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?
