Who is the Antichrist? Thomas Cranmer gave an answer while he was burning at the stake: “As for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine!” Such formulations sound peculiar now to our enlightened, secular, post-confessional ears. Even the sectarians no longer seem to go in for it. Ian Paisley famously heckled Pope John Paul II with Cranmer’s words during a session of the European Parliament; though spared the flames, he was punched in the face by Otto von Habsburg. It is an affecting sign of the times that, when Pope Francis died last year, the Democratic Unionist Party put aside the old invective and waxed lyrical about how he had been “held in deep affection”.

But there is one man who still talks of the “Antichrist” with an old-fashioned zeal: Peter Thiel. The Antichrist’s kennel, said John Milton, was Rome; Thiel would rather locate it in Davos, the Hague, or perhaps Greta Thunberg’s Freedom Flotilla. The billionaire philosopher king has been jetting around the world in recent months, presenting his blockbuster “Antichrist” lectures. He kicked them off in San Francisco. Then, a few weeks ago, he found himself in Cambridge. Now he is in Rome.

Thiel knows from his Bible that the Antichrist is “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. He believes that this figure will attempt to arrest the progress of science and usher in some kind of world state. The prime candidates, ironically enough, are doomsday naysayers in their own right — “luddites who want to stop all science”, such as Thunberg, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, or venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Thiel’s San Francisco lectures contained some cutting criticisms of Pope Leo XIV, to the point of raising an eyebrow at the religious activities of the billionaire’s one-time protégé, JD Vance. “I don’t like his popeism,” he said of the Vice President. “We have all these reports of fights between him and the Pope; I hope there are a lot more.” What worries Thiel most of all is the possibility of a “Caesaro-Papist fusion”. For the Antichrist world government to exercise true tyranny, it would have to unite temporal and spiritual power. We all should tremble at the thought of a Vatican–Washington axis.

That Thiel is delivering these lectures so close to the Vatican is a sure rebuke of the “woke American pope”. His company, Palantir, is strongly supportive of the American-Israeli operation Iran, which the Pope has condemned. Thiel also opposes government regulation of AI, which has been a central theme of the first year of the Leonine papacy.

Robert Prevost took on the name Leo partly with AI in mind. In the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII addressed the social question arising from the Industrial Revolution in an interventionist and communitarian way; this is what his namesake now seeks to emulate when he confronts “developments in the field of artificial intelligence”. Pope Leo XIV, who used to teach mathematics and physics, is always stressing the “moral dimension of emerging technologies” and the duty of governments to legislate accordingly. This, for Thiel, is the stuff of luddism — the stuff of Antichrist.

Thiel is no Luther, no Cranmer, no Paisley: he does not think that the Pope is literally the Antichrist. For one thing, Leo is much too old: the Antichrist ought to be in the prime of youth, perhaps a Thunberg or a Mamdani or an AOC. For another, not all popes are as bad as the present one, so it’s not as though “Antichrist” is somehow vested in the papal office. Thiel nurses a particular warmth for Benedict XVI, who earns his praise for having “literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times”.

Still, Thiel’s concerns about world government might underlie his stated dislike of “popeism”, which does, after all, claim some kind of universal jurisdiction. Nor is it any surprise that his preaching so close to the Vatican should ruffle some Curial feathers. The Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti, who advised the last pope on AI, has written an essay to coincide with Thiel’s Roman holiday, criticizing him for worshipping at the altar of “competition, technology, and the individual”. It seems to forecast a new ideological struggle between the Catholic Church and its enemies. And, fittingly, it bears a rather 16th-century title: “The American Heresy: Should We Burn Peter Thiel?”

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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