From Burning Man to The Beast System… :: By Brandon Holthaus
How Neo-Paganism and Silicon Valley Are Shaping the Last-Days World
Something is happening in our culture that I believe Christians need to understand, especially those of us watching the convergence of events Scripture says will characterize the last days.
For years, when we have taught Revelation 13, we have talked about the eventual emergence of a system capable of controlling commerce, identifying individuals, enforcing allegiance, and preventing those who refuse the Beast from buying or selling. Previous generations believed those passages because God’s Word said they would happen, even though they could not fully understand how such worldwide control could be implemented. Our generation is different.
We are watching artificial intelligence, biometrics, digital identification, surveillance, massive data collection, algorithmic governance, and increasingly digital financial systems develop before our eyes. But another part of this story deserves our attention. We need to ask not only what technology is being built, but what worldview is influencing some of the people building it.
That question takes us to one of America’s strangest gatherings: Burning Man. What began in 1986 as a small gathering around a wooden effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach has developed into a temporary city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert attracting tens of thousands of people.
Burning Man officially presents itself around principles such as radical inclusion, radical self-expression, communal effort, participation, and immediacy. Yet accounts from inside the event describe something far more spiritually significant than an unusual art festival. The environment includes psychedelic drugs, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, New Age ideas, occult imagery, ritualistic activity, and the rejection of traditional moral boundaries.
The worldview celebrated there should concern Christians because much of it represents the opposite of the biblical understanding of God, humanity, morality, sexuality, and truth.
Alex Newman Goes Inside Burning Man
Investigative journalist Alex Newman decided to see this culture firsthand. Newman went to Burning Man with a small crew and documented what was happening inside the temporary desert city. After returning, he said he was still trying to process what he had witnessed. Newman described an environment filled with bizarre art, pagan rituals, electronic dance music, enormous amounts of alcohol, and widespread consumption of hallucinogenic and other drugs. The entire week eventually culminated in the burning of the enormous wooden figure known as “the Man.”
Newman also described scenes deliberately incendiary toward Christianity. According to his account, a golden-calf art vehicle moved across the desert. At the same time, elsewhere Christian worship songs and children’s songs were reportedly used as soundtracks for sexually explicit performances and mock worship. Within minutes of a Christian man preaching near the wooden structure called the Man, another man with an amplifier began shouting about Baal needing “baby blood” and repeatedly calling for sacrifice. Newman said that he and his crew could not tell whether the man was joking or possessed.
What Newman witnessed sexually also immediately brought the biblical world to mind. He described widespread sexual activity, orgy-themed camps, nudity, drugs, and behavior so explicit that he declined to describe some of the sexual acts publicly. What particularly disturbed him was the presence of children in that environment. As Newman watched what was taking place and later witnessed the burning of the Temple, his mind went to Canaan before Israel entered the land and the kind of depravity Scripture associates with Sodom.
For a Christian viewing Burning Man through a biblical worldview, the comparison is hard to miss. What modern culture celebrates as liberation and radical self-expression bears a disturbing resemblance to patterns of sexual and spiritual rebellion Scripture records in societies like Sodom and Gomorrah that had abandoned God’s moral boundaries.
The burning of the Temple particularly affected Newman. According to his account, participants carried into it photographs, wedding dresses, ashes of deceased loved ones and pets, and memories they wanted to leave behind or, as the article describes it, offer to “the gods.” The atmosphere initially became quiet before some participants began howling at the moon. Newman described the burning of the Temple as one of the most bizarre things he had ever witnessed. It is difficult for someone familiar with the Old Testament not to recognize echoes of ancient paganism in a culture combining fire, ritual, altered consciousness, sexual license, spiritual experimentation, and rejection of the biblical God.
Why Burning Man Matters to Biblical Prophecy
If Burning Man were simply a gathering of people experimenting with alternative lifestyles and spirituality in the Nevada desert, it would certainly be a cultural and spiritual concern, but perhaps not an obvious subject for Biblical prophecy. What makes the story particularly significant is Burning Man’s longstanding connection with Silicon Valley’s tech industry. Newman emphasized this point after his visit. “These are the people who build the world that we are all moving into.”
The account discusses prominent technology executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and people associated with influential institutions who have participated in or identified with Burning Man culture.
This is where worldview becomes enormously important. Technology is designed, programmed, financed, regulated, and deployed by human beings, and human beings bring their beliefs about truth, morality, freedom, identity, sexuality, authority, God, and the nature of humanity into what they create. The people helping build the technological infrastructure of tomorrow are not spiritually neutral, and neither are the worldviews that influence them.
