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Who is Peter Thiel’s Antichrist?

“Don’t immanentize the katechon” was the slogan printed on the T-shirts handed out at Peter Thiel’s Oxford lectures. Part in-joke, part serious warning, the phrase plays on political philosopher Eric Voegelin’s anti-utopian demand: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.” Voegelin used Christian theology to caution against utopian attempts to create heaven (eschaton) on earth: transcendent hopes should not be political programmes. For Thiel, a similar danger lies in immanentising the katechon — a power keeping the Apocalypse at bay.

A mysterious force in Christian eschatology, the katechon should not be treated as something historical that can be pinned down, identified and controlled. Literally “the one who restrains”, it comes from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, in which he alludes to the fact that the community knows “what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes”. A force will hold back the rise of the Antichrist before the return of Christ and the final judgement. But the restraining is only temporary, as “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed”.

The katechon has fascinated theologians and political thinkers for centuries. This mysterious figure or power has been variously interpreted across history, often reflecting the anxieties and hopes of different epochs. Is it a single person? A government? An institution? A spiritual power acting through history? Is the battle it fights one of politics or of faith? The early Christian writer Tertullian identified the katechon with the Roman Empire, viewing its imperial authority as a bulwark against chaos and the rise of the Antichrist. Centuries later, Martin Luther suggested that it might be the institutional Church itself, paradoxically preserving social order even as he criticised its corruption. But the Catholic Church ended up condemning the attempts to identify the restrainer with a political structure.

In more recent thought, the katechon is often understood less as a concrete political institution and more as a metaphysical or cultural principle, a force that resists dissolution, chaos, and the meaninglessness of a secularising world. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev interpreted the katechon as Christian culture itself, while the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade saw the katechon in traditional structures of sacred time and myth, which he believed held back the modern world’s drift into historical relativism and existential despair.

Now Thiel is taking up the mantle. The German-born Silicon Valley-based tech entrepreneur, who was raised Evangelical but describes his religious views as “somewhat heterodox”, explored these questions in four private lectures delivered so far in Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin. The talks were modelled on the four sermons on the Antichrist that John Henry Newman gave in the 1830s, before he converted to Catholicism. The event was strictly invitation-only and guests were asked not to speak publicly about what was said — though Thiel has occasionally alluded to the themes in interviews. He recently discussed some of his intuitions with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

“Thiel is battling for the return of apocalyptic thinking.”

Thiel’s fascination with the katechon places him in dialogue with Carl Schmitt. For the German jurist and political theorist, it could and must be identified in history. In this way, Schmitt “immanentized” the katechon — believing it had to take concrete form. His fear of the lawlessness and disorder foretold by scripture led him to a chilling conclusion: that the Nazi regime, for all its evils, might have been a bulwark against something even worse. The Third Reich, in his eyes, held back even greater threats of chaos, such as Bolshevism or the collapse of European order. He believed that the regime embodied a decisive political authority capable of resisting the disintegration of state sovereignty and the rise of a borderless, technocratic liberalism.

Thiel is attuned to this paradox. For him, the katechon and the Antichrist are not absolute opposites. The restrainer, he suggests, is always at risk of becoming what it seeks to hold back. When I ask him about this over Zoom, he says that “the katechon is purely defensive and hence somehow inadequate” to fit with the various power structures that in history claimed to have a katechontic role. He points to how Christian forces like the Holy Roman Empire saw themselves as more than just passive restraining forces, but rather as active interpreters of a salvific vision. Once it has exhausted its historical role, the protective force may mutate into something else entirely. After all, the Roman Empire was, at different times, both the persecutor and the defender of Christians. Nero, one of the great persecutors of Christians, was a Roman emperor just like Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion. Thiel’s mentor, René Girard, saw this ambiguity clearly: “Christ and Antichrist are intermingled and concomitant until apocalypsis — the moment of revelation and decision — is reached.”

This tension runs through Thiel’s worldview. In our conversation, he traced the role of the katechon in 20th-century politics. “After 1948, Carl Schmitt struggled to identify a katechon in history,” Thiel told me. To his mind, the forces keeping away communism and secular liberalism were elusive. “My placeholder answer from 1949–1989 is anti-communism, which united the Reagan coalition of priests, generals, and millionaires against the one-world ideology of communism,” Thiel continued. But after the Cold War ended, they had to make a choice: “pack up and go home, or push George Bush Sr.’s ‘New World Order’: anti-Communism in a world with no more Communists.” The anti-communist coalition had to become something new.

The power that emerged to restrain evil thus became a creative power, a temptation experienced by many forces once regarded as preventers of evil. Anti-communist forces took different paths after the Cold War. Liberal internationalists and a segment of the Reaganites have refounded the globalist project, while Christian Democracy has hollowed out from within. “Christian democracy morphed into something neither Christian nor democratic,” says Thiel. “When Angela Merkel rose to power in 2005, the CDU became like KFC — they stopped saying the full name, just the acronym. With the name change, the Christian Democrats lost their souls.” What had for a time appeared to be a katechon ultimately revealed itself to be its opposite.

