From Russell Brand to JD Vance to Candace Owens, what happens when the Catholic Church chases influencers—and their legions of followers—down the rabbit hole of the right?
By Illustration by September 10, 2024
Illustration by MARC BURCKHARDT.
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.)
A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself?
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.
Across both Catholic and mainstream media, consensus grew that “the liberalizing energy” Francis had brought was dissipating, and boomers’ progressive Catholicism was facing its “last gasps.”
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.
None of this endeared the pope to his critics or ended the division. In February an anonymous cardinal issued a memo, styled as a job description for the next pope, accusing Francis of fracturing the Church. In May a group of lay Catholics and one priest released another document, “The Crimes and Heresies of Pope Francis,” demanding he resign or be fired. A now suspended Texas ministry announced it had received a divine prophecy: A “usurper” sat on the papal throne.
Yet the sense of impending apocalyptic schism seemed to have receded as conservatives looked ahead to an eventual post-Francis era. Across both Catholic and mainstream media, consensus grew that “the liberalizing energy” Francis had brought was dissipating, and boomers’ progressive Catholicism was facing its “last gasps.”
In a widely read article in May, Associated Press reporter Tim Sullivan diagnosed a Church-wide shift: Catholics were returning to “the old ways,” with Latin Mass, lace mantillas, and medieval music replacing signifiers of modernism in parishes across the country and a uniformly conservative crop of new priests supplanting older clergy once inspired by Vatican II.
Two weeks later one of the traditionalist communities Sullivan profiled—Kansas’s small Benedictine College—seemed to prove his thesis, when Catholic NFL player Harrison Butker delivered the most controversial commencement address of the year. In his speech Butker advised female graduates to care more about homemaking and motherhood than careers and promotions, called Pride Month a “deadly sin,” and exhorted Catholics to abandon the “Church of Nice”—a popular epithet on the Catholic right—for the Latin Mass.
Soon after, LifeSiteNews announced an October conference on the theme of “putting ‘Boomer Catholicism’ out to pasture.”
By 2024, the neat overlay of US Church and electoral politics was becoming harder to maintain, even with the same candidates initially on the ballot. There were multiple reasons why: partly the subtle but clear differences between Biden and Pope Francis on issues from immigration to Israel; partly the pope’s refusal to increase women’s leadership in the Church; partly Trump’s strategic equivocation on abortion; and partly, said Faggioli, because some bishops were becoming anxious about the Church’s association with Trumpism’s cultish third wave.
There were certainly still Catholics making a strident case for Trump. On March 19, Catholics for Catholics hosted a $1,000-a-plate rosary prayer dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, invoking the liturgical feast day of St. Joseph—patron saint against “atheistic communism”—to “make the overdue bold proclamation that [Trump] is the only Catholic option for 2024.” Roger Stone spoke, calling himself “a Joseph R. McCarthy Catholic,” as did former lieutenant general turned QAnon hero Michael Flynn. Passion of the Christ star (and fellow QAnon booster) Jim Caviezel said, between impressions of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, “If Trump is our Moses,” Catholics must “be the tip of his spear.”
There was also Trump’s drumbeat message that the Biden administration was persecuting Catholics—a claim centered on a 2023 regional FBI office memo discussing ties between “rad trad” Catholics and white nationalist extremists. The memo was written after a young, self-described “radical traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist” in Virginia was caught amassing an arsenal of homemade bombs while writing detailed threats to kill Jews. But when it was leaked, it became the subject of endless Republican charges that Biden had labeled his fellow Catholics terrorists and sent feds to infiltrate their churches. Trump whooped it up, releasing “Make America Pray Again” merch and vowing to create a task force to “fight anti-Christian bias.” Bannon’s podcast set became cluttered with Catholic iconography as he promised a coming retribution.
Trump’s messianic mythos was only reinforced when he survived an assassination attempt at one of his rallies this July. Some Catholic supporters dipped into numerology, noting that the time Trump was shot corresponded to a scripture verse about putting on “the full armor of God.” Memes about divine intervention flooded Catholic Twitter—a blue-eyed Virgin Mary flicking the shooter’s bullet off its course. Catholics for Catholics declared that a campaign they’d launched in June—to have 2,024 Masses said for Trump before Election Day—could be the reason the shooter failed, and commissioned a billboard near the site of the Pennsylvania rally, bearing images of both a bloodied Trump and St. Michael the Archangel, beseeching the angel to “defend us in battle!”
