The Frightening Intersection of Christian Nationalism and Techno-Fascism

The campaign to make Donald Trump a dictator would be nothing without religiosity. About 80% of white evangelicals supported Trump in 2020, affirming the religious right’s role as the linchpin of Trump’s base. Trump’s campaign is rife with religious rhetoric, including comparisons between himself and Jesus Christ, and claims that he survived an assassination attempt due to divine intervention. Trump supporters have rallied in shirts bearing the message, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” Unmoved by Trump’s hypocrisies and personal transgressions, evangelicals play a key role in a cult of personality that celebrates Trump’s attacks on political scapegoats, who Christian nationalists argue are destroying the moral fabric of the United States, such as trans people, immigrants, teachers, and librarians. Many people are aware that Trump’s political brand is a vehicle for Christian nationalism and that Christian supremacist politics threaten the freedoms and futures of millions of people. Far fewer people, however, are aware of the political intersection between Christian nationalism and the tech cults of Silicon Valley, which have incubated their own fascist politics. Now, following aggressive lobbying from Elon Musk and tech investors like David Sacks, JD Vance is Trump’s running mate. Vance is a protege of right-wing, post-democracy-minded tech mogul Peter Thiel, who has played a major role in funding and orchestrating Vance’s career. Vance is a product of Silicon Valley, and he is a vehicle for the hopes and dreams of tech founders and investors who hope to rule the world.

In the same way that Musk fetishizes interplanetary commerce that is beyond the reach of earthly laws, tech billionaires (and billionaire hopefuls) want a world, here and now, that is stripped of oversight, where tech corporations can not only consume every industry but also usurp governance itself. Corporate fascism is the political end game of these tech elites, with the United States and other nations divided into fiefdoms and ruled by tech leaders who have captured economies and the machinery of governance. You may be wondering what this has to do with religion, given that the techno-authoritarian fantasy I am describing sounds a lot like old-fashioned greed, domination, and conquest. Well, as history would usually have it, there is a religious element to all of this greed, domination, and conquest. Silicon Valley’s technological and philosophical evolutions in recent years have been heavily influenced by a bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres have described as TESCREAL. TESCREAL is an abbreviation for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. “It's a mouthful to pronounce these large polysyllabic words,” Torres told me in a recent interview. “One way you could think about it is transhumanism is sort of the backbone of this cluster of ideologies,” they explained.

Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to civilization and humanity. They have published on a wide range of topics, including machine superintelligence, emerging technologies, and religious eschatology, which is a branch of theology and philosophy that examines conceptions of “the end times” or the ultimate destiny of humanity and the world. They are also the author of Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. Two years ago, I spoke with Torres about the threat of longtermism, which is closely related to effective altruism. Now, as some tech leaders have become more public and aggressive in their right-wing politics, I wanted to talk with Torres again about how TESCREAL ideologies are manifesting themselves in the current political moment.

“All of the other ideologies grew out of transhumanism,” Torres explained. Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for using advanced technologies to enhance and re-engineer human beings, ultimately aiming to create a radically improved "post-human" species. Despite transhumanist PR focusing on the potential for medical advancements and the idea of “conquering” death, it is a foregone conclusion, amid historic levels of inequality, that the imagined “enhancements” of transhumanism would primarily benefit the wealthy. One might even characterize transhumanism as an effort to create a master race. As Umair Haque writes, “20th century fascists saw themselves as human, and everyone else as subhuman … Humans have become the new subhumans to the transhumanists.”

The pursuit of an eternal, post-human life may sound ambitious, but for the cults of Silicon Valley, the end of our humanity is only the beginning. “Longtermism adds to this tech-utopian vision of becoming post-human, a further imperative,” Torres explains, “which is to go out and colonize as much of the universe as possible.” Longtermism asserts that the driving logic behind our decisions should involve doing the most good for the most people. That sounds rational on its face until you recognize the transhumanist element: theoretical, future digital people are part of this equation. As Emile explained on Movement Memos last year, according to the logic of longtermism, “There could be 10 to the 58 digital people in the future, whereas there are only 8 billion of us right now. So by virtue of the multitude of potential future people, they deserve our moral attention more than contemporary people.”If these bizarre fantasies about living forever and peopling the heavens with digital humans, including angels (given that the resurrection of the cryogenically preserved is part of this techno-fantasy), feel familiar, that is very much by design. “Transhumanism was originally proposed as a secular replacement for religion in the early 20th century,” Torres explained. “Religion declined a lot during the 19th century in the Western world, and that just left this vacuum,” they said. “Suddenly, you have these atheists or agnostics who are looking for something to provide the same kind of utopian promises and eschatological hope that religion provided, and transhumanism was introduced to do that.” Like Christianity, transhumanism offers the prospect of immortality, post-scarcity, and a celestial heaven – all crafted by the would-be tyrants of the tech world, who have cast themselves as gods in this sci-fi fantasy.

