OHn Thursday, Maybe 30, 593 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, Candace Owens traveled to Scottsdale to take up the sword. It was the feast day of St. Joan, and there was an evening Mass at Phoenix’s Joan of Arc Church, followed by a trip to the suburban Hilton, where a newly formed group called Catholics for Catholics was holding a welcome-back party for Owens. The group, founded in 2022 to declare non-Catholic Republicans “more Catholic” than their Democratic opponents, presented Owens with the Joan of Arc Award for “giving Christ the King what he deserved.”
One month after Owens announced in April that she had joined the Catholic Church and two months after she was fired from the right-wing Daily Wire, the events are unrelated.
As a commentator and livestream host with an audience of millions, Owens has built a career on outrage. Before 2016, she was one of many writers peddling hot takes on women’s preferences. But when she pivoted that year—after liberals criticized her plan to create an online troll registry—she found new support on the far right. She made videos declaring that she didn’t care about Charlottesville and calling on other black voters to “Blexit” from the Democratic “plantation.” She wore the same “White Lives Matter” T-shirt as Kanye West right before he started praising Hitler, then remained largely silent when he did.
Only then did Owens’ conversion become embroiled in controversy, particularly her very public split with the Daily Wire. The controversy centered on her repeated use of the phrase “Christ is king,” a mantra that has a controversial legacy among Catholics but has in recent years become associated with the loudest-screaming young men in the far-right “groyper” movement, which follows white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes. Owens denounced the comparison as a sin by association, but her other recent comments—about Germans in World War II being victims of the “Christian Holocaust,” Jewish “gangs” in Hollywood, and her mocking of the Daily Wire’s Jewish co-founder Ben Shapiro as unable to “serve both God and money”—have not helped her insistence that she was merely making a statement of faith. In late March, the company announced it had parted ways with Owens, with a former colleague, Andrew Klavan, a Jewish convert to Christianity, alleging she was fired for anti-Semitism, including her “Christ is King” tweet. (The Daily Wire did not respond to a request for comment.)
But, Owens told her fans in Scottsdale (and the more than 200,000 who would watch online), she was not prepared for how powerful conservative Catholics rallied around her. “The whole weight of the church fell on [Klavan],” she said, noting that the phrase she made people aware of “trended for four days.”
A month later, when she posted a photo of her baptism at a Latin Mass church in London, the support was similar. Within a day, she was announced as the head of the right-wing Catholic Identity Conference this fall. Within weeks, she and her husband, George Farmer—the former CEO of the failed far-right social media platform Parler and a convert himself—were photographed with a right-wing Catholic podcast host at a fundraiser in Nashville, followed by the 60-mile Chartres Pilgrimage in France, along with 18,000 Latin Mass worshippers (including this year’s French nationalist politician Marion Maréchal).
Catholic Twitter was buzzing with excitement. Owens wasn’t the only high-profile recent convert, or even the first Catholic convert. When CFC hosted a prayer dinner for former President Donald Trump in March, founder and CEO John Yep announced that a speaker, Mormon activist Tim Ballard, whose questionable claims about combating child sex trafficking had inspired the 2023 film The Sound of Freedom, are also considering conversion. Then there’s actor Shia LaBeouf, comedian Rob Schneider, Dutch pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and, of course, Ohio senator JD Vance, who converted in 2019, five years before he was nominated as the 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate. Not to mention the possible ones: British actor Russell Brand, who started selling a Christian prayer app (funded in part by Vance and his Silicon Valley mentor Peter Thiel) and making rosary videos, and psychologist-turned-guru Jordan Peterson, whose wife converted on Easter and has gone on an international speaking tour called “We Wrestle With God.”
Speculation raged about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, or Trump himself? By early spring, the anti-abortion media outlet LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why ‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.” “Feel the energy shifting?” the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote tweeted several times. “Keep praying for the converts.”
The excitement also raises hopes that influential people can help reform a Church that has gone astray, since their audience is clearly drawn not just to Catholicism but to a very particular version of Catholicism: one that has spent the past decade rebelling against a pope it despises; one so obsessed with culture wars that it cannot separate its electoral politics from its religion; but also one that is increasingly skeptical that it will win.
IIt’s weird. time for the Catholic Church in the United States. Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis—the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years—has faced fierce opposition. His early calls for Catholics to reduce their “obsessive” focus on sexual issues marked him as a liberal to conservative critics; his emphasis on poverty and the environment marked him out as a “Marxist globalist” to the same group. Cardinals issued formal dubia (demands for clarification); clergy called for his resignation; some declared him an “anti-pope”; some prayed for his death.
As the divisions came to a head in 2020, they were neatly mapped across the American political landscape, pitting “bad Catholics” Joe Biden and Pope Francis against Trump (who is not Catholic) and the faithful left. The Trump campaign recognized this, bypassing the church’s bishops to court Catholics through non-conformist leaders, including many in the “radical traditionalist” camp. Podcast host Taylor Marshall, whose 2019 book accused the pope of being part of a 100-year-old Masonic plot to “infiltrate” the church, was brought in as a campaign adviser. Trump has retweeted letters from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who orchestrated a failed papal coup in 2018 — the closest the church has come to schism in 500 years, Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli said — and is now writing lengthy open letters about the machinations of the “deep church.”
When Trump lost, the Catholic right was a core part of the effort to overturn the election. Former campaign strategist and right-wing Catholic Steve Bannon transformed War Room podcast into a “stop the steal” machine. Catholic groups, often focused on abortion or religious liberty, joined the lawsuits to block Biden’s certification. Fuentes led his followers in the “Million MAGA March” that November, chanting “Christ is king.” Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland spoke at the carnival-style “Jericho March” rally in December 2020—widely seen as a test run for January 6—while January 6 organizer Ali Alexander announced that he, too, was converting (to “fight evil in the Church of Christ”). On that very day, a Nebraska priest exorcised the Capitol.
But then their momentum seemed to falter. In mid-2021, when conservative members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) tried to pass a measure denying Communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians—effectively excommunicating Biden—the Vatican blocked their plans. Pope Francis began speaking more openly, mocking his critics as Americans, calling them rigid, reactionary, backward, suicidal. He issued new restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass, the dominant form of the liturgy before the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s introduced various modernizing reforms. And the church hierarchy has silenced some of the clergy’s loudest dissenting voices. The Wisconsin priest behind a viral video claiming that Catholic Democrats are going to hell has been removed from his church. Another priest, who gave a pro-Trump speech with an aborted fetus on his altar, was defrocked. Pope Francis’s leading opponent, Cardinal Raymond Burke, was stripped of his monthly allowance and his lavish apartment in Vatican City. Strickland, who began claiming the pope was supporting an “attack on the sacred,” lost his diocese. In July, the Vatican excommunicated Viganò for inciting a schism by refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and the Second Vatican Council.
