by Selwyn Duke, The New American:
When it was alleged in 2023 that the message “Jesus died so you could live” was labeled “hate speech” by Facebook, it perhaps was not surprising. Two years later, however, something else surely is.
Christian code has entered Silicon Valley, we hear, and may be supplanting its notoriously secular programming. Apparently, man does not live by bits and bytes alone.
Yet how sincere is this movement? And will it really eradicate the woke mind virus? Or will it reflect what Barna Group research company president David Kinnaman lamented a decade ago? To wit: “Americans’ dedication to Jesus is, in most cases,” he said, “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
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Vanity Fair introduces the story in its April issue. In an essay titled “Christianity Was ‘Borderline Illegal’ in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion,” its Zoë Bernard writes:
[There] was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life. But no more. Christianity is now an object of fascination to the libertarian capitalists of the tech world.
Website Wired provided some details on this movement on March 14, informing that these tech titans are
promoting a new moral vision for the tech industry, in which job choices and other decisions are guided not by the pursuit of wealth, but according to Christian values and Western cultural frameworks.
At an event in San Francisco last week hosted in a former church, Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense contractor Anduril and a partner at the Peter Thiel–led venture capital firm Founders Fund, characterized the idea as the pursuit of “good quests” or careers that make the future better, a concept that he said has theological underpinnings.
“I’m literally an arms dealer,” Stephens said at one point, prompting laughter from the crowd of roughly 200 people, which included Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. “I don’t think all of you should be arms dealers, but that’s a pretty unique calling.”
The hour-long discussion was part of a series of ticketed gatherings organized by ACTS 17 Collective, a nonprofit founded last year by Stephens’ wife, health care startup executive Michelle Stephens. The group, whose name is an acronym that stands for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” is on a mission to “redefine success for those that define culture,” she says.
Meaning Over Mammon
Michelle believes she’s responding to a need — if not a craving. Tech workers are typically ensconced in the worldly, defining success in terms of pocketbook and power. This often leaves them with a sense of meaninglessness, so Michelle renders a prescription. “[S]uccess can [instead] be defined as loving God, myself, and others,” she says.
That certainly is an ethereal message. And since, as she correctly said, tech bigwigs “define culture,” they can do much to re-popularize a faith wrongly impugned. Yet there is an issue: Are these “converts” sincere?
And what, exactly, are they sincere about?
As The Atlantic related Thursday, citing the Vanity Fair essay:
Bernard’s article makes clear that some converts are cynical characters merely pretending at Christianity. “I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel,” one entrepreneur told Bernard. But even if a significant proportion of the new believers are entirely sincere, that doesn’t mean their theology is copacetic. Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It’s a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love.
Designer Religion
The Atlantic then states that this Silicon Valley Christianity is infected with a certain virus: the “prosperity gospel.” This essentially promises that “moral” rectitude will be rewarded with riches. And then there’s also the following, from the Wired article again, quoting Michelle Stephens:
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