…you need to have this sort of ‘touch grass’ moment.

“People are so ready to make AGI their god,” Tan added. “What we’re trying to do with events like this is give them an alternative.”