A week later, after Biden announced he was suspending his campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris became Democrats’ nominee instead, the Catholic right doubled down on its claims of persecution. CatholicVote launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in swing states to “expose Kamala’s vile hatred of Catholics”—she once challenged a Trump judicial appointee over his membership in the antiabortion, anti-LGBTQ+ Knights of Columbus—and Trump called her “the most Anti-Catholic person to ever run for high office.”
But there was scant perspective on the election from the actual Church. Where bishops once weighed in on elections, said Faggioli, now it was “only the most extreme, ideological, beyond-the-fringes voices.” CFC echoed the charge: They’d stepped in because bishops were failing to steer Catholics to Trump. The USCCB no longer even released new voter guides, as it had done every four years since 1976, observed theologian Steve Millies, because they could no longer agree on enough to do so. (In June, CFC issued its own guide instead.)
For Millies, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, all of this amounted to the Church’s “retreat from [the] public square”—a surprising claim at a time when Catholicism’s influence on US politics seems more apparent than ever. The Supreme Court that overturned Roe is dominated by conservative Catholics. The radical Project 2025 “readiness plan” for a second Trump administration was created under the Heritage Foundation’s “cowboy Catholic” president, Kevin Roberts. As the National Catholic Reporter’s Heidi Schlumpf reported last winter, right-wing strategist Leonard Leo—the devout Catholic credited with orchestrating the takeover of the federal judiciary—has declared his intent to use the same Federalist Society model to reshape American culture.
Then there’s JD Vance, the onetime Never Trumper and “angry atheist” who, in the years since Trump’s first campaign, had undergone political and religious conversions—becoming both a vitriolic MAGA advocate and, in 2019, a Catholic (a decision Vance described as “join[ing] the resistance”). Vance’s nomination was greeted as the ascendancy of several overlapping reactionary movements: Silicon Valley’s tech right; the postliberal integralists who seek to re-found America as a Catholic confessional state; the New Right’s anti-administrative-state wonks; and the far right’s seamy online fringe, where bodybuilding “masculinists” meet groypers and eugenicists. This year Vance wrote a foreword for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book, which calls for a “Second American Revolution,” and a blurb for far-right Catholic pundit Jack Posobiec, whose new book declares liberals and leftists “unhumans” and praises dictators like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.
The Catholic right was elated by the news. Bannon had already described Vance as a St. Paul figure: in Politico’s paraphrase, “the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself.” CFC summoned the Batman franchise to drive home the point: “Trump merely adopted MAGA. Vance was born into it.” The only thing that “could make it better,” CFC wrote, was if Trump converted too.
But both in politics and the ways Catholics self-identify, subtler changes were taking place. For one, the storied “Catholic vote”—long viewed as a stand-in for the swinging center and thus a bellwether of national elections—was losing its predictive power. After an April poll found Trump leading Biden among Catholics by 12 percent, a shocking jump from his 1 percent margin in 2020, Millies saw proof that Catholicism was following evangelicalism into nearly automatic identification with the GOP—not because liberal Catholics were warming to Trump, but because they were withdrawing from a church associated with Trumpism. (“It’s a circular thing,” said Schlumpf. “As the church becomes more conservative, it becomes less attractive to young progressives. And as more young progressives disaffiliate, what’s left is more conservative Catholics.”)
To many on the Catholic right, that’s just prophecy fulfilled. For decades, conservative Catholics have predicted a winnowing of the church down to a “smaller, purer” core, as liberal clergy and laity die off or drop out. The corollary to that vision—the reason Catholic-right groups are talking about “energy shifting”—is the promise the Church won’t remain small but, once purged of internal conflict, will spark a virtuous revolution and exponential growth.
But it wouldn’t be the bishops leading that revolution, since, as Millies argues, they’re no longer the ones determining “the narrative of the Church in the United States.” Instead, it’s increasingly a mix of lay movements, lay money, and the lay leaders those powers choose. When Butker’s commencement address went viral, for example, conservative Catholic media heralded him as embodying a “DIY traditionalism” with “little direct connection to Church authorities.”