While, for some people, religion can inspire kindness, creativity, and fellowship while fueling the pursuit of justice, we also know that it can be a powerful means of domination and social control. Justifying social stratification and the uneven distribution of power through religiosity is a very old trick that has resulted in some familiar social forms. Seizing upon technologies to reify these stratifications and divisions of power is also nothing new. As Jared Yates Sexton wrote in his recent piece, “What's Actually At Stake: MAGA and Tech Fascism”:

Every new technology, from handwriting to paper to printing to radio and television, brings a moment like this. The authoritarians are always grasping for their advantage and the technology always gives them a new chance. In the feudal era, control of literacy allowed the church to use beneficial mythology to tame the masses. The Nazis relied on radio. We’ve seen countless tragedies sown through the television and the internet.

Obsessed with a Made-Up Apocalypse

Like Evangelicals, many proponents of longtermism are obsessed with an imaginary apocalyptic scenario. As Torres explains, many adherents to longtermism believe that the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is imminent. AGI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that would possess the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge – unlike the plagiarism machines that are presently characterized as “artificial intelligence.” Longtermists believe that the advent of AGI will lead to the creation of a “superintelligence” that will surpass human intelligence and capabilities across virtually all domains. In the tech world, this milestone is viewed as potentially revelatory in the biblical sense. “[They believe] it will either be doom, as in the total annihilation of all humanity,” Torres explains, “or it will be utopia.” This has led to a division among longtermists about the speed at which such technology should be pursued and what kind of safeguards must be developed in order to protect humanity from AGI. However, like evangelicals and white supremacists, the tech world also has its accelerationists. 

Longtermism took a reputational hit in 2022, with the collapse of FTX, but has remained influential behind the scenes. Meanwhile, some players in the tech world have questioned the doom-saying of prominent proponents of  longtermism, arguing that the risk of human annihilation has been overblown and that the benefits of an AGI-created “techno-utopia” far outweigh any risk. “More and more, you see people working at some of these companies or individuals with very large social media audiences advocating for or evangelizing for this accelerationist view,” Torres said. “These accelerationists are arguing that rather than trying to slow capabilities research down so that AI safety research can catch up, we should be accelerating the capabilities research, and the default outcome is going to be utopia.” 

The idea that continuing to scale up large language learning models will result in the creation of AGI is one that many people, myself included, have largely discounted. Wall Street has also become quite skeptical about the current evolution of the technology. “There are a lot of people who are quite skeptical of this view,” Torres said. “I count myself among them.” Torres also points to scientists like Gary Marcus, who argue that “we will probably get AGI at some point in the future, but that these large language models are an off-ramp.”

Unconcerned with a Real Apocalypse

Regardless of whether AGI will be created at some future time or what the pace of that pursuit should be, the tech world is currently all-in on the expansion of existing AI tech. In so doing, tech billionaires are accelerating the pace of the most pressing existential threat humanity actually faces: climate chaos. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query utilizes nearly ten times as much electricity as a Google search. That same report indicates that “the carbon dioxide emissions of data centers may more than double between 2022 and 2030.” That sounds bleak, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested that existing estimates of AI’s future energy use may actually fall short. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said during an interview at the World Economic Forum in January. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough.” 

Tech companies are currently making big promises and big investments in alternative sources of energy in order to justify their massive energy consumption. The thought of tech leaders, who aren’t exactly known for their concern or foresight around public safety, dabbling in nuclear power or fusion technologies, ushers in a whole new set of concerns. However, even if these projects were managed as safely as possible, we would still be faced with a situation where Big Tech companies are hyping up future innovations that they may or may not successfully deliver in order to justify destructive environmental actions in the present. The tech world’s obsession with AI, despite the technology’s lack of profitability, is already impacting the environment. Coal plants, for example, are being re-enlivened by the AI boom. In Omaha, where Google and Meta have established new data centers, plans to decommission a coal plant in 2022 have been delayed until at least 2026. Data centers are already responsible for two percent of global emissions, and a large data center consumes between 1 and 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling purposes. Google's greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 48% over the last five years as the company’s development of AI products has expanded. 

