(RNS) — Within the waning days of October, a number of hundred individuals gathered on the Life Middle, a megachurch in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a city corridor organized by the Trump marketing campaign. Attendees chatted excitedly as they filed into the church’s cavernous sanctuary.
However when the occasion started, the speaker who strutted onstage wasn’t former President Donald Trump, or one in every of his evangelical Christian promoters. As an alternative, it was Elon Musk, the billionaire proprietor of SpaceX rocket firm, Tesla electrical vehicles and the social media platform as soon as generally known as Twitter.
Musk, the richest man on the planet, has lengthy approached faith with suspicion, and a few within the viewers have been skeptical: One requested what was “retaining” him from believing in God.
“I consider within the teachings of Christ,” replied Musk, whose jacket was adorned with a NASA emblem and a mission patch of one in every of his rocket tasks. “I consider within the Christian rules: Love thy neighbor, flip the opposite cheek — which is essential to have forgiveness. As a result of for those who don’t have forgiveness, then you will have an countless cycle of retribution.”
Musk then expounded, giving an uncommon tackle “flip the opposite cheek,” arguing that Christ’s edict ought to solely apply if you’re already “sturdy” and never if you’re weak. “When you’re dealing with a type of a predatory menace, and that menace is stronger than you and that menace doesn’t consider in Christian values, then you’ll simply get, you realize, executed,” he stated, including he doesn’t consider the concept is prevalent “within the Center East.”
The alternate signaled a brand new stage in Musk’s shift from insisting science and faith can’t coexist to describing himself as a “cultural Christian.” Unusual because the metamorphosis could seem, students and consultants on the nonreligious say it’s a part of a broader pattern amongst secular thought leaders and Massive Tech entrepreneurs. As soon as seen as a bastion of liberalism, Silicon Valley leaders have more and more echoed concepts from conservative Christianity on matters from household measurement to transgender rights. At occasions, their concepts have appeared to overhaul conventional religion as a guiding power for conservatives.
Elon Musk speaks as a part of a marketing campaign city corridor in help of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump in Folsom, Pa., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Picture/Matt Rourke)
Because the election, Musk, who as soon as criticized Trump’s character, has turn into a daily on the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort and can co-lead a nongovernmental advisory group tasked with slicing authorities spending. Some critics argue his relationship with Trump is one in every of comfort, on condition that Musk’s companies stand to learn from a sympathetic administration.
However students on the nonreligious argue that his rapprochement with Christianity goes deeper. Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise, sees Musk’s pivot as “the least stunning factor ever.”
“He’s the prophet-in-chief of this new wave of extremely spiritual expertise that could be a dominant power within the present Republican coalition,” Epstein stated. “I’d say that conventional Christian preachers are nonetheless a pillar, in fact, of (Trump’s) administration and what it stands for, however they’ve at the least been joined, if not outdated, by a unique model of preacher.”
Epstein argues in a brand new e-book, “Tech Agnostic: How Expertise Grew to become the World’s Most Highly effective Faith, and Why It Desperately Wants a Reformation,” that “the tech itself has turn into the item of worship” in Silicon Valley, notably synthetic intelligence, commemorated in some minds for its potential to both destroy the human race or rid it of all its ills.
Musk has come to be a “sort of papal determine” amongst tech moguls, Epstein stated. Although he has readily invested in AI, Musk has voiced considerations about its probably cataclysmic risks. Musk can be given to apocalyptic visions of ferrying people to Mars, avoiding our “extinction” by being “bi-planetary.”
Apocalypse can be a prevailing idea in Christianity, and more and more, our secular politics, in response to Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media research on the College of Oregon College of Journalism and Communication. In her new e-book, “The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Faith, Media, and Politics,” Phillips and co-author Mark Brockway describe evangelicals’ depictions of a cosmic battle between good and evil, the latter personified by “the liberal satan.”
At the moment’s politics, Phillips stated, furnish “an apocalypse you could take a chew out of now, as a result of the liberal satan is already right here.”
In Musk’s model, stated Phillips, evil is “wokeness” or the “woke thoughts virus,” which the billionaire associates with liberal identification politics he insists is forwarded by The New York Occasions, Nationwide Public Radio, larger training, artwork and video video games and X competitor Bluesky, amongst different targets. Wokeness, in response to Musk, is “completely the faith that occupies the area beforehand held by Christianity.”
