Silicon Valley, it seems, is coming to Jesus. There are no bad conversions, in my book; I was born and raised a Christian and remain one, and it’s good, from that standpoint, to see erstwhile nonbelievers take an interest in the faith, whatever the reason.
Thus, I was cautiously optimistic as I read a recent Vanity Fair feature, by the writer Zoë Bernard, on emerging tech-world Christianity. “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,” Bernard writes. But no more. Christianity is now an object of fascination to the libertarian capitalists of the tech world.
In the faith, Bernard writes, the converts of Silicon Valley see a great deal of utility: a source of community and, therefore, professional networking; an index of ethics capable of checking some of the libertine excesses of their world; a signal of self-disciplined seriousness versus the flip-flop-wearing whiz-kid archetype popular in this same universe a mere decade ago. Christianity has become a potential path to fortune.
Bernard’s article makes clear that some converts are cynical characters merely pretending at Christianity. “I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel,” one entrepreneur told Bernard. But even if a significant proportion of the new believers are entirely sincere, that doesn’t mean their theology is copacetic. Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It’s a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love.
American Christianity has a tendency to produce forms of belief and practice that are facially antithetical to Christian teaching. Consider, for example, the purveyors of the prosperity gospel, who promise worldly riches as a reward for moral uprightness. (One adherent has now been appointed the head of a new faith office created by Donald Trump.) Although the prosperity preachers still teach certain core Christian concepts—such as the resurrection of Christ—the overall drift strikes me as self-serving, devoted to money: decidedly unchristian. The emerging variety of techno-libertarian Christianity appears to have faults of a similar type.
Based on Bernard’s report, Christianity is gaining ground in Silicon Valley partially because it encourages a kind of orderly behavior that secular liberalism fails to enforce. “No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” the same venture-capital executive told Bernard. “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.’” Religious faith is a tool for keeping people productive, in other words, a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth.
In that sense, Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes. Granted, Christianity promises certain benefits to its adherents, such as inner peace, eternal salvation, the comfort of community, and prosocial ethics. That said, Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be. In Matthew 19:21, a disciple asks Jesus how to live as a model Christian, to which “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” Christianity disrupts life as we know it rather than reinforcing a self-serving status quo. It venerates generations of Christian martyrs whose examples are prized precisely because they placed obedience to God before more advantageous beliefs or activities. The formation of their faith was contingent not on temporal success, but rather on another principle altogether: that Christianity is worth following not because it has the potential to improve one’s life, though it can, but rather because it is true.
This is key, because if Christianity is true—if we really were created to love God and one another and were then rescued from our sins by the sacrificial intervention of Christ—then everything else one believes must flow downstream of that essential reality. Believers’ personal philosophies, practices, and politics are all answerable to the Christian religion: There is no domain of life outside God’s interest, and he requires that all things be brought in accordance with his will. This means that economics is God’s business, which is bad news for techno-libertarians, because Christ’s teachings decidedly militate against the rapacious acquisition of wealth. “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other,” Jesus says. “You cannot serve God and money.”
There always have been and always will be rival interpretations of what exactly the Christian faith demands of its followers, motivated in many cases by prior commitments. In that sense, the tendency of American Christianity to result in philosophies that advance worldly aims is nothing new. But much of the faith’s central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class. Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.
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