Microsoft, for its part, claims that it will harness the power of atomic fusion by 2028, but critics are skeptical. As  John Holdren, a Harvard physicist and one-time White House science adviser, told the Washington Post, “Predictions of commercial fusion by 2030 or 2035 are hype at this point … We haven’t even yet seen a true energy break-even where the fusion reaction is generating more energy than had to be supplied to facilitate it.” The false promise that technologies like commercial fusion are close at hand “feeds the public’s belief in technological miracles that will save us from the difficult task of dealing with climate change,” Holdren said. 

Big Tech’s promises around green energy bring to mind Elon Musk’s false promises about self-driving cars and space colonization. If Musk has taught the tech world anything, it’s that billionaires are not penalized for making big claims about what they will accomplish on wholly made-up timelines. When the due date for innovation arrives, tech giants can simply spin a new tale about why their work necessitates whatever it is costing humanity and how huge the payoffs will be if they are only allowed to proceed as planned. In the meantime, tech companies are devouring energy at an unprecedented rate and jeopardizing green energy transitions in some municipalities. 

One might find it noteworthy that some tech leaders are deeply concerned about the imagined annihilatory potential of artificial general intelligence, a technology that does not exist and may never exist, but seemingly unconcerned with the ongoing march of climate chaos. The answer to this seeming contradiction may be that tech billionaires simply do not believe that their lives will be endangered by climate change. In January of 2017, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that upwards of 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires have bought some level of "apocalypse insurance," such as a bunkered hideaway in the US or abroad where they can retreat from catastrophe and collapse. Even outside of a total retreat from society, the ultra-rich will consistently have the ability to migrate as environmental conditions shift. Unlike billions of other people, who will be prevented from fleeing rising seas and skyrocketing temperatures, either due to the violence of borders or their own material limitations, the ultra-rich can always move. So long as there are habitable stretches of land, billionaires can sleep safe in the knowledge that they can buy a new refuge. 

The privilege of mobility is one that right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk are eager to restrict. Musk has repeatedly made xenophobic comments about immigrants and demanded stricter border policies. Most recently, he declared that “civil war is inevitable” while agreeing with a post that blamed the actions of racist lynch mobs in the UK on “mass migration and open borders.” In reality, social media helped fuel misinformation about a stabbing attack in which three children were killed. The perpetrator, it was later revealed, was not an immigrant or Muslim, as the mobs had claimed. Elon Musk calls longtermism, “A close match for my philosophy.” As such, Musk claims to be concerned with countless future space-dwelling beings and is thus less concerned about human suffering in the present. As for the climate crisis, Musk summarized his perspective in a 2014 interview with the words, “Fuck Earth! Who cares about Earth?”

Torres calls the disparity between some tech billionaires’ concerns about climate change and AGI a “tragicomedy or a coma-tragedy, depending on your perspective.” Torres says that to the tech titans, it’s a matter of basic math. “On the one hand, you've got climate change, which is probably going to kill a billion plus people, and the rich and powerful think they are probably going to be fine,” they said. “Misaligned superintelligence, on the other hand, [is something that they believe] is going to kill everyone, including the billionaires.” Therefore, controlling the course of AI is, in the eyes of some billionaires, a matter of self-preservation, whereas climate change is a threat to little people.

Inventing the End Times

It is noteworthy that the religiosity of the tech world has crafted its own visions for the end of humanity, whether that end is envisioned as AGI armageddon or a post-human utopia in space. “Eschatological beliefs have played a really crucial role in so many major events in human history,” Torres said. “The two bloodiest conflicts were World War II and the Taiping Rebellion of the 19th century, and World War II was in part motivated by certain eschatological promises made by Hitler.” Torres explained that Hitler “drew a lot from Christian end-times thinking.” In his rhetoric, “Hitler talked about the Thousand-Year Reich, which mirrors the Christian notion of the millennial kingdom, a Thousand-Year kingdom, and there are lots of other examples. So there's a very real sense in which World War II was motivated by eschatological visions of what the future ought to look like.” Torres explained that eschatology also played a key role in the Taiping Rebellion, which involved the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom – an apocalyptic movement.

