When folks started seeing ads about a Christian prayer app featuring “Voice” judge and pop icon Gwen Stefani, the initial reaction was mild bemusement. “This year, I’m excited to share that I’ve partnered with this amazing prayer, meditation and music app called Hallow,” she declared in a Christmas ad, asking viewers to “join me and millions of other Christians around the world.”
“Watching your heroes get old is so depressing,” said one Redditor, in a typical response. “I never thought I’d see trad-wife grifter Gwen Stefani but here we are I guess.”
The annoyance turned to outrage a few months later when Stefani released another ad for Hallow, this time for Lent, while also posting a Tucker Carlson video.
“She’s a MAGA. Sorry to ruin your childhood!” posted one outraged Redditor. “[T]he washed up celeb turned republican pipeline remains almost undefeated,” cracked another.
What I discovered is that while religion may not be the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx famously wrote, this app is a sedative to dull the consciences of MAGA.
In the advertising, the Hallow app seems bland enough. The founder, a rich management consultant unfortunately named Alex Jones, claims the goal is to “share the beauty, peace, and power of the Church’s spirituality with the world,” all for $70 a year. But the whiff of MAGA isn’t too hard to detect, for someone who knows what they’re sniffing for. Early funding came largely from Donald Trump fanboys Peter Thiel and JD Vance, the latter now serving as Trump’s vice president. Celebrity endorsements and collaborations include Trump’s buddy Mark Wahlberg, anti-abortion actor Jonathan Roumie and Chris Pratt, whose efforts to hide his MAGA leanings always fall short. The app also recruited washed-up British comedian Russell Brand, but they are putting that endorsement deal on pause now that he’s been legally charged with rape in his home country.
I’m an atheist who wasn’t raised with much religion at all, so I’ve never observed Lent. But after seeing all this hullabaloo, I thought I’d take my first crack at the season of self-inflicted suffering — in the name of journalism, not Jesus. So I downloaded the Hallow app, after saying a fruitless prayer of hope that it does not steal all my private data. Like most Lent observers, my commitment to my oath to listen to this app faltered at times. Still, I muscled through many days of lessons on how to be a godly woman and treacly prayers read by Chris Pratt. What I discovered is that while religion may not be the opiate of the masses, as Karl Marx famously wrote, this app is a sedative to dull the consciences of MAGA.
At first, Hallow didn’t seem so bad, even though I blanched when it immediately gamified the spiritual experience by congratulating me for maintaining my “streak” of daily usage. (My best was three days “praying” in a row, which falls far short of my workout streak on Apple Fitness. Still! Pretty good for a non-believer!) Lots of praying and Bible verses and Jesus talk, which is gibberish to me, but means a lot to many good liberal Christians I know, so I’m not going to discount it out of hand. Mostly, it was just very boring, an opinion seemingly shared by Mark Wahlberg, who sounded like he was reading out of the phone book during his prayers. Even his fake banter with Chris Pratt for their “Fasting Friday” contributions fell flat.
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Do Catholics really fast on Fridays during Lent, I had to wonder. My vague memories growing up in a heavily Catholic part of the country involve people eating a lot of fish at dinner. Pratt and Wahlberg did not clear this up for me, but only made it more confusing. They suggested one way to “fast” is to not look at your phone for 10 minutes before bed, which hardly seems like the level of sacrifice that would focus the mind and spirit on the suffering of Jesus on the cross. It was also hard to figure out how to do that while also using “sleep better” programs like the one titled “Have no anxiety,” read by Jonathan Roumie.
My confusion on this issue made me realize that this was a systematic contradiction throughout Hallow, which only grew more aggravating the more I listened. On one hand, there was a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric, especially offered by Pratt, about how Christians “welcome” hard times and that the faith is not about “how to escape suffering, but how to endure it.” What the app offered, however, was escapist materials built around turning off reflection, instead of encouraging it.
The prayers and programs mostly focused on banal and empty affirmations about being grateful, relieving stress, and sleeping better. The universe of problems imagined for the user was comically small: a quarrel with a coworker, a disagreement with a spouse or a fussy child. It seemed all very silly to worry about in our current political situation, where a fascist has taken over the government, tanked the economy and people — most of whom are likely Christians!— are being kidnapped and sent to a foreign gulag. These seemed far more pressing matters to bring to Jesus than the aggravation that your spouse won’t fill the dishwasher correctly.
Hallow does provide a space to bring concerns like mine: an “artificial intelligence” feature called Magisterium AI, which offers, “Ask me questions on faith and Church teaching!” Hey, if you’re paying for a prayer app, why not play along with the pretense that a mindless computer is your conduit to the mind of God?
