Over the past years, the billionaire Peter Thiel has written and spoken widely – at a four-lecture series in San Francisco in 2025; in an interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times; perhaps most prominently at an invitation-only conference in Rome, mere blocks from the Vatican, and most recently through a co-written article in First Things – about his concerns regarding the advent of the Antichrist in the world. Thiel warns against transnational entities exercising quasi-statelike power worldwide, especially those proposing to regulate technological development; he views with the utmost suspicion proposals and promises of peace and harmony; he sees in all these trends the harbinger of a figure who achieves world domination through promises of peace and safety will initiate the end times.

The secular response has been divided between amusement and alarm at the outré notions and outsized leverage of an unimaginably wealthy eccentric; the ecclesial response, specifically the article in Le Grand Continent from Fr. Paolo Benanti, advisor to the Holy See on AI ethics, was in many ways incisive, particularly in its explanation of Thiel’s theories of business and culture and their relation to elements in the thought of the billionaire’s former professor and philosophical inspiration, the French-American sociologist René Girard. An (excellent) article in Wired expands the circle of Thiel’s known intellectual influences and dialogue partners, making it clear that, whatever Thiel is thinking or doing regarding the Antichrist, it is neither a new nor a superficial fascination. To my knowledge, however, no mainstream media sources have precisely explained a burning question here: From whence does all this come? Where did this preoccupation begin? Why the Antichrist?

I propose that the answer to this question does indeed hail back to Girard, specifically to one book of the Girardian oeuvre. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, published in French in 1999 and in English in 2001, is the most explicitly theological of Girard’s works; its core thesis is that the scapegoating mechanism so essential to the dissipation of mimetic crisis (social violence stemming from the mutually generative yet competitive character of human desire) has been nullified and rendered ineffective by the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. Girard does, however, dedicate two late chapters of this slim volume to the question that appears to have directed Thiel’s focus to the Antichrist.

As the first of the chapters in question, entitled “The Modern Concern for Victims,” put it: “our world did not invent compassion… but it has universalized it.” Girard highlights how uncharacteristic in the historical context of human thought and behavior concern for victims has been; he writes:

The China of the Mandarins, the Japan of the samurai, the Hindus, the pre-Columbian societies, Athens, republican or imperial Rome—none of these worried in the least little bit about victims, whom they sacrificed without number to their gods, to the honor of the homeland, to the ambition of conquerors, small or great.

Girard readily acknowledges that this concern, however amply evident in the Gospels, was often found in historical Christendom more in the breach than in the observance, noting by way of example how French humanism “developed in opposition… to the Christianity of the prerevolutionary regime, which was accused of complicity with those in power, and quite rightly so,” yet goes on nonetheless to observe that “humanism and humanitarianism develop first on  Christian soil.” Noting, however, that “the victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors,” Girard proposes this rather acid summary of secular humanitarian victimology:

From now on we have our antisacrificial rituals of victimization…. First of all we lament the victims we admit to making or allowing to be made. Then we lament the hypocrisy of our lamentation, and finally we lament Christianity, the indispensable scapegoat, for there is no ritual without a victim, and in our day Christianity is always it, the scapegoat of last resort.

In the following chapter, entitled “The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage,” Girard proposes the properly Nietzschean branch of this heritage as the last direct challenge to the concern for victims. He notes the following passage, from The Will to Power:

Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment. Destruction, the will to annihilation… [S]uffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—counts as an objection to this life, as a formula to its condemnation.

Girard sees this mindset culminating in Nazism, with its self-refuting nihilism, brutality, and rapid spiral of collapse; this, he contends, constitutes and embodies humanity’s final rejection of contempt for victims and open glorification of victimizers. This leaves in place what Girard sees as the other branch of the Nietzschean heritage, which he variously calls victimology or, more saliently, ultra-Christianity:

What only the great insight of a Nietzsche could formerly perceive, now even a child can perceive. The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. The media themselves notice this and make fun of “victimology,” which doesn’t keep them from exploiting it. The fact that our world has become solidly anti-Christian, at least among its elites, does not prevent the concern for victims from flourishing—just the opposite.

The majestic inauguration of the ‘post-Christian era’ is a joke. We are living through a caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.

It is in his discussion of this “ultra-Christianity” that Girard finally invokes the figure of the Antichrist:

In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.

In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world, Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him. This imitation by the usurper has long been present in the Christianized world, but it has increased enormously in our time. The New Testament evokes this process in the language of the “Antichrist.” To understand this title, we should de-dramatize it, for it expresses something banal and prosaic.

The Antichrist boasts of bringing human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver.[1] Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. 

