Have you ever said, “I got to get me some of that apocalyptic?” I have been haunted and harmed my entire life by the apocalyptic. First, it was the wild-eyed, sweating, screaming evangelists putting on twice-annual revivals at Antioch Baptist Church.
As a 10-year-old boy, the scenes of fighter jets taking off from Ezekiel, beast kings roaring out of Daniel and tanks rolling from Gog and Magog in route to the climactic battle of Armageddon were the most fun I had all week.
By the time I was 17, all the dispensational charts, numbers, predictions and scenarios seemed unrealistic. Then I read Walker Percy’s Lancelot, and the apocalyptic became serious again. Percy was my first secular apocalyptic writer.
Lancelot tells his therapist: “I’ll prophesy: This country is going to turn into a desert, and it won’t be a bad thing. Thirst and hunger are better than jungle rot. We will begin in the Wilderness where Lee lost. Deserts are clean places. Corpses turn quickly into simply pure chemicals.”
There was no existential need for a new take on the apocalyptic when I came across an opinion piece by Michael J. Christensen, “Antichrist or Armageddon? Peter Thiel rethinks apocalypse from Silicon Valley.”
Meet ‘TechnoBro’ and Doomsday prepper Peter Thiel
Meet Peter Thiel. No doubt Thiel is the most extraordinary apocalyptic preacher in the world. A tech billionaire up to his microchips in apocalyptic narrative is irresistible to an old apocalypticist.
“Silicon Valley giant Thiel … is up to his apps in apocalyptic.”
Silicon Valley giant Thiel, founder of PayPal, earliest outside investor in Facebook and founder of Palantir, the surveillance company used by the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, is up to his apps in apocalyptic.
He is a married gay man who attends a conservative evangelical church that, no surprise, teaches homosexuals are condemned to hell. Unperplexed by such cognitive dissonance, Thiel, with obvious pride, announces he is a “heterodox Christian.”
An apocalyptic age
Our world is filthy rich with apocalyptic theories. We live in an apocalyptic age — an age of hyperbole, exaggeration, excess and danger. The world’s insecurity extends from the possibility of nuclear war, widespread destruction and devastation, economic collapse and pandemic to a planet consumed by global warming. And you can throw in a growing authoritarianism among the governments of the world, including the United States.
Watching the evening news has become like reading the book of Revelation: The four horsemen of the apocalypse — pestilence, war, famine and death — thunder across our landscape.
In Precarious Rhetorics, Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona and Christa Teston suggest one cause of the growing sense of insecurity or danger felt around the world is the growth of right-wing nationalist populism in nations of the North Atlantic. The rise of “hard-right populism,” they note, “is cultivated through the sowing of fear and suspicion.” Apocalyptic and authoritarianism in tandem are a fear-mongering politician’s delight.
Once the territory of doom and gloom preachers, apocalyptic has flowered in unlikely places. The apocalyptic breeds new believers in the hinterland of Christian radio, with 1,600 stations, and television, featuring 46 stations.
Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley are a much more prominent showcase for the apocalyptic. Thiel has launched a private lecture series on the “Antichrist” for technologists and futurists. Hosted by the ACTS 17 Collective at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the talks won’t be recorded or published.
Thiel only needed the terms “Antichrist” and “Armageddon” to grab the attention of the 40% of Americans who, according to Pew Research, believe humanity is living in the End Times.
“Evangelicals will hesitate accepting End Times-teaching from a gay married man, but he has so much money, they probably will overlook it.”
Evangelicals will hesitate accepting End Times-teaching from a gay married man, but he has so much money, they probably will overlook it.
Thiel’s Antichrist
Thiel sees the Antichrist not as a single person but a global, technological, authoritarian system. This sounds in line with the Apostle Paul’s warning in Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Thiel believes the Antichrist will secure peace at the cost of freedom and democracy. He offers a choice between authoritarianism and annihilation. The authoritarian system will use bastardized religious themes, promise “law and order” and “peace and safety.” In return, all we do is surrender our souls to centralized control.
With military boots tramping in our cities, a military parade in Washington, D.C., an avalanche of presidential executive orders and encroaching interference in the basic freedoms of Americans, we can sense the creeping authoritarianism growing like kudzu to choke our democracy.
