July 23, 2024 – 7:00am
Elon Musk has identified himself as a cultural Christian in a new interview.
“While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise… I would say I’m probably a cultural Christian,” the Tesla CEO said during a conversation on X with Jordan Peterson today. “There’s tremendous wisdom in turning the other cheek.”
Christian beliefs, Musk argued, “result in the greatest happiness for humanity, considering not just the present, but all future humans… I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.”
Musk went on to note that the collapse of religion is leading to low birth rates that could drastically alter the future of civilisation. “When a culture loses its religion, it starts to become antinatalist and decline in numbers and potentially disappear,” he said. The father of 12 added that Paul Ehrlich, author of the highly influential 1968 book Population Bomb, which argued against having children, was a “genocidal maniac” who had done “great damage to humanity”. “Having a child is a vote for the future,” Musk said. “It’s the most optimistic thing somebody can do.”
Peterson, who wore a jacket decorated with various portraits of the Madonna and child, discussed the competing religious iconography of men and women. Christ, he said, is the West’s sacred image of a man, while the sacred image of a woman is the mother-infant dyad exemplified by the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. “Unless the feminine is conceptualised as the combination of female and infant,” argued Musk, “then the culture has lost its attachment to the traditional sacred images and is probably on its way out.”
During the conservation, Musk did not address whether he believed in God, but noted that he was not a practising Christian. Although he was baptised and brought up Anglican, he explained to Peterson that he experienced a crisis of meaning in early adolescence that prompted him to read the texts of major religions and philosophical movements, but at the time, “none of them really seemed to have answers that resonated.” He found a more satisfying answer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s message that what matters is asking the right questions — that curiosity itself is more important than finding the answers.
The X owner noted that if his beliefs were a religion, they might be called “the religion of curiosity, the religion of greater enlightenment,” the goal of which is to expand consciousness — a goal that ties in with his work in artificial intelligence.
Musk joins a growing cohort of public figures either converting to Christianity or professing to be cultural Christians. Renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, for example, recently identified as a cultural Christian while others, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have gone further.
Peterson discussed Dawkins’s stated preference of a society rooted in Christian beliefs as opposed to other belief systems, to which Musk replied: “I do think those are good ones.”