Is Christianity the New Religion of Silicon Valley?

Christianity in tech, New Calvinism, the growing gender divide in church and more in this week's digest.

What I’ve been reading: Flight of the WASP by Michael Gross

Here’s a picture of the print edition my profile in the New York Times.

The times also printed a number of letters to the editor in response to the piece, which was the featured article of the day by the Times and drew a large readership.

In honor of my Times profile, I’m removing the paywall on my popular piece about the four conservative aesthetic styles for the next 30 days. Read it while it’s open.

The Four American Conservative Aesthetic Styles

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The Christians Rising in Silicon Valley

Vanity Fair just published a big article about Christianity in Silicon Valley. It’s similar to the one the Times published not long ago, but in a more magazine feature style. Some excerpts:

It 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. For many years, the running joke—popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley—was that in the Bay Area, Christianity was “borderline illegal.”

Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley.

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Nowadays, Christianity is rarely met with direct hostility in Silicon Valley. But there is still the lingering sense—at least in intellectual circles—that practicing it is a “faux pas,” said Michelle Stephens, who is Trae Stephens’s wife and the founder of the organization hosting the Code & Cosmos event, ACTS 17 Collective. (The organization is named after a passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which the apostle Paul visits ancient Greece and preaches the gospel to intellectuals.) “Like, how are you a smart person,” she asked, “and a Christian?”

This is a secular source confirming my “negative world” concept. Note the reference to “pointed hostility” to Christianity. And while the author notes the vibe shift towards a reduction of that hostility, she also notes that Christianity is still low status.

You’ll also note that the roster of major public Silicon Valley Christians appears to be very thin. The same three names keep recurring in these pieces: Peter Thiel, Garry Tan, and Trae Stephens. (Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel, is another, although not mentioned in this piece). This belies the idea that Christianity is the “new religion” of Silicon Valley.

Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted, and along with them, a factory-fresh founder prototype emerged. It used to be that the 20-something whiz kid who coded a viral game and dropped out of Stanford was a venture capitalist darling. “VCs used to throw money at that guy,” said a woman who manages communications at a top-tier venture firm. “Now if someone comes in and says, ‘I love my parents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work ethic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’ ” The inception of this platonic ideal could be traced to the publication of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s essay, “It’s Time to Build,” in which he argued that over the last few decades, American innovation has fallen short.

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“No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” said that same venture capital communications exec. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’ ”

Note here the suggestion that the growth in religion is fashion related. I think it is clear that in some sense, Christianity is having a moment, though one more countercultural than society transforming.

In the cutthroat world of venture funding, founders are often taught to have a competitive advantage—or what the industry calls an edge—against their peers. When Thiel said in 2015 that many of Silicon Valley’s successful entrepreneurs seem to have a mild form of Asperger’s, overnight “kids started putting on an autism effect to seem smarter,” one entrepreneur recalled. “Like, you’re not on the spectrum, you’re just socially awkward and you’re trying to seem smart.” These days, he argued, the same effect that engendered a class of people putting on neurodivergence is cultivating a new bent toward biblical altruism.

This could be especially appealing to anyone seeking to stand out in a monoculture in which polycules and ketamine are mundane but attending Sunday church service is subversive. “You know, in cities like San Francisco and New York, being a Christian is a little bit of a vice,” said a San Francisco consultant. In other words, the new religion is religion.

One Y Combinator–backed entrepreneur told me with obvious distaste how BookFace, Y Combinator’s internal social network, has lately filled up with pro-Christian messaging. It is, as Arjun Sethi, the co-CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Kraken, said, only the latest prototype in a system crowded by identity politics. “It’s surface. It’s a fad,” he said. “I think they are trying to replace ESG”—the socially conscious investing principle that prioritizes environmental, social, and governance issues—“with Christianity.”

“I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told me, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Whatever becomes a fad is guaranteed to fade at some point. Will people who become Christian or get interested in Christianity stay the course if the trends change?

Also, we see here an example of the growing trend of seeing Christianity as a utilitarian tool, helpful - at least people think - “to get close to Peter Thiel.” (Anybody at Thiel’s level is sure to see right through this sort of thing).

The Christians profile say they are leaning into the trend to get people in the door, then trying to close the deal on genuine conversion.

There’s a lot of interesting material in the article, so click through to read the whole thing.

The Future of New Calvinism

Tim Challies wrote an interesting piece on the future of New Calvinism, riffing off my original article on its maturation. Challies is an old school blogger who’s still going strong. And he’s part of the New Calvinism movement. So I was glad he thought I was right in some respects:

It seems to me that the movement sputtered on the basis of cultural factors as much as theological ones. Either way, it is now but a shadow of its former self and never reached the heights it had aspired to. As Renn says, “New Calvinism’s ability to project influence over the evangelical field has radically diminished.”

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Circling back to Renn, he says “New Calvinism has shifted from an ‘All-Star team’ model designed to exert influence over the broader evangelical world to a post-superstar model that primarily serves its own community.” That much seems demonstrably true. He also says that what remains best serves “educated strivers in urban centers, college towns, and professional class suburbs” and the movement should be content with this. I both agree and disagree.

In his view, much of the impact and legacy of New Calvinism is in foreign countries.