I am uneasy with Thiel’s prediction when his Antichrist bears such stark resemblances to President Trump. The power of the presidency has been expanding since Franklin Roosevelt but has now exceeded the constitutional limits of the republic.
Democracy faces unprecedented danger from a president determined to dictate to Congress and the Supreme Court. Trump’s desire for hyper control extends its tentacles into every layer of America culture as he bullies universities, threatens the free press and intimidates lawyers, prosecutors and the courts.
Thiel’s Armageddon
There’s no escape plan in Thiel’s vision. Earth is on a collision course with an inevitable Armageddon — a worldwide cataclysmic war. The result will be the catastrophic collapse of civilization through global warfare and destruction, with no Jesus arriving like a cosmic Superman.
“For Thiel, almost total annihilation will be required to rid the world of authoritarianism.”
For Thiel, almost total annihilation will be required to rid the world of authoritarianism. Only a few will survive. This suggests only the billionaires will be able to afford the ticket to get away. Thiel has a 477-acre ranch in New Zealand as his “Doomsday prepper” Promised Land.
About 3 million people identify as “Doomsday preppers.” Originally known as survivalism, doomsday preppers are preparing for Doomsday. Doomsday preppers put boots on the ground. They are warriors training for the end.
The National Geographic reality show Doomsday Preppers presents a public face to the movement. Other shows include Doomsday Castle, Apocalypse Preppers and Meet the Preppers.
I am not willing to trust the future to a technocrat. Italian humanist philosopher Ernesto Grassi offers one of the early warning signs for the dangers of technology. Grassi says, “Today we glory in science and (technology), entrusting our future to them, forgetting that we still have the problem of finding ‘data’ of ‘inventing’ them, since the technological process can only elaborate them and draw consequences from them.”
Grassi warns of the consequences for society when a privileged wealthy class evokes an attitude of superiority. Such an arrogance puts us close to a group of people believing they have the right to the domination of everything.
A way forward
If anything, Thiel is a false prophet. His scenario reeks with the myth of the exceptionalism manifest in his ending, making room on a vanquished Earth only for himself and his fellow billionaires.
Even more troubling, Thiel is more a planner than a prophet. His lectures point in the direction of how he wishes to manipulate the end times.
When he combines the religious and the secular with the rich as God’s chosen vessels who comprise an innocent and righteous army of technocrats opposed by the “Lawless One,” the Antichrist, Thiel sounds like a medicine man conning an unsuspecting public.
The presumption that only Silicon Valley can save us now is a far cry from Vaclav Havel staring into the abyss and crying, “Only a God can save us now.”
“Thiel’s fearful apocalypse mirrors President Trump’s fear-infused message and his own dream of imperial exceptionalism.”
Thiel’s fearful apocalypse mirrors President Trump’s fear-infused message and his own dream of imperial exceptionalism. Trump never spoke a larger and more honest statement than when he said, “If you are rich and famous, they let you do it.”
A wealthy man’s dream or nightmare? In the end, Thiel is one more failed apocalyptic preacher. His scenes are as distorted, untrue and crazy as those of Robert Jeffress. His vision will fall into the garbage dump of history with every preacher’s prediction of the day of Jesus’s return.
Thiel is just another cog in the “inverted totalitarianism” of corporate power exploiting the authority and resources of the state to manage democracy and demobilize the citizenry. His Antichrist already exists in our corporate/government alliance. His Armageddon is unacceptable. His hustle is an attempt to advance the imperial.
Thiel, like Trump, advances the agenda of corporate capitalists at the expense of the rest of us.
The time has come to stop buying apocalyptic preachers’ crazy dreams. Our task, our anti-Armageddon task, is to resist the Antichrist and its dream of “world domination.”
We accomplish this task in the extraordinary power of the ordinary — ordinary Americans showing up every day to endow democracy with more strength. Americans have been free too long and valued equality too much to fall for another apocalyptic preacher’s con job. In our hearts, we know social cooperation, hope and a desire for the common good is a better, stronger hope.
Our power lies in our resistance to the corporate state and our rejection of the destructive apocalyptic of authoritarianism and annihilation.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
Related articles:
Why Trump seeks to create a government of one person
The Antichrist is coming and is already here
Trump’s evangelical base believes God spared him from an assassin’s bullet for a purpose