Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, Nashville
Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures come to Music City, USA.
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Arena Magazine promotes its reporting on Peter Thiel's lectures about the biblical Antichrist in Nashville. The magazine's Carson Becker reports on the exclusive event, which was also previously held in Rome and San Francisco. The lectures sparked a local firestorm and raised questions about Thiel's motivations for giving them.
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Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, Nashville
Arena's Carson Becker reports from Nashville, where investor Peter Thiel gave a quartet of lectures about the biblical Antichrist.
For the last four Mondays, in a vault-like neoclassical building that houses the Masonic Grand Lodge of Tennessee, behind a perimeter of armed guards and metal detectors, Peter Thiel held court in downtown Nashville before an audience as captivated as it was varied.
Among the crowd: out-of-town tech bros, writers, and online influencers; throngs of married couples from the Nashville suburbs, local pastors, college students, and musicians. They were sporting everything from suits and ties to Ted Kaczynski T-shirts, neck tattoos, and boot-cut jeans. A few blocks away lay the neon signs and booze halls of Broadway, with its live music and hordes of drunken tourists: the permanent, daily replication of the best of an American college town on a Friday night, busy even on this fine succession of autumn Mondays. So close to that carefree revelry, the weight of Thiel’s words could seem jarring.
“I’m worried about the Antichrist,” he said. Over four weeks as the weather started to turn, he explained why.
Versions of these lectures focused on the biblical Antichrist had previously taken place in Rome on a secretive, invite-only basis and in San Francisco last year (that event in the AI capital of the world was ticketed and strictly off the record). Some attendees who even tweeted photos of the San Francisco lectures had their tickets revoked.
The Nashville series was the most public-facing yet (a small number of outlets, including Arena, were invited to write about the lectures) and it sparked a local firestorm when it was announced in mid-September. Anyone who attended was confronted with a pair of obvious questions: why is Peter Thiel, one of the world’s most influential billionaires, bothering to give these lectures at all? And why, of all places, did he choose to give them in Nashville, a city known mainly as the capital of country music and bachelorette trips?
Davis Hunt, editor-in-chief of The Pamphleteer, the local publication that hosted the lectures (along with Meriwether Academy) introduced Thiel on stage each week. Hunt makes the case that Nashville is “a bastion of Christian values” and that it has a civilizational role that extends far beyond its well-earned reputation as a party town. The Tennessee capital is a center of American Protestant intellectual life, thanks to a significant publishing industry and a music tradition descended from Christian gospel. The Southern Baptist Convention, headquartered nearby, is the largest non-Catholic Christian denomination in the United States, and the area is home to a wide range of Protestant institutions, from the Presbyterian Church in America to many evangelical churches.
In his closing remarks, Thiel painted the city as the “global capital of Protestantism,” with an important role to play in the future of the West, not just America.
Any gathering dedicated to a topic as weighty as “the Antichrist” is bound to cause misunderstandings. As if to prove the point, one local reporter, apparently worried about “Christian nationalism,” waited outside, photographing attendees as they entered the venue and uploading the images online. Digital sleuths attempted to identify them by their unsuspecting faces. This behavior assumed that those in attendance were by-and-large Thiel’s followers. In fact, the crowd ranged from Thiel-aligned to open-minded to deeply-skeptical. Most, by the look of it, were merely curious, and in a series of formal and informal afterparties his ideas were debated, disagreed over, and discussed late into the evening.
The photographers and protesters didn’t stick around.
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