Tech Revivalism, plus the Psychedelic Safety Summit

Notes from a week in the Bay Area

Welcome to Tuesdsay Brunch, a round-up of interesting stories I’m following. First bit is free, second just for paid subscribers.

I spent last week in the Bay Area, mainly attending the Psychedelic Safety Summit in Berkeley. More on that below. While in San Francisco, I went to Epic Church on Sunday. Epic is at the centre of a supposed ‘tech revival’, ie tech people turning to Christ. At least, it’s the church of Garry Tan, head of YCombinator; Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel; and Trae Stephens, founder of defence tech company Anduril. Trae and his wife Michelle set up an organisation called ACTS17 to reach out to leaders in tech and other sectors and try and bring them to the Lord.

That’s part of a broader effort to (1) encourage traditional values in Silicon Valley including more patriotism and more willingness to work in defence (the subject of a newish book by Alex Karp, the founder of Palantir), and (2) encourage leaders in business, culture and politics to return to traditionalist values via organisations like Teneo and Opus Dei. A lot of this stems from the intricate plans of the Bay Area’s very own Cardinal Richeliu , Peter Thiel. He funded Palantir, Anduril and Teneo and has links to Opus Dei going back 40 years.

Peter Thiel is betting on the apocalypse

But the Bay Area turning to Christianity? It sounds a stretch. I mean, yes the charismatic revival of the 20th century has deep roots in California, from the Los Angeles Azusa Street Revival of 1906 (the birthplace of Pentecostalism) to the Vineyard church of the 1960s (also in Los Angeles). It’s just that the Bay Area seems so Rationalist / secular / counter-cultural / polyamorous / LGBTQ+ / woke / transhumanist.

So I went along to Epic Church, wondering if it would be literally some sort of tech church, where we’d be greeted by ChatGPT before plugging into VR headsets.

In fact it was very reminiscent of Holy Trinity Brompton (the Anglican-Charismatic church I went to in London) or any other mainstream charismatic church - a slick operation, from the smiling hosts welcoming you, to the free coffee in the lobby, to the rock band playing Coldplay-esque worship songs, to the focus on getting you involved and volunteering, to the same basic service format of 2 worship songs / church news and upcoming events / 30-minute sermon with a big emphasis on personal growth / invitation to prayer / one more worship song and then exit.

It was reassuringly familiar. Maybe what was new was offering this format to Bay Area tech people. It seems to be going down well - Epic has three services on Sundays, and the one I went to was packed. Ben Pilgreen, the pastor and executive coach who founded the church in 2010, suggested attendance has boomed in the last few weeks since Epic has been featured in articles in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, San Francisco Standard and The Information on ‘Silicon Valley’s surprising turn to God’. They have four services planned for Easter Sunday. ‘God is moving here’, Ben told the congregation in his Georgia drawl. ‘Can I get a witness?’

Honestly, I enjoyed the service. I like going to this sort of church, it’s familiar to me from my time in HTB. Ben is a good preacher, and I like taking 90 minutes to give thanks to God and reflect on my relationship to IT (God, I mean, not Information Technology). Here are five thoughts I went away with.

1. Ben occasionally spoke about ‘secular business’ and ‘secular culture’ as something that surrounds them in San Francisco but they will somehow resist and transform. This is classic charismatic speak - they can sometimes think of themselves as a sort of underground rebellion surrounded by ‘secular culture’ yet resistant to it, a true counter-culture. However, at the same time these sorts of churches are deeply influenced by secular business culture (and vice versa). The service occasionally reminded me of a tech product launch - ‘we’re growing so fast’, ‘we’re so excited to bring new people to Epic’, ‘go out and tell your colleagues and fellow students and loved ones, sign them up’, ‘you can follow along on the Epic app’, and so on. I notice they’re relying on the Alpha course (developed at Holy Trinity Brompton in London) for their outreach to companies and campuses. HTB also reminded me, sometimes, of a very slick business. So many charismatic churches have a sort of ‘rapid scale-up / bigger is better / bums on seats / tell your friends’ focus, which is not so very different from secular companies (especially tech companies). In other words, Christian culture is not so very counter-cultural to business culture, especially tech culture. The ‘scale-up as quick as possible and aim for the rapture’ dominant narrative of Silicon Valley is, of course, super-Christian.

2. In addition, these sorts of charismatic churches often teach a sort of therapy-lite or personal growth, which is hardly counter-cultural. Ben is an executive coach as well as pastor.

3. However, there is a clear difference between secular self-help and the sort of personal growth offered in these churches. What I really appreciated about Ben’s sermon was the idea of relying on God rather than on the self. He preached to an audience which would include some very rich people who have built some very big companies and maybe felt the Silicon Valley tendency to think of oneself as a God-like founder. And he preached the gospel into that: ‘You can’t do it on your own. Tough stuff is going to occur - death, divorce, mental illness, financial failure and so on. Things that are beyond your capacity to deal with. But they’re not beyond God’s capacity to deal with’. I agree - and that’s an interesting message for Silicon Valley, considering its fondness for Stoicism, transhumanism, Rationalism and other self-reliant philosophies. The Economist has a cover story on transhumanism and the search for the ‘superhuman’ through tech, this week (yes, another aspect of Peter Thiel). And the message of the Gospels is basically: the path to self-transcendence and ‘superhumanity’ goes through the Cross, it goes through suffering and humility and self-abnegation and service to others. Not through stem cell injections and other tech (although maybe that’s good too).

4. On that topic, there are some very wealthy people in the church (as there are in the HTB network in London). How does the church connect to the poorest people in San Francisco? Does it run, say, a soup kitchen?

5. I imagine Epic like other charismatic churches is socially conservative - frowning on sex before marriage, homosexuality, psychedelic drugs, and so on. How does that go down in the Bay Area? Who knows. Maybe the Bay Area is going trad.

Anyway, as I said, I enjoyed the service. Let’s keep an eye on what might emerge in the Bay Area trad revival.

OK, after the paywall, some brief reflections on the Psychedelic Safety Summit.