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When Silicon Valley Started Sounding like a ’70s Prophecy Conference
When a Silicon Valley billionaire starts hosting sold-out lectures on the antichrist, you know we’ve entered strange times. But for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, it’s not just strange; it’s strangely familiar.
I was born in 1969, which means I grew up checking grocery store barcodes for hidden 666s, watching A Thief in the Night movies that gave me nightmares about guillotines, and genuinely wondering if I’d graduate high school before the rapture. My church had prophecy charts mapping Soviet troop movements to Ezekiel 38. At my friends’ homes, end-times paperbacks sat on coffee tables next to Reader’s Digest.
By the time I hit adulthood in the ’90s, I thought I was safe. The Soviet “Magog” hadn’t invaded Israel. The prophecy charts were quietly taken down. The Age of Apocalyptic Certainty seemed safely behind us.
Yet here in 2025, I’m experiencing an uncanny sense of déjà vu. History may not repeat itself exactly, but as Mark Twain allegedly quipped, it certainly rhymes. The prophets have changed—from evangelical bestsellers to tech billionaires—but the song remains hauntingly familiar.
Billionaire Prophet and the Evangelical Bestseller
Perhaps nothing captures this historical rhyme more perfectly than the odd spectacle of Peter Thiel—Silicon Valley billionaire and influential right-wing thinker—hosting private lectures in San Francisco about the antichrist.
Since 2023, Thiel has been gathering tech elites to philosophize about who the antichrist could be and warning of a “possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.” It’s like Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic bestseller crossed the Bay Bridge and got a Silicon Valley makeover.
For those unfamiliar with Lindsey, his 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sold more than 35 million copies and became the best-selling nonfiction book of that entire decade. It shifted apocalyptic speculation to the forefront of evangelical attention for almost 20 years. The book was so influential that it spawned a 1978 film narrated by Orson Welles—yes, the director of Citizen Kane—which brought Lindsey’s dispensationalist vision to an even wider audience.
Lindsey taught millions to “read the news” as the fulfillment of prophecy, popularizing a framework that has continued to today. Armed only with the book of Revelation and a copy of The New York Times, Lindsey convinced many people that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 started a prophetic countdown that would end with Christ’s return, likely sometime in the late 1980s.
The prophets have changed—from evangelical bestsellers to tech billionaires—but the song remains hauntingly familiar.
That prediction didn’t age well.
Yet Thiel’s lectures eerily echo Lindsey’s themes. Both men are obsessed with the antichrist and warn of a coming one-world totalitarian system. Both interpret current events through a news-centered, apocalyptic lens. The key difference is that Lindsey wrote from a populist evangelical perspective for church folks while Thiel approaches it philosophically for the tech elite who, in his telling, may themselves be building the infrastructure of the end times.
Thiel (who calls himself a “small-o orthodox Christian”) has speculated that the antichrist could be the United States itself, or perhaps a charismatic global activist like Greta Thunberg. Drawing on biblical prophecy and literature, he describes the antichrist as an “evil king or tyrant who appears in the end times” and will likely use crises to seize power. Most surprising, coming from such a prominent funder of tech companies, is his conclusion that the antichrist will come to power by “talking constantly about Armageddon, about rumors of wars . . . and scaring you into giving him control over science and technology.”
He even invokes Daniel 12:4—the prophecy that “many shall run to and fro”—as a warning about end-times globalization and the threat of a global technocratic empire. Lindsey made nearly identical arguments about computerization and international agencies in the 1970s.
Thiel isn’t alone in this apocalyptic turn among tech elites. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has stated that the worst-case outcome for advanced AI is “lights out for all of us”—a phrase that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Left Behind novel. And Elon Musk warned as early as 2014, “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. . . . You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like . . . yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.”
Musk, the richest human in the world, is using explicitly spiritual language—demons, pentagrams, holy water—to describe technological risk. This almost sounds like dialogue from Frank Peretti’s spiritual warfare novels. For Christians concerned about humans “playing God” with technology, Musk’s warning is a secular confirmation of their instinct that some knowledge, if misused, could unleash hellish consequences.
