In Silicon Valley, death can be treated like a technical problem. Data is collected, biomarkers are measured, protocols are tested, and companies aiming to slow or reverse aging are funded. Some entrepreneurs even undergo experimental interventions. Bryan Johnson, for example, tried plasma exchanges with his teenage son, but later discontinued the treatment after declaring it to be of no benefit, as Fortune reported. Other major investors, including Peter Thiel, fund companies engaged in longevity research, as Business Insider reports.

Research on aging is not, in and of itself, a religion. Curing a disease, alleviating suffering, or helping people live longer in good health are legitimate goals. The decisive shift occurs when technology no longer presents itself as a tool for treatment but as the promise of liberation from human finitude: when aging becomes a defect to be corrected and death a flaw that progress should, sooner or later, eliminate.

Here, medicine takes on a new meaning. It is no longer limited to combating certain ills; it is entrusted with the task of saving humanity from its present condition. A sort of technological soteriology thus emerges: salvation comes not from grace or a transcendent reality but from knowledge, biological engineering, and the ability to invest sufficient resources. The ultimate goal is no longer the healing of a specific person but the overcoming of mortality, indeed the attainment of immortality.

The parallel with Gnosticism must be handled with caution, as the doctrines of the early centuries were diverse and complex. But the similarity is significant: Man presumes to possess a knowledge capable of freeing him from the limitations of the corporeal condition. Just as in the past, at the time of the disputes involving St. Irenaeus, in certain Gnostic systems full salvation was associated with a spiritually privileged minority; today, in a vaguely similar manner, we see the presence of a small elite who toy with transcending human limitations. In contemporary technological design, however, the body is not necessarily rejected: it is redesigned, corrected, optimized. For this reason, the reference to Gnosticism is intertwined with another temptation: that of trusting in human abilities alone as the path to self-salvation.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has used similar categories to describe some contemporary trends. In the letter Placuit Deo of February 22, 2018, then-Prefect Archbishop Luis F. Ladaria, SJ, warns that, despite the very different historical context, some contemporary ideas bear similarities to ancient heresies. He defines the claim of self-sacrifice as “neo-Pelagian” and specifically cites the use of science and technology; he speaks of a “neo-Gnostic” tendency when liberation is understood as emancipation from the limitations of the body and matter, considered manipulable realities. This is not a condemnation of scientific research; it is a warning not to transform it into an absolute promise, ultimately into a secular religion that promises a “salvation” that is the polar opposite of Christianity.

In fact, we read in Placuit Deo:

Both neo-Pelagian individualism and neo-Gnostic contempt for the body disfigure the confession of faith in Christ, the sole and universal Savior. How could Christ mediate the Covenant of the entire human family if man were an isolated individual, self-realizing through his own efforts alone, as neo-Pelagianism proposes? And how could salvation come to us through the Incarnation of Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection in his true body, if the only thing that mattered was liberating man’s interiority from the limitations of the body and matter, according to the neo-Gnostic vision? Faced with these tendencies, this Letter wishes to reiterate that salvation consists in our union with Christ, who, with his Incarnation, life, death and resurrection, has generated a new order of relationships with the Father and among men, and has introduced us into this order thanks to the gift of his Spirit, so that we can unite ourselves to the Father as children in the Son, and become one body in the “firstborn among many brethren” (Rom 8:29).

The difference from the Christian faith, as can be seen, is profound. Catholic theology considers death a consequence of sin and, at the same time, affirms that the definitive victory over it does not consist in indefinitely prolonging biological life. Christian hope is resurrection in Christ. Medicine can cure and alleviate; it cannot redeem the human condition. This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, specifically paragraphs 1008-1010.

