Candace Owens, the conservative media personality and host of the Candace Owens Podcast, has converted to Catholicism.
She made the announcement yesterday on social media, stating that she has “made the decision to go home”.
“There is, of course, so much more that went into this decision and that I plan to share in the future. But for now, praise be to God for His gentle, but relentless, guiding of my heart toward Truth.”
The post is accompanied by a photo of Owens dressed in a baptismal gown at the Brompton Oratory with the Very Revd Julian Large, the provost of the Oratory community. The Brompton Oratory stands as the second-largest Catholic church in London and is a short walk away from the CatholicHerald offices.
In 2019, Owens, previously a reformed Evangelical, married George Farmer, also a convert to Catholicism. They have three children and recently baptised their youngest.
In a recent interview with the Herald, Farmer discussed the significant impact Owens has had on his own faith. When commenting on the years where his faith lapsed, he reflected: “my spiritual life did not really pick up again for quite a few years and basically until I met Candace.”
He said he believes that “God was at work” from the beginning of their relationship and was placing before him two options: “I could carry on living in London and doing what I knew, or I could take a leap of faith into a world that I knew nothing of, move to America, marry a girl that I barely knew, and take the plunge. Here we are five years later, three kids, and living in Nashville.” He describes being in a “very happy marriage”.
Owens has increasingly used her social media platform to discuss matters of faith. Last year she hosted a debate on her YouTube channel, which has over 3 million subscribers, between Farmer and Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator who hosts the podcast “Relatable” about various Catholic and Protestant points of contention such as Sola Scriptura, the Virgin Mary and the authority of the Church.
As Farmer discusses in his Herald interview, his wife’s outspoken views and high-profile status have resulted in “physical danger to her life, but there is also a career danger and a spiritual danger”.
In a recent video made in response to media attacks about her comments on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Owens states: “I am team God. I do not fear the media, I do not fear journalists, I do not fear AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], I do not fear big pharma. What I actually fear is God.”
It has been noted that in recent years there has been an increasing link between conservative commentators and Catholicism, particularly in the US. Owens now joins her former Daily Wire colleague Michael J. Knowles as a leading conservative commentator who also happens to be Catholic.
Photo: Candace Owens on the set of her talk show “Candace” in Nashville, Tennessee, 13 September 2021. (Photo by Jason Davis/Getty Images.)
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