And what about the Antichrist? Rarely presented as an openly devilish figure bent on destruction, the Antichrist appears as a compelling unifying presence. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, in his Story of Antichrist, imagined him as a magnetic 33-year-old man with a PhD in theology and a genuine concern for the environment. His goal was not to destroy Christianity, but to domesticate the churches and unify them under his guidance and his vision of good governance. Similarly in Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Lord of the World, world leader Julian Felsenburgh is a charismatic figure who unites the globe under a tolerant version of socialism, promoting peace and safety for everyone — except rebellious Catholics. After the First World War, Pope Benedict XV warned against the “advent of a universal republic” in which “there is no longer any distinction of nationality”. The rise of a socialist international republic, he said, “would lead to terrible social convulsions”.

While the international project of communism is the most obvious example, Thiel detects this pattern in many historical phenomena. The spread of the Islamic Caliphate in Europe — from the Battle of Tours in 732 to the Siege of Vienna in 1683 — was, in his view, another attempt to impose a universal government. Today’s equivalent is what he calls “woke socialism”, or what post-liberal theorists would simply call “liberalism”. In this reading, the same structures of power that once restrained evil now serve as its stewards.

“You could argue that the US deep state and intelligence apparatus historically played a katechontic role,” Thiel explained. “Their secrecy allowed them to get away with all sorts of morally dubious activities in the name of stopping Communism or Islamic terrorism. But their secrecy also obscured their decay into their opposite. The USAID disclosures revealed just how far down that path they had slid,” Thiel went on, referring to how the foreign aid machine has been captured by woke ideology, supporting almost-parody programmes like drag shows for Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador, sex-change surgeries in Guatemala, or training Sri Lankan journalists to avoid “binary-gendered language”.

The elephant in this apocalyptic room is Donald Trump. No doubt his critics see him as an Antichrist of sorts, but in Thiel’s scheme, his role is open to interpretation. Is he a katechon? A katechon that may become the Antichrist? An unnecessary immanentisation? None of the above? Thiel wouldn’t say. But the growing realisation of how deeply woke-thinking has penetrated the administrative state has only increased Thiel’s confidence in Trump. He supported the President way before it was acceptable in tech circles, and many Silicon Valley converts to Trumpism now acknowledge he was ahead of his time. Plus, he’s a mentor to Vice President J.D. Vance, who began his path toward Catholicism after hearing Thiel give a speech at Yale. Trump doesn’t sound like a great candidate to turn out as the Antichrist.

The view that Trump is a katechontic figure is widespread on the religious Right. Conservative writer Rod Dreher has said he sees Trump as a katechon, even while sharply criticising aspects of his agenda. Interpreting Trump as a restraining force against evil allows for acknowledgment of his historical necessity — without excusing his flaws. Following this logic, some Evangelicals argue that Trump’s character must be judged against the backdrop of the end times.

“Before the US election, I told Elon Musk that I would leave the country in the case of a Trump defeat,” Thiel told me. “He replied, ‘There’s nowhere to go.’ He believed the US would export woke socialism across the globe.” And not just across the globe. The ideology unleashed in these apocalyptic times, Thiel warns, has interplanetary reach. “For me, 2024 will be remembered as the year Elon gave up on Mars — not as a technological project but as a political project — because he realised that this threat would follow him into outer space if he didn’t address it here on Earth.”

Whatever role Trump plays — katechon or Antichrist or both — Thiel’s main concern is in revitalising apocalyptic thinking, something late modernity has largely rejected. But not entirely. “I think many people, including within the Catholic world, are thinking in apocalyptic terms, but admitting it remains taboo,” he said, explaining his almost mystical fascination with Benedict XVI.

“I believe Benedict XVI saw our time that way. There was an official teaching stating that the Church, confronted with rampant secularisation, would become smaller and purer. But then there was the secret belief — that we are witnessing signs of the end times. In my view, one reason he wouldn’t openly discuss it is that doing so would be accelerationist, hastening the arrival of the eschaton. My rebuttal to Benedict would be that things could not possibly have accelerated faster down that path than they did.”

Thiel is battling for the return of apocalyptic thinking, a profound shift in how we understand history, power, and the limits of human agency. Modernity, with its faith in inevitable progress and institutional stability, long sought to exile the apocalyptic imagination, viewing it as irrational and disruptive. But in the age marked by technological acceleration and looming existential threats, the end-times narrative has regained its grip on the political imagination. For Thiel, politics and theology are ultimately the same thing — each grounded in a vision of ultimate salvation or catastrophe. The resurgence of the apocalyptic reveals not just a fear of collapse but a hunger for meaning, a search for the forces that restrain or unleash history’s final dramas. In this light, political discourse is no longer just about policy or governance; it is once again about destiny.


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