What’s happening here is a profound role reversal. Where Lindsey gave the 1970s its popular prophetic framework, contemporary tech elites now supply their own secular-religious apocalypse, often borrowing biblical imagery and eschatological themes. The crucial difference is credibility and platform. When a pastor in 1975 warned about the end times, secular culture could dismiss it as religious eccentricity. When billionaires who literally build the future warn about civilization-ending threats, the mainstream listens.
Silicon Valley was supposed to be the realm of techno-optimism, where every problem has a technological solution and progress is inevitable. Instead, the people with the deepest knowledge of what’s coming are the most apocalyptic.
Countdown-Clock Psychology
Both eras also share the theme that we’re operating on a divine or civilizational timer that’s rapidly running down and will likely end in our lifetimes.
Lindsey popularized what we might call “generational deadline thinking.” He started his countdown with Israel’s rebirth in 1948 and suggested that in about a generation or two (“within forty years or so”) all prophetic events could unfold. This created a sense of urgency in the many evangelical churches that were convinced history had entered its terminal phase.
Today’s AI discourse runs on remarkably similar countdown psychology, just with different terminology. Instead of “generation” and “rapture,” we have “AGI” (artificial general intelligence), “superintelligence,” and “compute scaling” as tipping points. The vocabulary is secular, but the urgency is identical.
Take, for example, the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, which gathered governments and technology labs to warn about “frontier AI” risks. Major nations pledged international coordination on AI safety. Similarly, the Future of Life Institute issued an open letter urging a pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, signed by thousands of AI researchers and tech leaders.
The rhetoric of “existential risk,” “human extinction,” “alignment problem,” and “point of no return” is remarkably apocalyptic. These are secular terms for what amount to eschatological concerns. Both countdown clocks share the crucial feature of moralizing urgency through timelines.
Lindsey’s prophecy charts told believers exactly where we were on God’s schedule; AI capability curves tell us exactly how close we are to transformative—or catastrophic—change. Whether you’re a 1975 evangelical watching Soviet influence in the Middle East or a 2025 AI safety researcher watching transformer scaling laws, you’re living with the same existential weight. You have the sense that you’re witnessing the final act of human history.
From Prophecy to Engineering
But there’s a crucial way in which our era diverges from the 1970s: The apocalyptic warnings about technology aren’t coming primarily from prophecy teachers anymore; they’re coming from the people building the technology.
When I was a kid, evangelicals worried about the “Beast computer”—a supposed supercomputer in Brussels that would enable the antichrist’s one-world government. The story was complete fiction (literally, since it originated from a “prophetic novel” and was made into a low-budget film), but it spread like wildfire because it tapped into genuine anxieties about mainframe computers, universal product codes, and post-WWII European politics.
The people with the deepest knowledge of what’s coming are the most apocalyptic.
Lindsey himself fed these theories, writing about computers and punch-card systems as tools an antichrist could use to control the world’s economy. He predicted a cashless society where a “mark” would be required for all transactions.
The Beast-computer myth now seems quaint. But it reveals how the 1970s zeitgeist viewed technology as the potential infrastructure of prophesied totalitarian control. Every innovation was scrutinized for how it might enable Revelation 13.
Today, the theme is similar and contains a nearly unprecedented difference: The AI safety movement represents engineers and researchers warning that their own creations could destroy civilization. This isn’t pastors interpreting computers through Revelation. This is the equivalent of the inventors of the Beast computer warning that yes, actually, it might indeed enslave humanity.
When Eliezer Yudkowsky calls for shutting down large AI training runs—arguing we should be willing to risk international conflict to prevent AGI development—he’s using language as absolutist as any end-times preacher. When the Future of Life Institute’s open letter warns about “profound risks to society and humanity,” it’s invoking ultimate stakes.
