'Use Trump as a messenger': How 'fringy' Catholic women are bringing MAGA to the masses

08 May

Candace Owens speaking at the 2024 Young Women's Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas on June 7, 2024 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Until recently, the young women at the forefront of conservative politics were largely evangelical Protestants. They looked like the kind of young women you might see showing their OOTDs on RushTok, marrying a certain Southern-bred feminine aesthetic with a defense of President Donald Trump. These young women aren’t fading into the background during the start of the second Trump administration, but they now have company.

This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson and Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Young Catholic women have emerged as instrumental messengers of the MAGA message. While much has been made of Vice President JD Vance’s Catholicism and the role it plays in his politics, less attention is given to the young women talking about their Catholic faith — Instagram influencers like Isabel Brown, staffers at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute and Jayme Franklin, founder and CEO of the online conservative women’s magazine The Conservateur. A new class of influential young women have made the communication of Trumpian politics an extension of their Catholic faith.

About 1 in 5 adults in the United States are Catholic, a significant group that’s split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Recent polling shows that the younger generation of Catholics is becoming increasingly conservative, particularly in the United States. For many of them, it has come as the parties have become increasingly divided on the issue of abortion and religion’s role in public life. The more conservative American Catholics have gravitated toward Trump — who has claimed credit for eliminating federal abortion rights before saying he would not support a nationwide abortion ban and also established a religious liberty commission.

The Catholic Church itself is at a crossroads after the April 21 death of Pope Francis. Pope Francis had a couple of months earlier issued a letter to the church’s American bishops condemning the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, seemingly criticizing Vance himself for using his Catholic faith to justify the administration’s deportation policies.

On Wednesday, the Catholic Church’s cardinals gathered for a conclave to select the next pope. They’ll also set the direction of the church — picking either someone more progressive, like Francis, or a more conservative choice, who might be more aligned with right-wing American Catholics, some of whom gathered in Rome over the weekend to fundraise and organize.

On Saturday, the White House posted on Instagram a captionless AI-generated image of Trump himself as the pope, upsetting and offending many — but seemingly leaving the young women who have become some of the president’s most vocal supporters online unaffected. (Trump, meanwhile, told reporters Monday, “I have no idea where [the post from the official White House account] came from — maybe it was A.I.” and “They can’t take a joke. You don’t mean the Catholics; you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it.”)

Catherine Pakaluk is an associate professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America and is an expert on Catholic social thought and political economy. She said an increasingly active anti-abortion movement in the church coincided with the growth of social media, which provided more and more economic opportunities for young women. This eventually created a certain kind of influencer for whom Catholic faith and political ideology are now synonymous.

“They see their work as being meaningful and that their [online engagement] matters politically in the same way that people see social justice as something that is political activity, where you get up in the morning and you think, ‘OK how am I going to help people today?’” Pakaluk said.

One of the most prominent is Isabel Brown, a Gen Z livestreamer and content creator, who frequently discusses conservative politics and culture debates, advocating for traditional Catholic values to more than a million followers. She was featured on the cover of Newsweek, wearing a red MAGA hat, in 2019 and published two books in the last five years calling for Gen Z to embrace so-called traditional values. Brown was in attendance when Trump signed the executive order at the White House banning transgender women and girls from school sports that align with their gender identity and recently posted a critique of liberals’ supposed pearl-clutching about Trump’s proposed “baby bonus” to increase the national birth rate.

Leah Libresco, a freelance journalist and former policy researcher who has written extensively on feminism and Catholicism, stressed that while many of the of the most popular MAGA influencers happen to be Catholic, they do not represent the majority of Catholic women’s political opinions — but do reflect the reality that many Catholic women do not feel like there is a home for them in the Democratic Party today, largely because of the party’s pro-choice stance.

While many of the most high-profile practicing Catholics in politics lately have been Democrats, including former President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Catholics now driving Republican politics are younger and more conservative. Not only is Vance a vocal Catholic convert, but Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has spoken about the impact of attending a Catholic high school and Benedictine College. Over Easter weekend, Catholics for Catholics — the heart of far-right wing Catholicism in the United States — hosted its annual gathering and gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Conservative Gen Z Catholic influencers are being embraced by their party even as more progressive Catholic women feel shut out of liberal organizing spaces because of their belief that being anti-abortion is part of a larger, holistic approach to working to honor the sanctity and dignity of all life.