Unlike Thiel, Girard is employing this Biblical language metaphorically; like Thiel, however, he is identifying this spirit of the Antichrist with proclamations of peace and security, and with the moral progress and development that modernity interprets as a natural consequence of civilization – progress and development that Christianity proclaimed to an incredulous world as a character of a creation redeemed by the death and resurrection of the Son of God and groaning for the victory of the Holy Spirit in its midst; progress and development that would have been – and indeed were – nonsensical to classical and primal cultures, who revered their ancestors and ancients not only as forebears, but as superior to their descendants in every respect.

Girard’s home concept of mimetic rivalry leads him to apprehend the modern concern for victims, and indeed the whole secularist project, as a mimetic rival to Christianity. Taken in this way, secular modernity can be seen as a hostile takeover of the Christian narrative, and therefrom as a harbinger of the Antichrist. On this basis, Thiel’s claims about the Antichrist are unsurprising – though Thiel, more the biblical literalist than Girard, as well as emphasizing the expectation of a literal, personal Antichrist figure, reformulates the argument through a conjugation (some might say conflation) of passages from First and Second Thessalonians. Thiel’s scapegoats extend beyond Christianity to technological development and radical libertarian economics, and his concerns do not precisely correspond with those voiced by Girard; nonetheless, the particular flavor of Antichrist Thiel postulates is fully present in that passage from Girard.

Nor can it well be denied that the products of this turn cited by Girard – anti-Christian animus[2], abortion, euthanasia, “sexual undifferentiation,” neo-gladiatorial entertainments, and rampant consumerism – have become widespread to varying degrees. Yet Girard himself failed to see – or perhaps did not live to see, as he died in 2015 – a deeper cut of the Antichrist he identified. An adjacent yet critically different perspective sets us on our way toward seeing this deeper cut more clearly.

In his 2019 book, Dominion, British historian Tom Holland presented a thesis unmistakably similar to what Girard identified in the last chapters of I See Satan Fall Like Lightning – with a highly significant caveat. For Holland, contemporary secularism is to Christianity less a rival than a covert variant:

The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed…. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context.[3]

In the last pages of Dominion, Holland trenchantly notes:

The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.

Holland unproblematically accepts secular humanism as a credit to Christianity. Thiel is radically suspicious; in his most recent piece, he criticizes, with escalating degrees of severity, Pope Leo, his predecessor Pope Francis, and the late Swiss priest and social thinker Hans Küng, with particular opprobrium for Küng’s Weltethik.

It is worth noting that fervent religious believers tend to be prominent among the few who reject Holland’s comparison between Nazism and Marxist-Leninism, insisting (at least nominally) on counting one to one, death for death; through a Girardian lens, it is easy to extrapolate a Marxist-Leninist vs. Christian mimetic rivalry that could lead some Christians to brush off Fascism as comparatively irrelevant – or even to become intrigued with it as a potential ally. This points to a pitfall of corruption opening up at the feet of just such believers, and to the particular character of the Antichrist to deceive even the elect (Mt. 24, 24) – and this is where we meet the deeper cut cited above.

For Girard, “the attempt by Nietzsche and Hitler to make humankind forget the concern for victims has ended in a failure that seems definitive, at least for the moment.” – with his anxieties refocused accordingly on ultra-Christianity as moral counterfeit. Yet what better to deceive the elect than an antichrist that is, at least in name, Christianity itself? What could be a more diabolical Satanic scenario than to import the cruelty of the arena, the self-glorification of the powerful, the rejection of human frailty and human fraternity, and all the myriad evils associated with contempt for victims into the very midst of the faithful, under the name of Christianity?—and that not only among the kings, princes, and prelates who have ever been the targets of such temptations, but right down to the poorest, most ignorant, deprived and downtrodden of believers?

To hear Christians, even Catholics, and especially a certain type of American Christian or Catholic, holding forth on the danger of “toxic empathy,” calling for “a fighter” to defend Christian values, suggesting that a “bad Christian” or even a non-Christian should make for a better defender of the faith than a believer bearing the awkward burden of a Christian conscience – such citizens may be able to cite the Good Book chapter and verse, but they have clearly lost the plot. If the one you follow tells you to hate your enemies, preemptively strike down those who hate you, curse in advance those inclined to curse you, and pray vengeance upon those who mistreat you, then you may call yourself anything you wish, but it will not change who you are. And you may cry “lord” to the one you follow all you wish, but you should not dare call that one by the Name above all Names. For Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the Antichrist was a cartoonishly evil Romanian supervillain named Nicolae Carpathia; for Monsignor R. H. Benson in his 1907 science fiction apocalypse Lord of the World, the Antichrist was an American (!) named Julian Felsenburgh – but by the very name Antichrist, we can see that a real-life Antichrist would want: most of all, to usurp unto himself the name, role, and powers of the Son of God, and the name he would be most eager to claim for himself is that of Jesus Christ.

