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(RNS) — If you grew up Pentecostal or evangelical Christian — as I did — you probably remember the prophecy sermons and apocalyptic charts about the Last Days. Preachers warned about the Great Tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist and the “mark of the Beast.” In the 1970s and ’80s, movies, most memorably “A Thief in the Night” and the Left Behind series, dramatized wars, plagues, secret police and global control. Terrifying as they were, such depictions also offered a strange comfort: the idea that the faithful few might escape it all.
By the turn of the millennium, many of us had put away that style of end-times speculation. The Cold War was over, the prophecy books faded and “Antichrist” began to sound like a rapture relic of the past. I thought I had outgrown that language for good — until it resurfaced in Silicon Valley.
In recent days, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, early backer of Facebook and founder of Palantir, the surveillance company used by U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, 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. But based on Thiel’s public writings and past interviews, we know something about how he envisions the collapse of civilization.
Thiel seems to see the apocalypse unfolding in stages. He interprets the Antichrist not as a single figure but as a global, technological, authoritarian system — one that secures peace and stability at the cost of freedom and democracy. In his view, the danger lies not in our society’s overt defiance of religion, but in the co-opting of its language and symbols: promises of “law and order,” “peace and safety” that mask the rise of centralized control.
Drawing on biblical imagery, Thiel links this Antichrist system to the visions found in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation and its warnings of false messiahs and counterfeit peace. A lone tyrant is less likely to succeed in leveraging fear — of war, pandemics or economic collapse — to justify total control, but in Thiel’s view: a centralized autocracy may well. Such a system, he argues, can cloak itself in morality or even “hyper-Christian” rhetoric, promising salvation while enslaving humanity.
The alternative to the Antichrist system, Thiel argues, is “Armageddon” — the catastrophic collapse of civilization through global warfare and destruction. For him, our world is trapped between two extreme possibilities: annihilation or authoritarianism. The fear of collapse makes societies more willing to embrace authoritarian solutions that promise safety at any cost.
The only possible balance, Thiel suggests, lies in what the apostle Paul described in the New Testament’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians as the katechon — a mysterious “restraining force” that holds back the spirit of the Antichrist. As a theologian, I find it significant that Thiel turns to one of Paul’s most cryptic passages to frame his political imagination: Paul never explains what the restraining force is, leaving it open to interpretation. Thiel’s reading reveals less about Paul and more about how Silicon Valley elites are reinterpreting apocalyptic language for their own purposes.
What happens when this restraining force is removed? Thiel imagines that the Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon. Only the few survive. A techno-libertarian, he entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies. In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny — but only for the wealthy and well-prepared.
His own record makes the contradictions sharper. Thiel was an early supporter of Donald Trump, a financier of J.D. Vance and a chief supplier of government surveillance through Palantir. With a net worth of over $20 billion, he has reportedly secured his own survival on a 477-acre compound in New Zealand. For the rest of us, the stakes go far beyond Silicon Valley.
Thiel, in other words, is no fringe preacher, but one of the most influential technocrats alive, warning against authoritarian systems while also profiting from the technologies, political networks and surveillance tools that could enable them. A self-described libertarian, he moves fluidly in the nexus of technocracy, theology, right-wing politics and Christian nationalism.
This raises the unsettling question: Is Thiel exposing the Antichrist, or announcing it?
Perhaps a more vital question for us, given the multitude of “existential threats” on the horizon, caught in a dilemma between annihilation (“Armageddon”) and authoritarian control (“Antichrist”), is how shall we choose to live?
The challenge for people of faith, conscience and goodwill is not to succumb to fear or forecast doomsday, but to practice discernment and cultivate community. The spiritual advice I once heard in church may still be the best guide today: read the signs, take heart, stay vigilant, speak truth, do good work, persevere and love your neighbor.
The apocalypse may not arrive suddenly in the form of beasts and battles. More likely, it will look like an ongoing negotiation between collapse and control. Our task is to see things clearly, name the powers and resist both extremes.
But resistance alone is not enough. Against the survivalist fantasies of bunkers and colonies, real resilience is found in solidarity and community — becoming good neighbors, offering refuge to outsiders and building networks of solidarity and trust that can withstand fear-driven authoritarianism and collapse. If there is an escape hatch, it is not a private rapture but collective faith and action.
