It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached \u201cgood news\u201d to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.<\/p>\n
Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus\u2019s name and the Bible\u2019s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video<\/a> from the Department of Homeland Security, using the \u201cHere I am, Lord. Send me\u201d quotation from Isaiah \u2014 commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression \u2014 to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth\u2019s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, \u201cIs the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?\u2026 The answer is yes.\u201d He then added: \u201cThe Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible<\/a> does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.\u201d<\/p>\n A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God<\/a> to bless America\u2019s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): \u201cAnd in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle<\/a> on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president\u2019s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus\u2019s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)<\/p>\n The Antichrist<\/strong><\/p>\n And if that weren\u2019t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic \u201creligious\u201d beliefs that go with it.<\/p>\n In Vanity Fair<\/em> this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley<\/a>: \u201cI guarantee you,\u201d one Christian entrepreneur told her, \u201cthere are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, his theological beliefs<\/a> grimly complement his political ones. \u201cWhen you don\u2019t have a transcendent religious belief,\u201d he said, \u201cyou end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.\u201d Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive \u201cprogress\u201d \u2014 a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn\u2019t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.<\/p>\n More recently, Thiel has positioned himself \u201cright\u201d in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump\u2019s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives<\/a> (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump\u2019s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin<\/a>, the fellow who \u201cjokingly\u201d claimed<\/a> that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn\u2019t be more incompatible with Christianity\u2019s core tenets.)<\/p>\n Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale<\/a>, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That\u2019s right, there\u2019s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump\u2019s demand<\/a> that \u201cthe homeless have to move out immediately\u2026 FAR from the Capital.\u201d In July, Trump produced an executive order<\/a> facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don\u2019t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren\u2019t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and \u201cblue cities\u201d; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders<\/a> being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.<\/p>\n On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series<\/a> on the \u201cantichrist\u201d through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective<\/a> that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.<\/p>\n For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview<\/a> with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times<\/em>, Michelle Stephens describes how \u201cwe are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized\u2026 I think we\u2019ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.\u201d<\/p>\n In an article at the Denison Forum<\/a>, she\u2019s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, \u201cThose who see Christ\u2019s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society\u2019s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.\u201d Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.<\/p>\n A Battle for the Bible<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders<\/a> quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul\u2019s epistles to claim<\/a> that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping<\/a> the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a \u201cprosperity gospel<\/a>\u201d that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.<\/p>\n Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for \u201claw and order\u201d (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump\u2019s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended<\/a> the administration\u2019s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul\u2019s epistle to the Romans: \u201cI would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.\u201d<\/p>\n White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: \u201cIt is very biblical to enforce the law.\u201d And in his\u00a0first speech as speaker<\/a> of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, \u201cI believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,\u201d an echo of the New Testament\u2019s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that \u201cthe authorities that exist are appointed by God.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Screenshot-2025-09-08-at-9.59.25-AM.png\")
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