“It’s important to ask: What are they really converting to? Is it belief in what the Church teaches and the fundamental principles of Christianity? Or are they converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”
To the extent bishops still mattered at all, agreed Faggioli, it wasn’t because Catholics obey them, but because they’d become a sort of weather vane, reflecting changes in the culture or the influence of “Big Catholic Laymen.” Now when Church authorities weigh in on public debates—as many did to defend Butker’s speech—it’s they who are “playing catch-up.”
These lay institutions, most of which are conservative, have “inverted the authority structure of the Church,” Millies said, noting that Catholic parishes and schools are closing nationwide for lack of funds while influential Catholic outlets, like Eternal World Television Network (EWTN) or Bishop Robert Barron’s hugely popular media ministry Word on Fire, draw more donations every year. “We have become a celebrity-driven church, where the lines between entertainment and celebrity, and pastoral ministry and formation, have become as meaningless as the line between entertainment and governing in our politics.”
The result was a chasm between Catholicism the Church and “Catholicism the brand,” he continued. “And what brands need are celebrity endorsers.”
It’s bad form in the Church to question the sincerity of someone’s conversion. After all, said David Lafferty, an independent scholar who has written for the website Where Peter Is, which covers the Catholic right, pivotal Church leaders like St. Paul and St. Augustine started off as “great sinners.”
And yet, said Lafferty, “when it comes to all the influencers circling around the Church”—many of whom “make their living having opinions online” and seem more attracted to “external displays of piety” than grappling with core tenets of the faith—“it’s important to ask: What are they really converting to? Is it belief in what the Church teaches and the fundamental principles of Christianity? Or are they converting to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-globalism, and anti-communism?”
As 2024’s springtime of conversions became more obvious, Church officials weighed in, advising Catholics not to greet the trend with suspicion.
But it’s hard not to note some similarities.
Take Brand—once so synonymous with flaky religious syncretism that one of his own movies made it a punch line—who emerged as a spokesperson for the Catholic prayer app Hallow in the months after he was accused of sexual assault, abuse, or harassment by more than 10 women. Or LaBeouf, who received the sacrament of confirmation from Barron in January and who admits his road to conversion began with a lawsuit alleging he’d abused two ex-girlfriends and shot stray dogs as a Method acting exercise. Or Ballard, whose reinvention as a proto-Catholic celebrity followed detailed refutations of his claimed heroics, expulsion from the organization he founded, at least six sexual assault lawsuits, and what one lawsuit claimed was his reported excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Both Brand and Ballard have denied the allegations against them. One lawsuit against Ballard was dismissed this July.)
Converting, in these cases, offers some benefits, whether proof of redemption or a new army of defenders. After Brand began displaying Catholic icons in his Instagram videos and saying, on Good Friday, that he could “relate” to Jesus’s “persecution and humiliation,” traditionalist Catholics began referring to the allegations against him as “historic” and non-credible. It can also represent another form of rebranding for influencers courting new fans.
As the once-liberal Brand grew an audience among the “conspiratorial right,” his “New Age beliefs only took him so far,” said Mike Lewis, founder of Where Peter Is. “To ingratiate himself into that crowd, he needs to move away from New Age and embrace some form of Christianity. That’s where the growth is for him.” Likewise, Lewis continued, after Jordan Peterson’s academic career foundered, he became a conservative self-help guru, and now “the Catholic market seems to be eating this stuff up.”
Skeptics acknowledge it’s impossible to divine others’ true motivations, and even cynical conversions could prove transformative. God works in mysterious ways. But what’s driving the Catholic groups eagerly welcoming celebrity converts seems less opaque. “It’s like the vice presidential nominee,” said Lewis. “They’re from this swing state or represent this demographic the candidate doesn’t already have. It speaks to a much larger goal.”
And in service of that goal, sincerity, or even actual belief, doesn’t matter much. Peterson has made lectures on Christianity a cornerstone of his career—a book with the same title as his speaking series is due out this fall, and he’s acquired a wardrobe of Bible-themed blazers—even as he’s been notoriously evasive when it comes to affirming the most basic tenets of the faith: Was Jesus resurrected? Does God exist? Peterson’s answers to these questions have ranged from outraged (“It’s none of your damn business”) to poetic (“God is the call to adventure”), legalistic (“It would take me 40 hours to answer the question”) to Clinton-esque (“I’ve never made the claim that what I’m talking about is like what other people are talking about”).