(The Rev. Michael J. Christensen is a theologian, church historian and author of “City Streets, City People,” “The Samaritan’s Imperative” and “C.S. Lewis on Scripture.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Shane Encinas, 12, shown here with President Donald Trump, was among the students who recounted their experiences facing religious discrimination in American public schools at a Religious Liberty Commission hearing on Sept. 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Courtesy of U.S. Department of Justice/Screenshot
Washington D.C., Sep 9, 2025 / 18:25 pm (CNA).
More than half a dozen American public school students testified about anti-Christian and other faith-based forms of discrimination in an education-focused hearing conducted by President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
The Sept. 8 hearing was the commission’s second meeting since the president created it earlier this year. The commission’s inaugural meeting in June focused on broader threats to religious liberty stemming from federal, state, and local government actors and questions about the proper role of faith in public life.
The archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a member of the commission, made his first appearance at Monday’s hearing after missing the first hearing due to his train being canceled. He emphasized the importance of the commission’s work on education and broader concerns.
Dolan, who took part in this year’s conclave to elect Pope Leo XIV, discussed cardinals from around the world approaching him in pre-conclave meetings “to thank us for our strong defense of religious liberty” in the United States.
“They said, well, because you in the United States serve as a beacon for the rest of us,” he said.
“This gives us an added sense of responsibility,” Dolan continued. “We’re not doing this in a self-serving way. We’re doing this in an extraordinarily solicitous and benevolent way to help others because they look to us for the protection of religious liberty. They look to us as a nation that’s extraordinarily democratic, but yet admits that we couldn’t be that unless we were ‘one nation under God.’”
Other members of the commission include Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron, Pastor Paula White, evangelist Franklin Graham, psychologist and TV show host Phil McGraw, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
The commissioners heard from various public school students and former students about discriminatory actions they faced when trying to publicly proclaim their faith in a public school setting.
Hannah Allen testified about a 2019 instance when she was in middle school and the principal prevented students from praying for a classmate who had been injured in a car accident. The school’s principal told them they could only pray if the prayer was hidden from other students.
“He violated our right to freely exercise our religion,” Allen said.
After obtaining legal counsel from the First Liberty Institute, the school backed down and told the students they could pray in public view. Allen said “what happened at my school wasn’t right and I know that it is going on in other schools as well.”
Justin Aguilar, a recent high school graduate, testified that when he submitted his valedictorian speech that referenced Jesus Christ to school officials, “they just simply crossed his name out” and instructed him to resubmit the speech without any religious references.
He obtained legal support from Liberty Counsel to convey his religious rights to the school. He said: “I resubmitted my speech with everything I wanted to say” and school officials allowed him to reference Christ.
Aguilar said the situation made him nervous about referencing Christ in his speech but that the crowd cheered when he brought up his faith, and “I felt this huge joy and relief.” He said that out of everything said at the graduation, “nothing had as big of a response as the name of Jesus.”
Lydia Booth discussed a prolonged incident after her Mississippi elementary school restarted in-person classes after the COVID-19 pandemic. School officials forced the 9-year-old to remove a face mask that had the words “Jesus Loves Me” written on it.
“During that time, everything felt uncertain, but those three simple words reminded me I wasn’t alone,” Booth told the commission.
Her family obtained legal support from Alliance Defending Freedom and fought a two-year legal battle, which ended in a settlement from the school district in which it agreed to let her wear the mask.
“You’re never too young for your voice to matter,” Booth told the commission. “If I had stayed silent, nothing would have changed, but because we spoke up, now other students can wear messages of faith and love without the fear of being silenced.”
Several speakers also expressed concerns about public schools trying to impose values on children that conflict with the beliefs of parents, such as the recent U.S. Supreme Court case over parental opt-outs for course material that promotes gender ideology.
Sameerah Munshi, who serves on an advisory board to the commission, discussed Montgomery County Public School’s refusal to let parents opt out of such material.
“Many parents, including Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents, and students were concerned, to say the least,” said Munshi, who is an activist for the rights of Muslims.
“What happened in Montgomery County was not about Muslims and other people of faith trying to impose their values on others,” she continued. “It was about refusing to have others’ values imposed on us. It was about the right to dissent without being demonized.”
The Supreme Court in June ordered the school board to provide parents with an opt-out.
Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson, a member of the commission who is Catholic, noted that “frequently religious liberty violations are a result of unjust laws in the first place,” and argued that the imposition of gender ideology is inherently unjust.
“We can’t just … opt ourselves out of this,” he said. “We also need to directly combat it.”
Addressing the commission for the first time on Monday, Trump criticized the failings of the public education system in this area and alleged that “in many schools today, students are … indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda” and punished for practicing their religious faith publicly.
