Mother Jones
Tech Billionaires Want Christians to Believe in AI
Two years ago, we devoted an entire issue to the rise of the American oligarchy. Since then, our oligarchic system has become more entrenched and pervasive, revolving around a small crew of tech titans whose quest for wealth and power—in all of its forms—is destabilizing our democracy and reshaping our society. In the May + June 2026 issue, we investigate our new AI overlords and the world they are striving to create, whether we like it or not. Read the rest of the package here.
In early January, a short essay by a little-known AI entrepreneur turned internet philosopher named Will Manidis went viral on X. The post was mostly an attempt to explain why Boston, where Manidis lived before relocating to New York a few years ago, had failed as a tech hub. He pointed to a suite of reasons for the slow decline of the city’s once-crackling biotech scene, mainly the usual culprits of overregulation and overtaxation. But at the core of Manidis’ argument was something much deeper: The heart of the problem was the growing consensus among Boston’s stodgy elites that there was something unsettling and possibly even dangerous about the rapid pace of technological development. That mounting uneasiness about tech—and especially artificial intelligence—lay beneath the decisions that sealed the fate of Boston’s tech scene.
“The average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs, and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling, and all other manner of sin,” he writes. “If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. And we’ll be stuck wondering where it all went.”
Manidis, who describes himself as a Christian, writes about religious matters on X and his Substack. When I called to talk with him about this idea of tech as a “moral imperative,” he used a theological metaphor: “The mix of oligarchs and tech people and tech money and tech politics and the tech right,” he told me, “they’ve just been unable to communicate a coherent apologetic.”
His term—apologetic—refers to the project of defending the mysteries of faith to nonbelievers. The Christian tradition of apologetics is rich. Its brightest lights include St. Paul, Thomas Aquinas, and C.S. Lewis—all of whom made the case for their faith not by biblical invocation or surrender to the divine, but rather through engagement, rational arguments, and evidence. Manidis believes AI needs those kinds of defenders, because the public appears to be losing faith in it.
Last summer, right-wing luminaries converged at the annual National Conservatism Conference, a group that has emerged as a strong influence on the Trump administration’s policy decisions. The speaker lineup included some of MAGA’s most trusted interlocutors—for example, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, and White House budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. But lesser-known conservative thinkers appeared as well.
University of New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey Miller, for instance, confronted Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar during a heated exchange reported by The Verge. The AI industry, Miller told Sankar, is “globalist, secular, liberal, feminized transhumanists. They explicitly want mass unemployment, they plan for UBI-based communism, and they view the human species as a biological ‘bootloader,’ as they say, for artificial superintelligence.”
Many aspects of Miller’s position are extreme, but his discomfort with AI is broadly shared. A Pew Research Center survey last November found that more than half of Americans say they are “more concerned than excited” about the technology, up from 37 percent in 2021, the year before ChatGPT launched. Historically, Republicans share this opinion slightly more than Democrats, but Manidis doesn’t think the messengers of the tech world are doing AI any favors bolstering support on either end of the political spectrum. For example, that one time in 2015 when Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, famously opined that AI “will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
“What becomes incredibly useful for these people to do is to present their products as the answer to the meaning of life.”
“Why?” Manidis lamented to me on the phone. “Why would you say that? Like, come on, buddy.”
As if in response to Altman’s overblown rhetoric, some Silicon Valley oligarchs are attempting to run interference between two emerging camps in the religious right: AI’s cheerleaders on one side and its skeptics on the other. The likes of Palantir’s Peter Thiel and other religious techies such as Andreessen Horowitz’s Katherine Boyle and Anduril’s Trae Stephens are spearheading an effort to create the “apologetic” that Manidis called for. Bolstered by their own Christian zealotry, they argue that far from being the demonic force described by Miller, technology is more comparable to a savior—even a Christlike messiah. Not only are Christians called to embrace technology, but they have an obligation to do so, because progress itself is a moral good.