I have spent time with Christians in something like 40 different countries that span a host of languages and cultures. I have been amazed to see the reach and the impact of resources we associate with the New Calvinism. Way out in the bush in southern Africa, far from electrical grids or running water, I spotted an ESV Study Bible on a pastor’s desk beside a stack of MacArthur commentaries. Deep in the south of Chile, I had several people bring copies of my books in Spanish so I could sign them. In India, Brazil, Mexico, and Mozambique I’ve been to bookstores filled with the books this movement has created, all translated into local languages. I have seen trucks loaded with 9Marks books bumping along rutted roads to deliver them to far-off places where these may be the only books local pastors will own.

Click over to read the whole thing.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

There was a bit of a kerfuffle online about an article that appeared in the Presbyterian Church in America’s official publication, By Faith, about the Covid epidemic. It was written by Gregory Poland, a medical doctor who is also a PCA pastor.

What’s notable about this article is that reads like it could have been written in 2022 or 23. It entirely endorses the pro-public health establishment, pro-shutdown narrative, and rejects the critics as in effect sinners.

This was written at a time in which the new secular conventional wisdom is that the schools were shut down too long, that the lab leak hypothesis about Covid’s origins was improperly suppressed, and other such reappraisals of what happened during the pandemic. Even former NIH chief and evangelical Francis Collins, who some people dislike but who is undeniably a world class scientist, acknowledged mistakes in how Covid was handled.

You’d never know the world has moved on from 2022 by reading Poland’s article. It’s an example of how evangelicals are all too often a day late and a dollar short on engaging culture. That’s one reason why there’s so little evangelical influence in our society.

The Growing Gender Gap in Church

Daniel Cox at AEI released some new survey research showing a growing gender gap in church. Among Gen Z Christians, for example, there’s a large gender gap in views of sexuality issues.

His commentary:

A decade earlier, young Christian men and women were more aligned than they are today. In 2014, less than half of young Christian men (42 percent) and women (45 percent) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The gender gap in views of abortion has since quadrupled, with young Christian women becoming much more supportive of its legalization. This movement aligns with other surveys that show young women becoming increasingly supportive of abortion rights, especially after the Dobbs decision. Does this mean the growing gender divide among young Christians is due to young women moving left? Not so fast. When it comes to views on homosexuality the reverse is true. Young Christian women have hardly changed their views over the last decade, while young men have become less supportive.

This gap is aligned with the data around religious identification and adherence as well. The notable female skew in religiosity has disappeared among Gen Z, and there are even some signs more young men than women may be attending church.

I suspect some of this is due to political polarization by gender. With religion being right coded and more young men being conservative with young women being liberal, this reverses the traditional dynamic in religion. And in the contents of that religion for those who attend.

See also my piece on this from last fall.

Young Men Will Disrupt the American Church

Best of the Web

As a follow up to my piece about the growing divorce lit phenomenon, someone sent me two interesting pieces from Kirsten Sanders on the topic:

• What if you aren't the main character

• What on earth is happening to middle aged women?

Max Tani: Young conservative women build an alternative to the manosphere

Institute for Family Studies: America's Parents Are Civic Superheroes

Stiven Peter: Democracy After Nihilism

Jeff Giesea: The aesthetics of Trump 2.0

My friend’s snobbishness aside, there’s something interesting about the aesthetics of Trump 2.0 and Mar-a-Lago. “Looks” are definitely part of the vibe shift of Trump’s second term. Traditional gender roles, unapologetic cleavage, and guys who drive F150s are back. The shift is oddly refreshing.

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The aesthetic shift from Biden to Trump 2.0 feels like going from the sustainability co-ops of Oberlin to Greek Row at Ole Miss. Biden combined “slay queen” sensibilities with those of a sustainability club at an elite liberal arts school. Trump 2.0 is pure #BamaRush TikTok — frat house tours, sorority dance videos, and a celebration of middle-class, American pageantry.

It’s not just Trump aesthetics. There’s a shift in the mainstream world as well, even in fashion. The NYT reports that ultra-thin models are back, noting that “the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end.”

The Gospel Coalition: Peculiar, Yet Not Peculiar Enough: My Reflections on ARC 2025

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned this week in The New York Times, American Reformer, Mere Orthodoxy, and by the Lakelight Institute.

My Member only podcast this month is about people who are powered by the algorithm:

Become a Member today on Patreon (monthly) or right here on Substack (annually) and get exclusive access to a monthly Member podcast, a monthly member Zoom meeting, and our Member only private Slack channel.

New this week:

• The Middle Class and Striver Class Divide - The fundamental difference between building a life and seeking status advancement

• How Anora Signals the End of Hollywood's #MeToo Era - A film review by Joseph Holmes

• My regular podcast this week was with Dr. Christopher Schlect on the managerial revolution in American churches

I had originally thought Dr. Schlect’s dissertation was not available online, but apparently it is. This turned out to be a very popular podcast, so be sure to give it a listen.

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Post-Script

Elon Musk is frequently photographed with one of his children. Here’s one he posted on X.

I don’t believe these are always the same kid, but it appears to me that he is never seen with, and indeed rarely if ever sees, most of his 14 kids (by four different mothers). Think about how it is going to affect the kids he doesn’t see when they find the photographs of their dad with some of his other children.