“I think a lot of the challenge for the faith right now is to try and talk about Catholicism as a whole unified faith and not just the little pieces that get snipped off as essentially controversial, so that you are making the case that pro-life activism for children who are disvalued in the womb is united to advocacy for the disabled is united to advocacy for the poor is united to advocacy for their caregivers,” Libresco said.

There’s another reason that social media is a natural fit for younger people looking to express their political, and religious, ideology — especially young women, Libresco added.

“I think when you have a platform that’s very photo- and video-oriented in the way that TikTok or Instagram is, you’re going to see that as creating different opportunities for very young women than those that are text-based and what they create for older women and that’s because people want to look at very young women,” she said.

Some of the most prominent Catholic voices on the right are converts, including Vance. One of the most controversial is Candace Owens, a far-right personality who rose to prominence as a Trump supporter and was fired from The Daily Wire in March 2024 for a series of antisemitic comments. The following month, she announced a conversion to Catholicism and was met with excitement from some Catholics online. She was immediately invited to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a welcome Mass that more than 200,000 people watched online. Then a month later when she posted pictures of her baptism in London, the Catholic Identity Conference — an annual event hosted by a traditionalist Catholic newspaper that often criticized the progressiveness of Pope Francis’ actions and teachings — announced she would be a headliner that fall.

Katherine Dugan, an associate professor at Springfield University and the author of “Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool,” said that while the majority of Catholics are not enamored with “the moral life of Trump,” the influencers who have made their Catholicism synonymous with their politics are able to capitalize on a more widely felt sentiment that Trump represents “the lesser of two evils in a landscape where you have to choose between trans rights, abortion, and no religion in schools and the opposite of that.”

And though a minority voice within the world of mainstream Catholicism, Dugan said the women who have become key messengers of the Trump agenda are promoting not just a political message, but a version of Catholicism that they view as correct to other people’s wrong, more liberal Catholicism.

“My read is less that the politics are a necessary part of being Catholic in America, but they’re making a strategic choice to sort of pick a side of the spectrum that tastes a little better in their interpretation of the politics,” Dugan said.

Dugan explained that while this political ideology may not represent the majority of contemporary Catholics, a recent concerted movement to bring more young people into Catholicism has focused on young women — and offered them “a version of feminism that is different than second wave and even third wave feminism.”

This push stems from work done by Pope John Paul II in the early 1990s around what became known as “JPII feminism.” It was a kind of rebuke of the contemporary feminist movement, a disavowal of the idea that the way for women to assert greater power was to be thought of as like men.

“There’s this sense that culture has done women an injustice and in order to reclaim their power — like reclaiming the sanctity of life — they must reclaim a woman’s position in the world, which is that women need to not be like men,” Dugan said. “Women are to be women, and that’s how we celebrate God’s vision for all of human life.”

It has resulted in a unique cultural moment, Dugan said, where “Catholics understand their capacity to use Trump as a messenger, even if he is an accidental messenger, a great messenger for the dignity of human life” that is echoed through the way Trump talks about everything from abortion to increasing the birth rate to protecting women in sports.

And part of using Trump as a messenger means a cottage industry popping up of young women who both understand the power of Trump to act on their values, the power of social media to reach new audiences, and the power of the influencer economy to make new opportunities for themselves.

Part of this is also a natural side effect of a generation for whom social media is a native language. While evangelicals had a heavy radio presence throughout the 80s and into the beginning of the 21st century, “what has happened in the last 10 years is that Catholics woke up and figured out they’re not doing radio, but they’ve leaned pretty heavily into social media generally, especially in podcasting,” Pakaluk said.

“It’s still fringy, it’s not majority — but they are influential,” Pakaluk said of the emergence of the young women Catholic right-wing influencers. “I know a lot of young Catholic women who, like evangelical women before them, say it’s their number one interest after finishing college and before they get married to go down to Washington and be a staffer on Capitol Hill or work for think tanks. They want to change the world.”

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