Culturally speaking, these tech elites are coded very differently from charismatic Holy Rollers who have had a long tradition of promising their followers that adherence to Christian faith and practices will yield material wealth. But essentially, they are offering a similar, though slightly inverted proposition: Tech can make you rich and a good Christian. Call it the prosperity gospel of technology. Much in the way they have shaped culture with social media algorithms, tech evangelists now are attempting to normalize the use and acceptance of AI by wrapping it in a spiritual message. They also have explicit policy goals, and the Trump administration appears to be heeding their call, with new federal efforts aimed at unshackling AI from safety regulations.
Greg Epstein is a humanist chaplain at Harvard University and MIT who has spent the last two decades building ethical communities for nonreligious people and, more recently, writing about the similarities between Silicon Valley and faith groups. In 2024, he published the book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Epstein laments that while many have written about the cultlike aspects of the tech world, few have examined the motivations that lie behind making it that way. “What becomes incredibly useful for these people to do is to present their products as the answer to the meaning of life,” Epstein told me.
In Silicon Valley’s embrace of Christianity, he sees a marriage of convenience: “They’re trying to imbue wealth with meaning,” he said. “But they’re also trying to imbue a certain kind of meaning with wealth.” In other words, Christianity gets an elite, luxury-set rebrand, and in return, the tech titans get to sanctify their vast fortunes.
Nicolás Ortega/”Water Glass And Jug,” Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin/Web Gallery of Art
If one were to name a spokesperson for the anti-AI right, it would be hard to imagine someone more perfectly suited for the role than British writer Paul Kingsnorth. In his 2025 book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Kingsnorth, an erstwhile lefty environmental activist turned Orthodox Christian crusader, makes the case that technology, especially AI, is a semi-sentient being with its own anti-human, anti-Christian agenda. In prose so entertaining that you hardly notice how frantic and conspiratorial it all is, Kingsnorth conjures an ominous vision that implicates “the Machine”—or technology—in all manner of the political right’s favorite bêtes noires. He describes “progressive leftism and the Machine” as a “usefully snug fit” because they are both “suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion.” Both progressive leftism and the Machine, he concludes, “are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.”
For example, Kingsnorth considers this technology demon to be the true culprit behind “mass gender confusion.” Moreover, the struggle for transgender acceptance is actually a step on the path toward permanently abandoning our bodies. “A young generation of hyper-urbanized, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture,” he writes, “is being led toward the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome.” Young people learn that the “body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, ‘cyberconsciousness software,’ and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.”
Those ominous predictions apparently struck a chord: Kingsnorth’s book was a New York Times bestseller and widely reviewed, especially among Christian critics. In Christianity Today, Justin Ariel Bailey was rhapsodic, calling the work “a trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology’s promise of power and autonomy.”
To say that Silicon Valley’s Christian power players see things differently is an understatement—and they’re working hard to spread the countervailing message of technology’s godly promise. Leading this charge is Boyle, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who is an ally of Vice President JD Vance. Boyle, who shares thoughts about her Catholic faith openly on social media, runs a fund called American Dynamism, which, its website says, aims to back tech companies—in aerospace, defense, education, public safety, and other sectors—whose success “supports the flourishing of all Americans.” For her, the efforts to set guardrails around AI are nefarious, camouflaged, as she co-wrote with her colleague Martin Casado in a 2024 Wall Street Journal op-ed, as efforts “to promote safety.” In fact, they insisted, “We believe the true purpose is to suppress open-source innovation and deter competitive startups.”
Boyle, an ex–Washington Post journalist whose former colleagues recall her as pleasant, a bit distant, and always impeccably dressed, argues that tech not only is not evil, but also perfectly embodies the family-first values of many Christians. In a keynote address (PDF) at the American Enterprise Institute last year, she argued for a coming together between the tech sector and the American family so they could become allies against an overzealous government. “Much has been written about this nascent alliance between the tech right, or the so-called tech right, and this administration, and how weird it is for the transhumanists of Silicon Valley to find common ground with a MAHA mother in Missouri,” she said. “Except that they have identified a common evil. They know that the gravest threat to their businesses, their industry, their family’s health, and their freedom is a censorious and authoritarian state.”