When a neo-pagan, post-Christian worldview intersects with artificial intelligence, surveillance technology, digital identity, massive data systems, and the ability to influence billions of people, we should pay very close attention to where that convergence could ultimately lead.
That is where Newman’s experience becomes especially relevant. The people he encountered were not merely rejecting Christianity in favor of atheistic materialism. Some were openly embracing alternative spirituality.
According to the account, Newman attended a presentation involving the “high priest” of a psychedelic church and asked what he thought about Christians who warn that large doses of hallucinogens could expose people to demonic influences. Newman expected his question to be mocked. Instead, Newman says the man acknowledged the existence of what he described as “negative entities” that collect souls. Even more strikingly, he reportedly portrayed Yahweh, the God of Scripture, as one of the negative entities while presenting Lucifer as the liberator.
That spiritual inversion should immediately get the attention of a Bible student because it isn’t new. Genesis 3 records the serpent portraying God’s command as restrictive, and rebellion as enlightenment. God becomes the One supposedly keeping humanity from its full potential, while the serpent presents rebellion as liberation: “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The names and packaging may change, but the fundamental deception remains remarkably consistent. God is portrayed as the oppressor, His boundaries are treated as bondage, and rebellion against Him is presented as the pathway to freedom and enlightenment.
We see the same rebellion take collective form in Genesis 11. At Babel, humanity says, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). Babel was about more than architecture. It represented organized human autonomy—a civilization attempting to establish unity, identity, security, and greatness independently of God. Humanity wanted to build its own future, establish its own name, and organize society around its own purposes.
What Happens When Babel Goes Digital?
This is where artificial intelligence enters the discussion. The concern isn’t that AI itself is demonic, nor should Christians label every technological innovation the Mark of the Beast. AI can serve medicine, research, communication, education, productivity, translation, and countless other purposes. The deeper question is what happens when technologies with extraordinary power combine with a worldview that no longer recognizes an objective Creator, objective morality, or permanent boundaries governing human existence.
Newman specifically connected what he witnessed at Burning Man to this concern. AI is not simply another technological tool but something increasingly capable of answering questions that previous generations took to parents, pastors, teachers, and books. People are beginning to ask artificial intelligence questions about meaning, morality, sexuality, relationships, truth, identity, and the purpose of human existence. Newman therefore argued that the worldview of the people shaping these systems matters enormously.
AI doesn’t descend from heaven with its own understanding of reality. Human beings build these systems, select and curate data, establish policies, impose safeguards, determine acceptable answers, and decide how the technology will interact with society.
This becomes especially significant in Revelation 13. John tells us that the False Prophet “causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave” to receive the mark and that “no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16–17).
For centuries, Christians understood the prophecy but struggled to imagine its mechanics. How could one political system identify enormous populations? How could individual allegiance be connected to economic participation? How could someone be prevented from buying or selling across different cities, countries, currencies, and economies?
For the first time in history, we don’t have much difficulty imagining the infrastructure required to accomplish something like that. A world of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, biometric authentication, digital identity, interconnected databases, smartphones, surveillance cameras, geolocation, and digital financial networks could give governments capabilities ancient rulers could never have imagined. None of those technologies alone constitutes the Mark of the Beast. Still, their convergence shows that the technological infrastructure capable of facilitating unprecedented, centralized control is becoming possible in our generation.
Revelation 13 Is Ultimately About Worship
Yet if we stop with technology, we miss the central message of Revelation 13. The Beast system isn’t merely an economic surveillance system. It is fundamentally a religious system. Revelation 13:4 tells us, “So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast; and they worshiped the beast.” Behind the political authority stands a spiritual power. Revelation identifies that power as the dragon, Satan. The final system therefore combines political authority, economic control, religious deception, and ultimately worship.
That is why the resurgence of pagan spirituality alongside technological development is worth watching. Western civilization has spent generations removing biblical Christianity from its institutions, assuming that secularism would replace Christianity. But human beings don’t necessarily stop being spiritual when they reject Christianity. The spiritual vacuum can be filled with New Age spirituality, psychedelic mysticism, occultism, neo-paganism, astrology, Eastern spirituality, nature worship, transhumanism, and various forms of self-deification.
The account of Burning Man describes precisely this kind of spiritual marketplace, where elements drawn from Christianity, Satanism, Buddhism, shamanism, Western occultism, Tantra, Judaism, Wicca, and other traditions are combined into individualized spiritual experiences.