“Even here in the US, a lot of support for Israel stems from eschatological beliefs about the future,” Torres said. “[Christian evangelicals believe] you aren't going to get to the millennial kingdom and consequently heaven if you don't pass through certain apocalyptic events such as the Battle of Armageddon, which would be preceded by the seven-year tribulation,” Torres explained. “The seven-year tribulation cannot commence if there isn't a Jewish state in Palestine.” 

“This clunky academic term, eschatology, is so important for understanding what is going on in the world, and that is just as true with respect to Silicon Valley and the race to build AGI as it is with respect to World War II and the Taiping Rebellion and US Evangelical Christian support for Israel and so on and so on,” Torres said. “These secular atheists in Silicon Valley are just as enamored and energized by these sort of end times beliefs as the most radical Christians or the most radical Muslims or Jewish people, any religion out there.”

The Intersection of Christian Nationalism and Techno-Fascism

While the eschatological beliefs of the tech world are unlikely to resonate in middle America, JD Vance offers a bridge between the fascistic agendas of Silicon Valley and the aspirations of the religious right. Vance, who has not openly identified with longtermism or transhumanism, has grounded his political identity in his Catholic faith. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, due in part to the influence of Peter Thiel. Thiel – a rightwing billionaire who is a major player in Big Tech, mass surveillance, and venture capitalism – has been a mentor, employer, and funder for Vance. In 2021, Thiel, who donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign in 2016, introduced Vance to Trump. In recent years, Vance has transitioned from a staunch critic of the former president (who Vance once compared Trump to Hitler) to an enthusiastic supporter. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Vance identified as an atheist. He credits two major influences for his religious awakening: the theologian St. Augustine and Peter Thiel.

Thiel, however, is not a Catholic. Tara Isabella Burton has characterized Thiel’s brand of Christianity as “a distinct fusion of techno-utopianism that characterizes its successes as Christian miracles.” In a 2015 piece called “Against Edenism,” Thiel highlighted this strange fusion. He wrote, “Judeo-Western optimism differs from the ­atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered.” In that same piece, Thiel nodded toward techno-utopian eschatological aspirations, writing: 

Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.

In May, Thiel was interviewed by a pastor at a sold out event in San Francisco, where he made the “intellectual case for Christianity.” Thiel said told the audience:

If there’s a Christian critique of these sort of utopian scientific movements, it should always be in the direction that they don’t go far enough. Transhumanism, radical life extension. It’s not that you shouldn’t live forever, but that it’s only transforming people’s bodies and not their souls and not the whole person or something like this.

In addition to grounding his techno-utopian views in Christianity, Thiel has something else in common with many white evangelical Christians: a taste for fascism. Thiel has famously stated, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and has also argued that “the extension of the franchise to women…render[s]  the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Thiel also holds the modern university in contempt, arguing that it has reduced history to a list of grievances and normalized radical Marxist ideas. 

Vance and Thiel are also fans of software developer and “Dark Enlightenment” reactionary Curtis Yarvin, who has stated that the problem of “the underclass” necessitates “a humane alternative to genocide.” Yarvin also advocates for a reengineering of governance in which nations would be broken up into “patchworks” of smaller entities that would be ruled by tech corporations. This fascist system of corporate fiefdoms, a form of techno-authoritarianism, would allow billionaires like Thiel and Musk to pursue their pet projects, such as attempting to colonize space or engineer immortality, without the pesky oversight of governments. Big Tech would not only devour every other industry but would also consume any apparatus that might seek to reign in the whims of its entrepreneurs. 

Torres expressed concern about Vance’s current political position as Trump’s running mate. “My sense is that a lot of these sort of far-right people, including accelerationists in Silicon Valley, see Vance as an amazing opportunity to represent in a powerful way their interests in Washington,” Torres said. Torres noted that Vance has been “a moving target” politically, having made numerous opportunistic shifts in his stated beliefs over the years. “It's hard to know exactly what he believes or if he really has any kind of core beliefs in the first place,” Torres said. Torres noted that, despite Vance’s unreliable narration of his views, Vance’s relationships with figures like Thiel are quite telling. “He has not just incidental proximity to these individuals, but he’s intimately linked to Peter Thiel, who also seems to have accelerationist tendencies.” Torres expressed concern that, if Vance and Trump ascend to the White House, accelerationists in Silicon Valley “will have a means of influencing policy, in the pursuit of their particular ideological commitments, in terms of eschatology and the future of humanity.” 

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