On Thursday, May 30, 593 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, Candace Owens came to Scottsdale to take up her sword. It was the feast day of St. Joan, and there was an evening Mass at Phoenix’s Joan of Arc Church, then a trek to the suburban Hilton, where an upstart group named Catholics for Catholics was throwing a party to welcome Owens “home.” The group, founded in 2022 to declare non-Catholic Republicans “more Catholic” than their Democratic opponents, was presenting Owens its Joan of Arc Award for “giving Christ the King his proper due.”
It was a month out from Owens’s April announcement that she’d joined the Catholic Church and two months since she’d been fired by the right-wing Daily Wire. The events weren’t unrelated.
As a pundit and livestream host with an audience of millions, Owens has built a career premised on outrage. Before 2016 she’d been one among many writers peddling women’s-interest hot takes. But when she leapt right that year—after liberals criticized her plan to create a registry of online trolls—she found new support on the alt-right. She made videos declaring she didn’t care about Charlottesville and urged fellow Black voters to wage a “Blexit” from the Democratic “plantation.” She wore matching “White Lives Matter” T-shirts with Kanye West just before he began praising Hitler, then stayed largely silent when he did.
It only followed that Owens’s conversion would come wrapped in controversy too, namely her very public split with the Daily Wire. The controversy centered on her repeated use of the phrase “Christ is king,” a mantra with a contested legacy among Catholics but which in recent years has become associated with the young men who shout it the loudest—the far-right “groyper” movement that follows white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. Owens denounced the comparison as guilt by association, but her other recent comments—about WWII Germans being the victims of a “Christian Holocaust,” “gangs” of Hollywood Jews, and her taunt that the Daily Wire’s Jewish cofounder Ben Shapiro couldn’t “serve both God and money”—didn’t help her insistence that she was just making a statement of faith. In late March, the company announced it had parted ways with Owens, with one former colleague, Andrew Klavan, a Jewish convert to Christianity, suggesting she’d been fired for antisemitism, including her “Christ is King” tweets. (The Daily Wire did not respond to a request for comment.)
But, Owens told her fans in Scottsdale (and more than 200,000 others who would watch online), she wasn’t prepared for how forcefully conservative Catholics rallied to her side. “The full weight of the church came upon [Klavan],” she said, noting that the phrase she’d made infamous “trended for four days.”
A month later, when she posted pictures of her baptism at a Latin Mass church in London, the outpouring was comparable. Within a day, she was announced as a headliner for this fall’s right-wing Catholic Identity Conference. Within weeks, she and her husband, George Farmer—former CEO of the failed far-right social media platform Parler and a convert himself—were photographed with a Catholic right podcaster at a gala fundraiser in Nashville, then later on the 60-mile Chartres Pilgrimage in France, alongside 18,000 Latin Mass devotees (including, this year, French nationalist politician Marion Maréchal).
Catholic Twitter hummed with excitement. Owens wasn’t the only recent prominent convert, or even Catholics for Catholics’ first. When CFC hosted a prayer dinner for former president Donald Trump in March, founder and CEO John Yep announced that one speaker, embattled Mormon activist Tim Ballard, whose questionable claims of fighting child sex trafficking inspired the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, was considering converting too. Then there was 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’d be named the Republicans’ 2024 vice presidential nominee. Not to mention the maybes: British actor Russell Brand, who’d begun hawking a Christian prayer app (partly funded by Vance and his Silicon Valley mentor Peter Thiel) and making videos about the rosary, and psychologist turned guru Jordan Peterson, whose wife converted on Easter and who’d been on an international speaking tour called “We Who Wrestle With God.”
A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself? By early spring, antiabortion outlet LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why ‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.” “Can you feel the energy shifting?” the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote tweeted repeatedly. “Continue praying for conversions.”
The excitement also sparked hopes that influencers might help reform a Church gone astray, since their subjects were clearly not just joining Catholicism but a highly specific version of it: one that’s spent the last decade in rebellion against a pope they disdain; one so consumed by culture war that their electoral and ecclesiastical politics can’t be teased apart; but also one that, increasingly, suspects it will win.
It’s an odd time for the US Catholic Church. Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis—the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years—has faced bitter opposition. His early calls for Catholics to lessen their “obsessive” focus on sexual issues marked him as a liberal to conservative critics; his emphasis on poverty and the environment proved him a “Marxist globalist” for the same crowd. Cardinals issued formal dubia (demands for clarification); clergy called for his resignation; some declared him an “antipope”; some prayed for his death.
As the divisions reached a fever pitch in 2020, they mapped neatly onto American politics, pitting “bad Catholics” Joe Biden and Pope Francis against Trump (the non-Catholic) and the faithful remnant. Trump’s campaign recognized as much, bypassing Church bishops to court Catholics through non-establishment leaders, including many on the “radical traditionalist” fringe. Podcaster Taylor Marshall, whose 2019 book charged the pope was part of a 100-year Masonic plot to “infiltrate” the Church, was named a campaign adviser. Trump retweeted missives from the florid Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who in 2018 had staged an unsuccessful papal coup—the closest the church came to schism in 500 years, says Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli—and who now wrote long open letters about the machinations of the “deep church.”
When Trump lost, the Catholic right was a core part of efforts to overturn the election. Former campaign strategist and right-wing Catholic Steve Bannon transformed his War Room podcast into a “stop the steal” machine. Catholic groups normally focused on abortion or religious liberty joined lawsuits to block Biden’s certification. Fuentes led his groypers in that November’s “Million MAGA March,” shouting “Christ is king.” Texas bishop Joseph Strickland addressed the carnivalesque December 2020 “Jericho March” rally—widely seen as a test run for January 6—while January 6 organizer Ali Alexander announced he too was converting (to “fight the evils in Christ’s own Church”). On the day itself, a Nebraska priest exorcised the Capitol.
But then their momentum seemed to falter. In mid-2021, when conservative members of the US 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, and derisively, about his American critics, calling them rigid, reactionary, backward, suicidal. He issued new restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass, the dominant form of liturgy before the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) introduced various modernizing reforms. And the Church hierarchy neutralized some of the loudest voices of clerical dissent. The Wisconsin priest behind a viral video claiming Catholic Democrats would go to hell was removed from his church. Another priest, who’d once delivered a pro-Trump speech with an aborted fetus on his altar, was defrocked. Leading Pope Francis opponent Cardinal Raymond Burke was stripped of his monthly stipend and lavish Vatican City apartment. Strickland, who’d begun claiming that the pope supported an “attack on the sacred,” lost his diocese. In July, the Vatican excommunicated Viganò for fomenting schism by refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and Vatican II.