Romans 1 tells us where this process leads. Humanity “exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). The biblical pattern isn’t that humanity stops worshiping. Humanity exchanges the object of worship. Once humanity rejects the Creator, creation itself becomes sacred. Nature becomes sacred. Sexuality becomes sacred. Human consciousness becomes sacred. Eventually technology itself can take on an almost salvific role, promising humanity greater intelligence, freedom from biological limitations, longer life, and perhaps one day even a technological imitation of immortality.
This is why the transhumanist impulse is relevant to the discussion. The serpent’s promise in Genesis was “you will be like God.” Modern technological man increasingly talks about transcending the limitations built into human existence. The temptation is unmistakably ancient: humanity using its own knowledge and power to overcome its limitations without submitting to the Creator who made humanity in His image. In that sense, Babel’s bricks have become algorithms.
The Convergence We Should Be Watching
This is where the prophetic significance becomes difficult to ignore. Ancient pagan ideas are reappearing just as humanity gains unprecedented technological power. The culture represented at Burning Man celebrates radical self-expression, altered consciousness, alternative spirituality, and liberation from traditional moral restraints. Meanwhile, the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the wider technology industry is giving humanity extraordinary capabilities to manipulate information, monitor populations, identify individuals, shape perceptions, and potentially regulate access to systems.
Scripture has already told us where human rebellion ultimately goes. Daniel describes successive Gentile kingdoms culminating in the final form of Gentile world power. Second Thessalonians 2 describes the coming man of sin accompanied by extraordinary spiritual deception. Revelation 13 describes political authority, economic control, supernatural deception, and global worship converging around the Beast. Revelation 17 presents a religious dimension associated with the final world order, while Revelation 18 describes the enormous economic system associated with Babylon.
Taken together, these passages describe a last-days convergence involving politics, economics, religion, deception, centralized authority, and worship.
This is what makes our moment so significant. Our generation is building technologies that make the kind of control described in Revelation 13 technologically feasible, while Western civilization is simultaneously abandoning the biblical worldview that once placed moral restraints on how human power should be exercised. At the same time, alternative forms of spirituality and ancient pagan concepts are moving back into a culture that once considered itself Christian.
The people developing today’s systems do not have to sit around a conference table discussing Revelation 13 for those technologies eventually to become part of the prophetic picture. History repeatedly demonstrates that infrastructure created for one purpose can later be appropriated for another. Technologies developed for convenience, security, efficiency, commerce, communication, or entertainment can become instruments of control when an authoritarian government puts them in its hands. Revelation tells us that such a ruler is coming.
The Old Rebellion Has Found New Machinery
The story that begins in Genesis ultimately ends in Revelation. Satan’s original temptation was that humanity could reject God’s boundaries and become like God. At Babel, humanity organized collectively in rebellion against God’s purposes. The pagan civilizations surrounding Israel worshiped created things rather than the Creator. Daniel reveals that unseen spiritual conflict can lie behind earthly kingdoms. Paul tells us that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age” (Ephesians 6:12). Revelation finally pulls the curtain completely aside and shows the dragon empowering the Beast.
That means our ultimate concern isn’t merely Silicon Valley executives, programmers, Burning Man participants, or artificial intelligence. Our battle isn’t against flesh and blood. The deeper issue is the worldview and spiritual rebellion increasingly shaping Western civilization and what happens when that rebellion gains access to technological capabilities unlike anything previous civilizations possessed.
Burning Man provides a fascinating and disturbing window into that convergence. Alex Newman went into the desert and came away describing something far more spiritual than an eccentric art festival. He witnessed pagan imagery, fire rituals, psychedelic spirituality, sexual depravity that brought the biblical worlds of Canaan and Sodom to mind, biblical imagery turned upside down, mockery of Christianity, and people openly experimenting with alternative spiritual realities. At the same time, he encountered a culture with significant connections to the technological world that is helping shape humanity’s future.
The ancient rebellion against the Creator hasn’t disappeared. It is being repackaged for the technological age, while humanity is simultaneously constructing an infrastructure capable of the kind of centralized economic and social control described in Revelation 13.
Perhaps that is what Christians most need to understand about this story. Revelation tells us that the final world system will possess extraordinary political and economic power, but beneath it all will remain the oldest conflict in the Bible: Who has the right to rule? Who determines truth? Who defines good and evil? Who is God? And ultimately, who will humanity worship?
The rebellion is ancient. What is new is the machinery available to enforce it.