Boyle highlighted the many ways in which technology could be a boon for families. Mothers could spend more time at home with their children through tech-enabled remote work. Tech could also make both parents “more entrepreneurial” by allowing them to start businesses on platforms like Etsy. “This means a mother can now earn income while her child naps from the school parking lot,” she said. AI could be harnessed “to build infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable tutors for every child in this country.”
But the biggest tech win of all for families, Boyle said, was that it could “help reshape the culture” to make motherhood high status. She continued: “Meme it, and we will be it,” concluding, “a single influencer on Instagram can have a greater effect on behavior than the smartest tax policies.”
One of Boyle’s most successful projects appears to support that hypothesis. Before she joined Andreessen Horowitz, Boyle was with another venture firm, General Catalyst. There, she invested in Hallow, which, with 24 million downloads across 150 countries, claims to be the world’s most popular prayer app. There is a free version that includes features such as chats with Magisterium, “an AI-powered tool designed to provide answers based on the teachings of the Catholic Church.” But for $69.99 a year, users can “choose from 10,000+ sessions, 5-60 minute lengths, 100+ guides, and 1,000s of music options to lead you deeper into relationship with Christ,” and have access to celebrity spokespeople (“pray a rosary with Mark Wahlberg”). Boyle sees Hallow’s success as evidence that people are hungry for religion. “What I think Hallow is showing is…this desperate consumer need that is manifesting itself,” she told Tablet magazine in 2021. But it also provides a wholesome experience for Christian users, who are deepening their relationship not only with God, but also with technology. (When I reached out to Hallow for comment, I received an email back from Hallow’s AI agent, promising a real person would get back to me. They never did. Boyle also did not respond to a request for comment.)
Boyle is not the only captain of Silicon Valley industry attempting to give AI’s reputation a Christian-friendly makeover. Trae Stephens, the billionaire in charge of the autonomous weapons company Anduril, has been a vocal proponent of tech apologetics in San Francisco. A leader at the nondenominational Epic Church in San Francisco, Stephens delivered a lecture in 2024 titled “God and Technology,” in which he argued that humans, like God, are creators and that “what our soul deeply longs for is progress in building a better future.” He assured listeners that if they chose “good quests” rather than empty or destructive ones, they would be fulfilling God’s plan. (Stephens did not respond when I reached out to him for comment.)
Stephens invoked a historical precedent to make his point. Some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb, “were tormented by what they were doing,” he said. “And you could make a really rational argument in either direction. Was it a good thing to do? Was it a bad thing to do?” Stephens didn’t give any hint as to which he believed, though his professional life suggests the former.
His career and immense fortune were created by harnessing the power of AI to build “smart battlefields”—think of Anduril as the Waymo of drones and bombs. In a 2024 Wired interview, for example, Stephens spoke of “a classification of drones called loiter munitions, which are aircraft that search for targets and then have the ability to go kinetic on those targets, kind of as a kamikaze.” Since 2019, Anduril has been awarded more than $1.8 billion in government contracts.
As an answer to the classic “What would Jesus do?” question, “start robot wars” would be an unconventional response, to put it mildly. And yet, Stephens appears to endorse surrendering to tech. As he put it in his Wired interview, “The call that I have been trying to make to the tech community is that we have a moral obligation to do things to benefit humanity, to draw us closer to God’s plan for his people.”
“It’s almost as if [other AI companies] kind of think they’re creating God or something.” —Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
To wit: In 2024, his wife, health care tech executive Michelle Stephens, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective, a Bay Area group for “thinkers, builders, artists, and leaders who are wrestling with what it means to live with purpose and conviction.” The name is a reference to a New Testament book that focuses on Christian apologetics and is also, conveniently, an acronym: Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. Garry Tan, the Christian president and CEO of tech startup incubator Y Combinator, has hosted ACTS 17 events at his home—which used to be a church—and Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO, also a Christian, has been a speaker.