Musk’s political “finish occasions” imaginative and prescient was laborious to think about again in 2013, when he climbed right into a Seventies-era Volkswagen van to report a podcast with actor Rainn Wilson, who performed Dwight Schrute in “The Workplace.” Wilson, a Baha’i, requested a collection of religion-related questions, urgent the tycoon on whether or not he had a “non secular life.”
“I’m much less satisfied that there’s, say, some superconsciousness watching over our each motion and sort of evaluating it towards some standards, and deciding whether or not we’re going to go to 1 place or one other after we die,” Musk stated. “I feel that’s unlikely.”
Can science and faith coexist?, Wilson requested. “In all probability not,” Musk stated. Do you pray? “I don’t. I didn’t even pray after I virtually died of malaria.”
Elon Musk joins Rainn Wilson on a podcast in 2013. (Video display screen seize)
Ultimately, Musk defined that he attracts his philosophy from Douglas Adams’ comedic science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy,” by which the which means of life comes not from discerning solutions, Musk stated, however from discovering the “proper query.”
Eight years later he sat for an additional podcast interview, this time with The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative Christian web site. Requested what e-book he would add to the Bible, Musk named Adams’ novel, however famous he was raised Anglican and attended Hebrew day college as a toddler. Issues took an evangelical flip close to the tip of the interview, when the co-hosts requested Musk to simply accept Jesus.
As tender piano music performed within the background, Musk expressed respect for Jesus’ teachings and referred to Einstein, saying, “I consider within the God of Spinoza, however hey, if Jesus is saving individuals, I received’t stand in his approach.”
“I feel he simply stated sure,” a co-host replied. One other joked, “We acquired him.”
His connection to the Bee proved pivotal. In 2022, the web site’s Twitter account was suspended after its publication of a narrative broadly condemned as anti-trans. In keeping with paperwork filed in a ensuing lawsuit, Musk, who has referred to his transgender daughter as having been “killed by the woke thoughts virus,” exchanged outraged texts together with his ex-wife Talulah Jane Riley after information of the Twitter suspension broke. Musk wrote, “Possibly purchase it and alter it to correctly help free speech.”
By October, he owned the platform. Three weeks after he took over, the Bee’s account was reinstated.
Jordan Peterson, left, interviews Elon Musk. (Video display screen seize)
Then, in a July interview with Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with a big male following, Peterson, carrying a blazer coated in Christian iconography, requested Musk, “In what sense, then, are you not spiritual?”
“I’d say that I’m most likely a cultural Christian,” replied Musk. He additionally later agreed with Peterson, who has each recognized as a Christian and known as God “the final word fictional character,” that he most well-liked societies premised on “Christian axiomatic assumptions.”
Musk, Epstein stated, might really feel out of sync together with his onetime nonreligious neighborhood, which has not taken the identical rightward flip as he has. Epstein pointed to exit polls indicating that religiously unaffiliated voters have been one of many solely main teams that trended extra liberal quite than extra conservative within the November election.
“For Elon Musk or any person like him, cultural and secularized Christianities is usually a supply of social energy or social affirmation of his goodness and greatness, when different, extra historically secular humanist atheist communities and teams would possibly reject his declare or need to be seen as a sort of messianic determine,” he stated.
Epstein stated Musk seemingly finds widespread trigger for his views on transgender rights in corners of Christianity that he in any other case might not agree with theologically. Conservative Christians might also help Musk’s embrace of “pronatalism” — his perception that individuals ought to have extra youngsters in an effort to stave off inhabitants collapse. (“I’m tremendous pro-baby,” Musk, who has fathered of 12 youngsters, instructed the group in Harrisburg.)
Conservative Christians, in flip, having more and more embraced Musk as a fellow political believer if not a professed follower of Jesus. The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, has repeatedly praised Musk on X, and the pastor at Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Tennessee, the place Trump’s nominee for protection secretary, Pete Hegseth, attends, stated Musk’s removing of “censorships” on X is a “enormous blessing.”
On the Trump occasion at Harrisburg, one viewers member requested Musk whether or not he believed Jesus Christ was “an actual one who was crucified and died, and is risen, and God is Jesus.” Musk requested the questioner what he meant by “actual particular person,” and ultimately acknowledged he believed Jesus “is actual,” however rapidly moved on with out addressing the person’s theological factors.
However Musk’s reply gave the impression to be sufficient for the viewers, and when it later cheered him after he known as liberals “enemies of democracy,” Musk gave the impression to be extra comfy conflating his type of cultural Christianity, nevertheless outlined, with tradition struggle.
