BAD FAITH

From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex

- KATHRYN JOYCE

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.