The policy and the theology meet vividly in the world that we know today. Anglican priest Mark Clavier has written incisively of what he calls “post-Christian Christianity,” which he explicitly poses as the shadow twin of the Christian-rooted secularism described by Tom Holland:

Post-Christian Christianity moves in the opposite direction. It’s less concerned with Christian beliefs and doctrines than with the signs by which it is recognized. It understands the power of symbols and slogans in a crowded public square, and so it reaches for Christian language and imagery as instruments….

Unmoored from its historical claims, Christianity becomes something like a floating signifier — a label that still carries emotional and cultural force but no longer points to anything shared or settled. This isn’t the familiar pattern of denominational disagreement, where Christians differ yet remain accountable to a common inheritance. It’s more liquid than that, and more unstable.

In contrast to civic religion, the role of post-Christian Christianity is not to unify, but to signify. Clavier notes the (presumably cynical) move of Constantine to support the Church in building a hierarchy, a theology, and a governance structure as alternative supports for the Empire – flying buttresses on the throne room, to turn a phrase. He contrasts this sharply to the current post-Christian Christian move, which he identifies more with the attempt of Simon Magus to purchase miraculous power from the Apostles.

While I see his point, I would rather have compared the present move to the narrative I once heard from a Franciscan of an organized crime figure who had workmen remove from a church a marble baptismal font he fancied and install it in his garden as a birdbath – while leaving behind in exchange a wooden baptistry on wheels, to which he had the supreme effrontery to affix a brass plaque identifying himself as the donor.

The correspondences are remarkable. The Christian heritage that post-Christian Christianity is trying to appropriate is ancient, sacred, and irreplaceable. The purposes of those responsible for its appropriation are ignoble; even when not inherently objectionable per se, they are unworthy of the sacred treasure that they abuse. The means employed are at once devious and completely straightforward, and the dross they leave behind is transient, unstable, and perishable.

The accidents of religion have been memefied, their meaning vacated, sucked hollow like an egg. The Italian Deputy Prime Minister brandishes rosaries and crucifixes on the floors of his Parliament as gestures, not of piety, but of identity; the United States Secretary of Defense cites as inspirational a non-existent Scripture verse cribbed from an ultra-violent popular entertainment; whatever the motives for the installation of the Ten Commandments on public property in American states, it is hard to imagine that reading them, or having them be read, is prominent among them. These are not objects of prayer or religious formation, nor even symbols and tokens of faith; indeed, they are becoming little more than totems or fetishes, drained of intrinsic meaning.

…and this is how we lose our faith. Almost four hundred years ago, St. Vincent de Paul wrote of how Christ’s promise that his Church would endure until the end of time did not entail any assurance that the Church would so endure in Europe. If European (or rather Eurocentric) Christianity chooses to be more about identity than about faith, it is the faith that will be lost.

In fairness, I should point out that there is no evidence (despite some of the political figures and positions he has supported) that Peter Thiel is himself such a post-Christian Christian. However, the traps that lie before us are there, whether or not Mr. Thiel has set them, or has even seen them himself. Perhaps we would do well neither to scoff at Peter Thiel’s concerns nor to follow his prescriptions; perhaps what we need to do is to examine the mechanism again, and see what is being revealed in the signs of the times.

Image: Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, Wikimedia Commons 

[1] As Pope Benedict notes (Jesus of Nazareth I, 42-43), Christ never offered peace and tolerance as gift, nor (in contrast to Soloviev’s Antichrist), any “worship of well-being and rational planning.” Thiel and Wolfe likewise note the falsity of such a message and likewise quote Soloviev; they, however, offer in contrast neither God-with-us nor the voluntary acceptance of suffering implicit in the Cross, but (however darkly and implicitly) a necessary and perhaps final battle for “Judeo-Western” values. As for peace and tolerance (for which read: the primacy of conscience and respect for conscience in others), nothing is promised from without; they arise from within, through suffering, sacrifice, and the practice of charity.

[2] It is, however, well worth considering how much of the anti-Christian animus in the secular world has been generated, not by mimetic rivalry over the concern for victims between Christians and seculars, but by common-garden animus between seculars who see Christians (through the lens of historical Christendom) as victimizers, and Christians (of a particular sort) who see seculars (and, often, other Christians) as sentimental, “woke,” and unwilling to face what a prominent non-Christian apologist of this world view recently described as “the iron laws of the world.”

[3] Consider how, in Turkey, the secularism of the Komiteciler and of Atatürk led, on the one hand, to a Westernization of dress, orthography, etc., and on the other to ruthless ethnic cleansing of minorities – and especially religious minorities.