The president announced at the hearing that the U.S. Department of Education would develop new guidance to protect the right to pray in public schools. He also launched the “America Prays” initiative, encouraging Americans to pray for the nation and its people ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
(RNS) — The United States Department of War Rapid Response X account on Sunday (Sept. 7) posted a clip showing military personnel completing outdoor training as the words “Be strong and of good courage. Do not be afraid, nor dismayed. For the Lord your God is with you, wherever you go” faded into the screen. The video, which quotes the Bible’s Book of Joshua, received more than 2,000 likes as of Tuesday.
Similar videos praising the military while quoting the Bible have flooded the former Department of Defense’s social media accounts over the past few weeks.
The department, renamed the Department of War, has joined other branches of the federal government in embracing a Christian nationalist tone in its official communications. Some warn the new social media strategy could indicate how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s conservative Christian faith is revamping the military branch.
In an email to RNS, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the videos exemplify Hegseth’s efforts to celebrate the country’s Christian roots “despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation,” and that “Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.”
“Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian,” Wilson said in the email. “The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation and shared by America’s wartime leaders like President George Washington, who prayed for his troops at Valley Forge, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gifted Bibles to American soldiers during WW2 and encouraged them to read them.”
Back in early August, the DOW posted another video on X captioned “We Are One Nation Under God,” a motto from the pledge of allegiance, showing military aircraft and soldiers in operations as “I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back till they were destroyed” from Psalm 18:37 appeared onscreen. The 12-second video was shared 1,600 times and received 8,000 likes.
Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and the author of the upcoming book “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists,” said the videos thwart the original meaning of these verses.
“Those verses were not about the United States military,” Kaylor told RNS. “They weren’t really even about any imperial military force, and quite the opposite. These were passages about marginalized people, people under attack. It’s a very dangerous conflation of scriptural ideals with the U.S. military.”
The DOW’s videos, like the Department of Homeland Security’s Bible-quoting social media posts, also promote a literal interpretation of Scripture, a key feature of Christian nationalist rhetoric, said Kaylor, who is also president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, a Christian media company in Missouri.
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“Christian nationalism is itself selectively literal. … The irony about this Christian nationalism is that they’re justifying themselves with the Bible, but they’re only able to do it because they’re being very selective on what verses they choose,” he said.
One post, shared on the DOW Rapid Response X account on Aug. 24, quotes Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for YOU are with me.” The video shows U.S. military members equipping each other, firing weapons and jumping out of helicopters.
The inclusion of this prayer, written by King David, asking God for support and guidance in difficult times, Kaylor said, was particularly inappropriate, as the passage talks about God leading someone away from the fight.
Michael Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which seeks to ensure freedom of religion in the U.S. military, raised a concern that the DOW’s favoritism of Christian Scriptures in its communications could jeopardize cohesion among armed forces.
“This is completely dividing members of the military,” he said. “We see it around the clock. I’ve talked to generals who said, ‘Look, for the first time in my life, I still love the sailors and the soldiers and the airmen and the Marines that I command, but I hate the Navy, the Army and the Air Force that I work for because I see what it has become.’”
Moreover, the posts suggest non-Christian military members aren’t “worthy or honorable or trustworthy human beings to be able to fight for your country,” said Weinstein, who is Jewish. He was referring to Article Six of the U.S. Constitution, which bans religious tests for positions in the federal government — including military personnel — adding, “but there is a de facto test.”
Recently, his foundation documented an increase in religious freedom violations in the military. He said some of his clients have flagged as examples the DOW’s “evangelization efforts” through events like the lunch break “Christian prayer and worship service” convened by Hegseth’s office in the Pentagon auditorium earlier this year.
The department’s rebranding and its embrace of Christian references on social media could lead to an escalation of conflicts, Weinstein said.
“This is nothing more than a fast-ticking time bomb that will blow up in our faces,” said Weinstein, who served 11 years in the Air Force. “… It is encouraging a tremendous response by our enemies who are out there, many of whom follow their own extremist religious views.”
The DOW also seems to have adopted a Christian Crusader aesthetic, aligning itself with Hegseth’s declarations, Weinstein added. The defense secretary is known for his Crusader cross tattoo on his chest. The Crusaders’ battle cry, “Deus Vult” (“God wills” in Latin), has long entertained an idea of Western Christianity clashing with non-Christian civilizations. And in a March 25 X post, Hegseth showed a bicep tattoo that reads “kafir,” meaning “unfaithful” in Arabic.