The key difference is technical specificity. Where Beast-computer myths were vague about how the system would work, AI alignment concerns are precise: What happens when optimization systems become more intelligent than humans? How do we ensure AI systems remain controllable as they scale? What prevents an advanced AI from pursuing goals catastrophically misaligned with human values?
These aren’t conspiracy theories. They’re engineering problems that might have apocalyptic implications.
And here we see a parallel that should concern Christians. In both eras, technology becomes the imagined mechanism of civilization’s judgment. Both narratives share a common thread of humans building systems we cannot control, systems that will ultimately control us. One framework is theological, while the other is computational. But both ask the same question: What happens when our tools become our masters?
What This Reveals About Our Moment
For Christians, this creates both challenge and opportunity.
The challenge is to avoid two opposite errors. We can’t simply dismiss eschatology itself. Scripture is full of teaching about Christ’s return, resurrection, final judgment, and the new creation (1 Thess. 4:13-18; Rev. 21-22). All of these doctrines are foundational to Christian hope. My concern isn’t with Christians who carefully study what the Bible actually says about the last things, but with the assumption that we can turn the daily headlines into a prophetic countdown clock. Similarly, we can’t simply baptize Silicon Valley’s apocalyptic warnings into our own end-times speculations, as if they’re confirming biblical prophecy in some straightforward way.
We also can’t dismiss these warnings as mere secular anxiety, because they come from people with genuine expertise about what’s technologically possible. We also can’t dismiss these warnings as mere secular anxiety, because they come from people with genuine expertise about what’s technologically possible. When the people actually writing the code are worried, that’s different from someone on YouTube connecting dots between barcodes and the mark of the Beast (Rev. 13:15-18).
The opportunity is for thoughtful Christian engagement with technology’s trajectory. When Musk warns about “summoning demons,” we can explain what demonic evil actually is—and why human rebellion against God is the deeper problem beneath technological risks. When AI researchers worry about alignment, we can point to the more fundamental misalignment: humans who suppress the truth about God and worship the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:18, 25).
This isn’t a call for a lazy Jesus juke. The gospel really is the answer, for it speaks directly to the fears driving both ’70s-style prophecy panic and 2025-style AI doom. The problem isn’t ultimately about computers or algorithms. It’s about human hearts. We’re afraid of our tools because we’re afraid of ourselves. We know, even if we don’t admit it, that humans given godlike power will use it in ungodly ways.
And that’s why Christ came. Not to save us from computers or AI but to save us from ourselves. He came to reconcile rebels to God and to transform hearts (2 Cor. 5:18). He came to give us hope, not in controlling our technology but in being controlled by the Spirit.
Some Things Never Change
Here’s what I’ve learned from watching one apocalypse prediction fade into the next. The end might come tomorrow. Or it might not come for a thousand years. We genuinely don’t know. What we do know is that Christ is Lord, whether AGI emerges next year or never, whether Thiel’s lectures comes to pass or become the next generation’s embarrassing relic.
Christ is Lord, whether Thiel’s lectures prove prophetic or become the next generation’s embarrassing relic.
What matters is that our calling as Christians hasn’t changed. We’re to love our neighbors, share the gospel, and build for the long haul while remaining ready for the short one. It’s an impossible balance, which is perhaps why every generation gets it wrong in different ways. My parents’ generation retreated from culture in anticipation of the rapture. I wonder what future Christians will say about how my generation navigated AI and cultural chaos.
But here’s what I wish someone had told me in 1979, as a 10-year-old looking at prophecy charts: God is sovereign over every technology, every empire, every age. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Beast computer was fiction. And whether artificial intelligence becomes humanity’s greatest achievement or its final crisis, our ultimate hope is currently seated on a throne in heaven (Col. 3:1–4).
That’s neither optimism or pessimism, just a recognition of reality. After watching enough doomsday predictions fade and enough cultural ground shift beneath my feet, I’ve learned there’s only one sure foundation: Jesus Christ really is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8).
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