Christianity Rising in Silicon Valley (#353)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You Have Permission is now Religion on the Mind! Look for our updated artwork in your podcast feed and listen to this episode for more about what you can expect with the new name. In this episode, I sit down with Zoë Bernard, a writer and journalist who wrote a fascinating piece about Christianity's surprising resurgence in Silicon Valley. I share my own experience growing up evangelical in the Valley during the dot-com era—a time when religion, especially Christianity, felt distinctly uncool in tech circles. Zoë and I explore how dramatically things have shifted: where tech leaders once kept their faith quiet or embraced new atheism, figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk now publicly identify with Christianity, and startups in places like El Segundo are hosting Bible studies. We dig into what's driving this change—from the moral complexity of working in AI and defense tech, to the perceived failures of "wokeism" as a secular replacement for religion, to the hollow feeling many successful tech workers experience despite their wealth. I push back on some of the tensions I see between Silicon Valley's uber-capitalism and Jesus's actual economic teachings, while Zoë offers insights from her time embedded with young Christian entrepreneurs who are reshaping tech culture. We close by considering how AI might fundamentally alter spirituality itself—a conversation we'll definitely need to continue. Zoe's Website | Zoe-bernard.com Zoe's Article | https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2025/4/god-complex ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everybody to Religion on the Mind, the podcast focused on the intersection of psychology, religion, and spirituality.
0:16.8	I am your host, Dr. Dan Koch.
0:18.5	I'm a licensed therapist and a researcher in the psychology of religion.
0:23.4	And my guest today is Zoe Bernard, a Los Angeles-based feature writer and contributing editor at Vanity Fair,
0:31.1	who's also covered startups and tech culture for the information and business insider.
0:40.6	Zoe, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having you, Dan. So the main kind of structure or focus of our conversation, but we will surely stray a bit,
0:47.4	is this big story you wrote for Vanity Fair back in the spring. The link, I was able to read it
0:53.2	without a paywall, so we'll put a link in
0:55.1	the show notes. And I think that as long as you haven't, dear listener, used up your one free
0:59.9	Vanity Fair article per month, I think you too will be able to read it for free without a paywall.
1:05.1	But it's basically about the rise of Christianity in Silicon Valley, in particular. There's some other things that you've written
1:13.0	about in the last couple years that might come up, you know, sort of masculinity in Silicon Valley
1:18.4	and in men's media, maybe cryptocurrency and this sort of religion, spirituality angle,
1:25.4	as well as you've spent some time with the radical life extension
1:29.4	folks. And all three of those are the type of thing that might come in to this conversation
1:34.5	today. But we're going to start talking about Silicon Valley. Now, Zoe, I grew up in Silicon
1:40.0	Valley. I'm 42 years old. I was born in 1983. And I lived there within a 10 mile radius of
1:47.0	San Jose until I left for college in 2001. Many of my friends growing up had parents who worked in
1:53.4	computers and tech. If you know the kind of history of that world, like I was basically in high
1:59.2	school during the dot com bubble, the pets.com era, if you will.
2:05.6	My friend in fifth grade who turned me from hip hop and R&B to rock music, he lived five
2:12.1	houses down from Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple.
	...

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