Peter Thiel Draws Hundreds Downtown for 'Antichrist' Lectures

A crowd flocked to downtown Nashville Monday night for a different kind of show. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel brought the first installment of his four-part lecture series on the Antichrist to Broadway, drawing hundreds to the Grand Lodge of Tennessee for speculative theology that quickly turned into one man’s theory of everything. No journalists, pens or notebooks were allowed in the venue. Less than an hour after the lecture ended, the Scene obtained multiple full event transcripts and recordings.

Thiel rose to prominence as a tech executive and investor in the late 1990s as modern Silicon Valley developed around San Francisco. The $1.5 billion sale of Paypal, which Thiel helped develop and run alongside Elon Musk and others, made Thiel an immediate celebrity and power player among the burgeoning tech elite. Thiel owes a net worth reportedly north of $30 billion to the many successful companies he helped found, invest in, support and otherwise guide, including surveillance and data giant Palantir, where he serves as chairman. Building and running tech companies is his proven strength.

His lecture on Monday night, which lasted about an hour, strayed into another obsession — Christianity and the end times — woven through with the fear and contradiction that stray into conspiracy and often accompany ideological anti-authoritarianism.

“ A big part of why I'm doing this series is because I believe it is dangerous to focus on just one risk,” Thiel told the crowd in his closing remarks. “There's one existential risk that nobody seems to want to discuss — which I would like to add to the list if we're gonna enumerate existential risks — and that is the risk of a totalitarian one-world government.”

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The Nashville stop is Thiel’s third iteration of the series, which he previously presented in San Francisco and Rome. His attraction to Nashville could be the most interesting aspect of Thiel’s entire endeavor. Ties abound. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier is an apparent participant in “Dialog,” a secretive event network organized by Thiel. Tennessee has long incubated politics that simultaneously criticize governments for overreach and inefficiency; nondenominational evangelical Christianity has flourished here in recent years, with touch points like Greg Locke’s Global Vision Bible Church, the politically embedded Grace Chapel in Franklin and Remnant Fellowship, the subject of an HBO cult investigation. Antisocial splinter groups chasing utopian lives, often aligned with far-right politics and fears of society, have also made Tennessee home. Our Town, a recent investigation by WPLN’s Meribah Knight, illuminates the impact of one such effort in Gainesboro, Tenn.

Thiel’s host, a masonic lodge, opened the evening by distancing itself from the content of its talks. Conservative activist and blogger Davis Hunt introduced Thiel and co-sponsored the event via his politics website The Pamphleteer. Hunt described Nashville as “ one of the last remaining regions in the Western world with authentic Christian belief where it still thrives,” seemingly another reference to the local proliferation of personalized Christianities. Hunt did not respond to the Scene’s request for comment. 

Thiel’s appeal Monday night most closely mirrored the dizzying sermon of a pastor fixated on his own theory of the world, desperate to convince others to connect all the world’s dots. Detours through intellectual, technological and political history seemed more designed to give an impression of Thiel’s vast command of knowledge than to convey any rational argument. They also led back to the anti-government vision of politics that Thiel — an early Trump supporter and megadonor — has espoused and evangelized throughout Silicon Valley. Halfway through his speech, he invited the audience into this worldview, which derides both modern universities and public services, presenting his own opinions as self-evident.

“ As a thought experiment, which part of the U.S. government do you think runs the worst?” Thiel asked the crowd. “The post office or the DMV is like a university humanities department where they're not doing anything. It's pretty transparent. The NSA is like some esoteric science thing. And obviously, first order approximation, the sciences are in worse shape than the humanities.”

Three more lectures will take place throughout October, titled “The End of Empire” (Oct. 5), “Velocity of Antichrist” (Oct. 12) and “New Rome” (Oct. 19).