The Gospel According to MAGA

“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop.”

So says Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, early investor in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and, judging by this quote, a man blessed with the enviable ability to completely miss the irony of his own statements.

Thiel’s core argument is simple: the Antichrist would weaponise existential threats to usher in totalitarianism. He sees the left’s apocalyptic rhetoric on climate change, personified by Greta Thunberg, as a Trojan horse for control. Preach global warming, he suggests, and you inevitably preach regulation: you can’t have the energy you want; you can’t have the cars you want; you can’t have the progress you want.

For Thiel, resisting this “safetyism” means siding with Trump and the populist right. As he put it: “I’ll take whatever progress I can get.”

This vision of the Antichrist shapes Thiel’s entire worldview. “Christianity,” he says, “is the prism through which I see the entire world.” On a New York Times podcast, he invoked 1 Thessalonians 5:3:

“The slogan of the Antichrist is ‘peace and safety.’ And we’ve submitted to it for fifty years.”

Owing to that ‘missing irony’ trait, Thiel doesn’t seem to notice how neatly his critique maps onto his own political allies. Earlier this year, J.D. Vance declared immigration the “greatest threat” facing the world – MAGA’s apocalyptic preaching. Vance repeatedly hails Trump as the “President of peace,” while the GOP itself branded them the “pro-peace ticket” during the campaign. Meanwhile, Trump and Vance openly menace the free press, undermine judicial independence, and trample state sovereignty. If the Antichrist exploits existential panic to seize control, what exactly are Vance and Trump doing?

Thiel isn’t an ignorant podcaster like Joe Rogan; nor is he an inflammatory extremist like Nick Fuentes. He belongs to a different wing of the MAGA coalition – the intellectual class. Rogan jokes about vaccines; Fuentes shouts about race; Thiel pens essays like The Straussian Moment and delivers lectures on Nietzsche, Plato, and the Second Coming of Christ.

Thiel also mentors JD Vance. In 2011, J.D. Vance first met Peter Thiel after a talk Thiel gave at Yale. Reflecting on that encounter years later in a Catholic magazine, Vance described it as “the most significant moment of my time [at Yale].” Thiel, he said, was “possibly the smartest person” he had ever met and shattered the “social template” Vance had carried with him—namely, “that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists.”

That meeting began a long mentorship. Thiel brought Vance into his firm Mithril Capital, and later backed Vance’s own venture capital company, Narya Capital, and ultimately played matchmaker between Vance and Donald Trump. It was Thiel who organised Vance’s meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to walk back his ‘never-Trump’ status.

From there, the path was clear: Vance downplayed the January 6th insurrection, secured Trump’s endorsement for his 2022 Senate run, and rode a wave of Thiel-fuelled financing. Thiel himself donated $15 million – the largest single contribution to a Senate candidate in U.S. history – and lined up roughly ten other major donors, including David Sacks, who chipped in $1 million.

Fast forward to February of this year.

Appearing on Fox News, J.D. Vance invoked a theological term: ordo amoris, or “the order of love”, to defend the administration’s sweeping cancellation of U.S. foreign aid programs. According to Vance, this policy was pure Thomism: “We should love our family first, then our neighbours, then our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world. […] As an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens.”

By Vance’s logic, the Good Samaritan made a grave mistake – he should have checked the traveller’s passport before binding his wounds. The problem is that Christ’s command to “love thy neighbour” was never meant in the narrow, geographical sense Vance implies. It does not mean “love those in your neighbourhood”; it means love all human beings without regard to borders or tribe.

Vance’s reading collapses the universality of the Gospel into something that conveniently aligns with nationalist policy. Vance himself credits Augustine’s City of God as pivotal in his conversion to Catholicism. In the book, Augustine distinguishes between the City of God, built on the love of God, and the City of Man, built on self-love and power.

The MAGA intellectuals collapse this distinction, baptizing the City of Man as if it were the City of God. By making faith a servant to the state, it can no longer challenge injustice or call rulers to account. Instead, it blesses whatever serves power.

We have seen versions of this before, and the outcome is never gospel fidelity. It is compromise against what was supposed to be sacred and uncompromised. Trump’s election in 2016 was not just a political shift; it was a theological one.

The old religious conservatism, which had long appealed to principles and personal morality, suffered a decisive blow. In its place emerged religious populism, driven by the intellectual class of MAGA – thinkers like Vance who cloak nationalist aims in the language of scripture.

This new religious posture treats America not as a nation accountable to moral law but as a people whose history, culture, and power justify subordinating the gospel to political ends. Compassion is rationed, and the moral law ends at the water’s edge.

The intellectual class of MAGA may quote Aquinas and Augustine, but in subordinating the radical universality of the gospel to nationalist self-interest, they turn theology into ideology. The danger is not in the speeches of Greta Thunberg, or in apocalyptic references to “peace and safety.”

The danger is a gospel reshaped to serve a party policy aim.

What should be sacred is now a tool of expedience; what should be universal is now conditional. The result is a faith that blesses oppression, excuses cruelty, and rationalizes exclusion – a faith emptied of its moral force.