“What does Jesus say about sending migrants to foreign torture prisons without due process?” I asked my soulless Jesus interpreter in my phone. The initial response did seem promising, answering, “Treating migrants with disrespect, or denying their fundamental rights, is a grave offense.” The AI added, “Catholic teaching would strongly condemn sending migrants to foreign torture prisons without due process.” Much better than listening to Chris Pratt explain how a 10-minute phone fast would cast out demons. So I kept at it, asking, “How can JD Vance say he is a good Catholic, when he defends imprisoning people without due process?”
At this point, the AI champion of Jesus chickened out, saying, “A person’s overall commitment to Catholic values should be considered, rather than focusing solely on one issue.”
And sure, I bet Vance is eating fish on Fridays, but overall, it feels to me that lying about people to justify torturing them in ways not unlike what the Romans did to Jesus should count for more. But I’m just a lowly atheist arguing with an artificial “intelligence,” so what do I know? Jokes aside, it crystallized why I felt so queasy, listening to prayers and programs that reduced the “trials” of Christian life to squabbles with neighbors and nuisances at work. The universe of concerns assumed in the listener was no different than the usual sea of “self-help” debris offered up by other MAGA-coated “wellness,” “spirituality” and “lifestyle” influencers online. Though Hallow did present demonic possession as a real and ongoing concern, which at least is more fun than the raw milk-flavored form of magical thinking in the more secular MAGA influencer spaces.
Most of this material doesn’t seem political, but it does encourage a form of small-minded narcissism, with the relentless focus on the self. The Jesus of the Hallow app isn’t much concerned about social justice or caring for the downtrodden, but about being your good buddy who strokes your hair after a bad day at work. The “demonic” forces the believer is called upon to resist aren’t grave evils like human rights abuses. Satan seems more interested in frustrating you with traffic than, say, installing a fascist leader in the White House to destroy democracy. It doesn’t seem political, but the project of lulling users into not caring about anything outside their immediate self-interest suits the goals of the MAGA movement. And it’s probably more persuasive to ordinary people than overt right-wing propaganda. This isn’t the Christianity of the liberal Christians I know, who volunteer, donate money, and care very much about electing better leaders. This is a “don’t worry your pretty head about all that stuff” kind of Christianity.
Not that there was no political propaganda on Hallow. As a feminist, I couldn’t help but listen to a 9-part series labeled “Feminine Genius” by a woman named Lisa Cotter. My hopes for the accomplishments of Emily Dickinson and Marie Curie — hell, even Gwen Stefani! — quickly went up in smoke. Instead, I got scolded about how I should stop trying to “act like a man,” and that women’s “gifts” and “genius” are — surprise! — about the ability to “generously live for others.” Unlike men, women have the “unique” ability to “see people as people,” and not objects, so a woman’s role is to make sure everyone is taken care of, while men do all that higher-paid, less caring work. Not that women never get anything in return! In the lesson titled “Receptivity,” we’re told, “In the act of sex, a husband gives of himself to his wife, who receives his gift.” Say what you will, but I did not expect the Jesus app to tell me I’m a genius because I know how to get f—ked.
That puts Hallow in the larger universe of Vance and Thiel’s project to shove their retrograde gender politics on Americans through every avenue they can find, from apps discouraging contraception to calling single women “miserable cat ladies” at every turn. MAGA propagandists repeatedly show that they see gender as the most fruitful locus for radicalizing people to their cause, and the Hallow app reveals one reason why. A lot of how people experience gender is not framed as “political,” but personal: dating, marriage, sex, and how you live out your identity. That creates these “self-help” angles that purport only to offer guidance on daily life, but instead smuggle in highly politicized ideas about hierarchy, power, and freedom. Cotter’s prayer to “remove any obstacles in our hearts that may want to place men and women in competition,” and her exhortation to “stop trying to be your own savior” are offered as personal advice to women. In reality, they’re deeply political statements about how half the human race should live in submission to the other half.
I quit Hallow on the day I was told is Holy Thursday — I did learn a lot about how many holy days there are! — and sang my own “hallelujah” in response. (I am on the hook for that $70, even though I thought I was only signing up for a few weeks. Vance is stealing my cat food money right out of my Apple Wallet!) Alas, I never did find any contributions to the app by Stefani herself, which is too bad. I want a rewrite of “Just A Girl,” but about that rather literal definition of feminine receptivity. But as dumb as it all was, I find myself unsettled. The Hallow app is right-wing propaganda, but not in the hammer-to-the-face way you get from Breitbart or Fox News. Instead, it’s a warm bath of permission to ignore the horrors being unleashed by an administration boosted by the people who funded this app, and all offered in Jesus’ name, amen.