As Brand’s and Peterson’s potential conversions became a potent will-they-or-won’t-they-drama—with EWTN cameras documenting Tammy Peterson’s confirmation and abundant coverage of Brand’s unorthodox April baptism in the River Thames—some conservatives’ patience wore thin. The Federalist published a long takedown of Peterson’s approach as fundamentally a branding exercise, offering a vision of Christianity “so cut-rate” that it made “cheap grace” look expensive.
But in an era of strange culture-war bedfellows, the dabblers were doing their part. Soon after gaining a Catholic audience, Peterson launched into criticism of Pope Francis, suggesting Church membership had declined because modern Catholicism was too much about “guitars,” “hippies,” and “worshiping Gaia”—or Baal. In this context, even celebrities’ failure to convert becomes a form of ammunition, as multiple Catholic-right outlets concluded that the true obstacle to Peterson’s conversion was “Pope Francis himself.”
Even without conversion, the phenomenon of Peterson-like appeals to faith—what The Federalist called “post-atheist” but not quite Christian—offered something for conservatives to appreciate. Last fall, UK Christian journalist Justin Brierley released a book and ongoing podcast series, both entitled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, arguing that the mid-2000s “New Atheist” movement was being replaced by both a renaissance of actual belief and a secular religiosity, wherein former atheists find common cause with conservative believers over their shared opposition to “cancel culture” and “where the West is heading in the absence of the Christian story.”
It was something akin to the 2021 Pew finding that nonreligious Trump supporters had begun calling themselves evangelicals as a political, rather than religious, identification. A prime example came in April, when Richard Dawkins, one of the “four horsemen” of New Atheism, declared himself a “cultural Christian” because he’d rather see churches around London than mosques. By July, Elon Musk had concurred, telling Peterson that, although not a believer, he, too, “is probably a cultural Christian.” (For his part, Bishop Barron wrote a May op-ed for CNN, declaring that Bill Maher—whom he’d once considered a nemesis for his mockery of religion—was now an ally in the shared fight against “wokeism.”)
Influencers themselves made the case for a cultural, if not personal, conversion. Over several weeks last spring, Joe Rogan delighted Christians by saying, “As time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things”; Brand said “the return to God” was an obvious response to crumbling institutions; and Peterson recited to Barron a list of prominent former atheists who had come to see that the “humanist enterprise” was unsustainable without being “embedded” in a “metaphysical space.”
Or, as Catholic-right podcaster Timothy Gordon put it in an interview with Candace Owens’s husband in May, people online were deciding that “secularism is fake and gay.”
Of particular note to Brierley was the fact that many of these new seekers, or strategic allies, have “large platforms” with “huge influence on a younger generation.”
He’s not the only one to notice. Peterson’s evolving, if ever-squishy, approach to religion has inspired a cottage industry of clergy tracking his appeal. Five years after Barron first praised the “Jordan Peterson phenomenon,” Word on Fire now has a dedicated page for all its Peterson content. Calvinist pastor and podcaster Paul VanderKlay has made some 750 videos about Peterson after realizing his Bible talks were selling out auditoriums while the churches he knew were empty. Another pastor, Paul Anleitner, noted that while clergy sat through endless “church growth” consultations, Peterson had become a far more effective “gateway drug,” “reversing the flow of traffic” out of the church. That Peterson tended to reduce the gospel to Jungian archetypes was regrettable, they agreed, but certainly not a deal-breaker.
In “the strategy of winning back culture,” said Faggioli, “it’s not that important how genuine these voices are.” The point isn’t “having Jordan Peterson be ordained as a priest,” but all the young people—especially young men—he brings along.
“If the Catholic Church is going to stop the bleeding, it needs to win over not just men, but real men,” declared Zach Costello, another Christian influencer, last spring in his own rumination on the Peterson phenomenon. As it was, Costello continued, Catholicism was too “embarrassing for men to associate themselves with.” Women dominated Bible studies, he said, and the priesthood was “infested with either homosexual men or men who can’t get women.” But the good news was that, as at other points in history, a “generation of men” was being “called to reform the Church when it has drifted off course. That time is now, and Jordan Peterson will play a very important role.”
Peterson agreed. In a 2022 video entitled “A Message to the Christian Churches,” he demanded that Church leaders make great efforts, rent billboards, to welcome young men demoralized by the culture’s “assault” on the “masculine spirit.” “Do it now,” Peterson warned, “before it’s too late.”