Last year, ACTS 17 sponsored a series of four lectures by PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who is Trae Stephens’ former boss, JD Vance’s mentor, Gawker’s murderer, and President Donald Trump’s megadonor. His subject? The Antichrist.
The event was private, with tickets reportedly costing $200, but transcripts were leaked to reporters. While Kingsnorth argues in his book that technology itself is the devil incarnate causing a one-world government, Thiel appears to believe the exact opposite: Anything preventing unbridled technological development—from overbearing government regulation to climate activist Greta Thunberg—is the Antichrist. “In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.” AI’s detractors, he reportedly claimed, were part of a plot to install a global government. “There are a lot of rational reasons I can give why the one-world state’s a bad idea,” he said. “But I think if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough. You will never really resist.”
Of course, exceedingly wealthy Silicon Valley dreamers with weird ideas are nothing new. (Juicero, anyone?) But for most Americans, these fever dreams may be a little too weird, says tech journalist Gil Durán, host of the Nerd Reich podcast and author of a forthcoming book by the same name. “If you read anything by Michelle [Stephens] or by Katherine Boyle—these things are pretty far out there,” he told me. He gave the example of Boyle’s American Enterprise Institute keynote in which she argued that the state was the enemy of the family. “That is an extremely bizarre thing for her to say, especially since American Dynamism is all about partnering with an authoritarian government,” he added in an email, in reference to the Trump administration. They have “no sense of calibrating for a mass audience,” he told me, “so as long as those are the people in charge of it, I’d say that chances are they’re going to fail.”
Still, there is some indication that Christian tech apologetics are working their way into the highest realms of political influence. Vice President Vance, in a sprawling 2020 essay titled “How I Joined the Resistance,” published in the Catholic publication The Lamp, chronicled his conversion to Catholicism. In 2011, Vance writes, he attended a lecture by Thiel that he describes as “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School.” In the talk, Thiel, who would later become Vance’s employer and then close friend, expressed frustration with the slow pace of technological progress. He argued that professional striving was a fundamentally empty quest for prestige and status and posited that he saw “these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected,” Vance writes. “If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.”
That notion of endless empty striving is what Thiel’s Stanford professor, the late French Catholic academic René Girard, called “mimetic desire.” This phenomenon causes immense human anguish—and, according to Thiel, technological innovation can deliver us from it, and hence from suffering.
Vance, who does not seem to have ceased striving, now describes technology as a net good not only for American economic prosperity, but also for the human condition. In a speech at Boyle’s 2025 American Dynamism Summit, Vance quoted Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical, Laborem exercens. Focusing on work and the individual, the pope made two fundamental points: Labor should be a greater priority than capital, and individuals should be more important than things. These decades-old teachings received an update from Vance, who factored in technology and AI. “In a healthy economy, technology should be something that enhances rather than supplants the value of labor, and I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs rather than augmenting so many of the things that we do,” he said. “Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers.”
Vance, whose views have been publicly criticized by both the current pope and the previous one, was obviously putting his own spin on the teachings—and he didn’t mention the decidedly un-Christlike fact that replacing workers with robots would further line the pockets of tech oligarchs. Nevertheless, his interpretation that AI promotes human dignity appears to be spreading. Last July, the Trump administration released “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” The report promises that AI will “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing” and will “increase the standard of living for all Americans.”
This rhetoric, of course, is precisely what Kingsnorth considers to be most dangerous: a hubristic quest to replace God with progress—and maybe even to become gods willing robots into sentient beings. “We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it,” he writes in Against the Machine. “This attempt is the story of modernity; the Machine is what we have created to fulfill it.”
But Kingsnorth appears to be shouting into a headwind of mimetic desire. In the past two years, as the most recent Pew poll shows, conservatives have become less skeptical of AI. In 2023, 59 percent said they were “more concerned than excited” about AI, but by late 2025, that number had fallen to 50 percent. Manidis, it seems, may not have to worry about the Boston scenario repeating itself after all.
Read more of our coverage of the roots and rise of the American oligarchy.