This distinction also helps us understand Thiel’s speech on the Antichrist. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known and controversial billionaires, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of eBay; Facebook’s first outside investor (2004); co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies (2003), a big data analytics and intelligence software company used by governments and companies; and a stakeholder in various venture capital funds. In his lectures, the billionaire has warned of the danger of a global power exploiting the fear of catastrophes to centralize control and curb technological progress. He has also linked activists and technology critics to this risk, as The Guardian reports. He later called Pope Leo XIV a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party , referring to his concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence. Thiel has clarified that he does not consider the Pope a conscious agent of the communists. It remains significant, however, that a call for moral prudence is traced back to a geopolitical dispute and discredited with an insult. Thus a tension emerges: Thiel fears a promise of security that justifies totalitarian control, but he attributes a crucial role to technological progress in defending human freedom and the future. If technology becomes the supreme good, those who set its limits risk being treated as enemies of salvation. The debate is no longer simply about which therapy is effective or which technology is safe; it concerns who has the authority to define human well-being.

The risk of a new secular religion arises when a small segment of the elite promises to defeat death with knowledge and power, and presents this project as humanity’s destiny. At that moment, technology is no longer simply a resource: it becomes a faith, with its saviors, its opponents, and its promise of redemption.

Faced with these epochal challenges, these new secular religions that promise salvation, the behavior of large sectors of the Church appears deeply disappointing and worrying. Entrepreneur and essayist Francesco Cicione also shares this view in an article published by Avvenire. Cicione writes:

We are at the heart of the paradox mentioned at the beginning. On the one hand, men who do not believe in transcendence construct a false religion of transcendence, having understood that it serves to increase their own power. On the other, those who have professed that transcendence for millennia are renouncing their own truth. We Christians renounce our religion in the name of political correctness. We don’t deny it, though. We disguise it to make it “presentable.” We remove what identifies us, keeping what appeals to the mainstream. We become mainstream ourselves. We deliver to the world and to history a Gospel that is watered down, inoffensive, compatible with any living room. And we call it dialogue. But a word with just one comma removed is no longer the same word: it changes species. It ceases to be the Word of God and becomes the word of man, and as such loses all saving power. We thought we were smoothing out its rough edges. Instead, we are altering its very nature.

This phenomenon, writes Cicione, is also found in the ancient wisdom traditions of the East:

The result is the society we inhabit: liquid, fluid, relativistic, artificial. Where nothing is nothing, everything becomes possible. Even the creation of gods. And so the contradiction is resolved. A false soteriology replaces the true soteriology. False religions, however, can never prevail over the true one. At most, they can temporarily fill the void it has left. The question arises, therefore: while the techno-turbo-capitalists-optimists-anarchist-libertarians-accelerationists-supremacists found new false religions to pursue their own very private interests and indulge their delusions of omnipotence, why do we renounce true faith, […]?

There are obviously various answers. On a secular level, the most immediate explanation is that the new techno-capitalist powers are directing the debate. This is partly true; they control the communications infrastructure, and those who own it don’t have to win the discussions because they already decided which discussions are possible.

But on the religious level, Cicione is rightly harsh:

On the religious level, however, the answer is even more difficult, if possible. And it concerns us first and foremost. We have lost the courage to speak truth and to bear witness to the truth. We are selling out our identity. Without Christ, there is no identity. If the foundation is lost, everything else is lost. Truth was once contested. Today, it is sufficient to dilute it. The Gospel is thus reduced to a catalog of shared values—peace, dialogue, acceptance, the environment—which, separated from their truthful origin, become seedless husks.

Why do we do it? Because we desire to be welcomed, revered, seated at the tables that matter. And the price of that place is always the same: placing the Word under a bushel and declaring ourselves one among many, one with the many, one who takes no space from anyone. It’s the theory of the very new founders of a religion without identity, with a universal mask: a religion of man, not of God.

Cicione continues by saying that a heart without God is sad, but even more so is the believer incapable of communicating God to others, because his own heart is also empty. And he disconsolately observes that with sincere commitment, but without correct knowledge, we have replaced the one mission entrusted to us with so many purely human ones.

The following words are also striking: “The light had been placed in our hands. We transformed it into darkness, so as not to dazzle anyone. And we became, without realizing it, worshipers of our own emptiness. Because idolatry isn’t just about putting something in God’s place: it’s also about putting nothing in God’s place and calling it respect.”