Concerns about a “feminized” Church aren’t new, said Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, a religious studies professor at Kalamazoo College who’s written extensively on Catholic masculinity. Such panics have arisen cyclically for centuries, in tandem with social change; in the mid-1800s, they came amid waves of mass migration, urbanization, and a supposed epidemic of male neurasthenia, as men who’d left farms for cities were said to be afflicted with depression, fatigue, and terminal indecisiveness.
“There was this idea that unless we get American men back in touch with their bodies, the land, and a different vision of the Church, the nation would be in decline,” said Maldonado-Estrada. “Nothing consolidates masculinity like anxiety that something is being lost.”
Today’s fretting over feminized churches overlaps with a culture, particularly for young people, where most identity building happens online, Maldonado-Estrada continued. And as signs accrue that young men are moving rightward—Gen Z support for LGBTQ+ rights dropped by double digits in the last two years, thanks primarily to Zoomer men, a majority of whom now support Trump—some Catholic leaders are following along in weird and dangerous ways.
When Barron interviewed LaBeouf about his pending conversion two years ago, they discussed how Christianity wasn’t just about a soft, near-Buddhist Jesus, but an “Old Testament Christ on a horse, cape dipped in blood, [with a] sword.” Butker’s infamous advice to women was paired with a call for men to fight “cultural emasculation.” In June, a Missouri Catholic church ran an ad in its bulletin calling on young men to join a newly formed militia that would combine “combat training” with church service; its recruits would wear white military-style uniforms with gold epaulets and crosses on the shoulders. Also last spring, Matt Fradd, host of one of the most popular Catholic podcasts online, conducted a two-and-a-half-hour interview with 20-something Catholic livestreamer John Doyle about his ardent following among young men, who could be led from Peterson-esque advice—“Stop watching porn, go to the gym, pick up the Bible”—into “intelligent Christian commentary” and eventual conversion.
There were a number of things about the interview that might have given Fradd pause: Doyle’s self-description as “an internet bigot”; his fury at women who showed up at his events wearing “little trad wife dresses” and distracting from what should be “a male environment” of young men “changing history”; his hope that Republicans will govern “like it’s The Handmaid’s Tale”; his claim that interracial pornography is a plot to convince white Christian boys they’re “being bred out of existence.”
Another thing that might have given Fradd pause is the findable fact that Doyle has complicated but deep connections to Nick Fuentes’s groyper movement. For several years, Doyle—who’s led protests with Fuentes and spoken at his annual conference—has profited from his status as a Fuentes-lite figure, passing in more mainstream right-wing spaces where Fuentes’s racial slurs, Holocaust denial, and calls to burn women alive are a step too far. When the now defunct Catholic-right outlet Church Militant began overtly recruiting followers from the broader groyper community, as Ben Lorber, a Political Research Associates analyst who tracks the white nationalist right, and I reported in 2022, Doyle was among the voices they platformed.
At the time, a Catholic media outlet courting Fuentes’s audience was a scandal. Now it just looks ahead of its time.
When right-wing youth organization TurningPoint USA held its annual student conference in June—drawing 8,000 attendees to hear Trump and other Republicans speak—Jack Posobiec tossed hats reading “White Boy Summer,” another co-opted groyper slogan, into an eager crowd. Fuentes was blocked from entering the conference and had to lead his followers in chants of “Christ is king” (and “Fuck off Jew”) from the street outside. But inside, the same message reigned. When Candace Owens spoke, the audience gave her a standing ovation, chanting “Christ is king.”
In March, Owens denied knowing Fuentes or what his movement meant by that phrase. By June, when she relaunched her podcast—which immediately hit the top 10—Owens was tweeting at him publicly, asking to get in touch. By July, she was speculating on air that various Nazi atrocities were “propaganda” and dedicating multiple episodes to convoluted theories linking “crypto-Jews” to “occult history,” “ritualistic murder,” and the satanic infiltration of all the world’s major religions—interrupting herself to read an ad from Hallow, “the number one prayer app in the world.”
Call it a form of audience capture. Or a feedback loop, says Lorber. One wherein “influencers shape the attitudes” of their young male audiences and then are influenced in turn. A race for followers becomes a race to the bottom, as the merely right wing move further right, and the far right goes further still. All the while, a Church stares into the void of the internet, unaware or unconcerned that the internet stares right back.
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