Popular conservative commentator and former host with the Daily Wire, Candace Owens, recently converted to Catholicism and has been growing bolder in her proclamation of the gospel along with observations being made through the new lens of her faith, including her recent characterization of history as an ongoing “holy war that is being waged against goodness.”
I would say that’s a correct statement, so long as we recognize that “goodness” is defined by God and is found in the pages of Sacred Scripture. We have to be careful not to present a vague sense of what is “good.” Mankind is not inherently “good.” We’re a fallen race of beings who participate in evil — as revealed in God’s law — as we pursue our own pleasure and fulfillment apart from relationship with the Creator.
Owens made the comment during a speech being delivered before an advocacy group called Catholics for Catholics in Phoenix, Arizona.
Via The Christian Post:
Owens converted to Catholicism earlier this year and began her speech by referring to her address as her “first Catholic event.” In her remarks, she elaborated on how her journey to Catholicism began “with just a curiosity of the Catholic faith, seeing what it had done in my husband’s life.”
Owens described herself as “overwhelmed but interested in why this had done so much good in my husband’s life.” She noted that he attends Mass every day and goes to confession weekly, expressing her excitement at seeing “somebody have that sort of a commitment” and “everything in their life become better.”
In addition to curiosity stemming from her husband’s embrace of and conversion to Catholicism, Owens cited “things that were happening politically” and the belief that Evangelicalism was “starting to feel like a political party” rather than a philosophy based on adherence to “truths that are incontrovertible” as other factors that pulled her toward the religion.
“My husband used to say to me … to become a student of history is to become a Catholic,” she recalled during the address. “I never knew what he meant until I started getting interested in what was motivating people, what was driving people.”
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After doing a deep dive into specific topics, she then started having debates with Protestants.
“I would find myself discovering things that I thought, ‘wow, that’s weird, seems like this was an intentional time in history that was an attack on the Catholic faith,'” she continued.
According to the former Daily Wire host, she then began to go back and look through those history books that she read from in school and asked questions about where the ideas she had about Catholics having a negative impact in the world came from. The podcast host then stated that her change of mind about the Catholic faith came about as the result of studying history, which she said was vastly different than what she learned when attending public school.
Identifying history as a continuous story of “good versus evil,” Owens determined that “it has forever been a holy war that is being waged against goodness.” While she recalled hearing a voice in her head telling her, “you could just say nothing” and “just keep on going and saying the thing about the left versus the right, and you could live a really nice life doing that” as opposed to focusing her commentary on “the topic of faith,” she concluded that taking that course of action “didn’t sit right” with her.
“Suddenly, I understood that my entire career, which I felt like I was going into this nice easy spot in, was going to be upended because everything else that we were talking about was nonsense,” Owens explained to the crowd. “I understood the attacks that I was going to endure for my faith.”
She then came to the realization that many believers of Christ ultimately come to, which is that by being outspoken about your faith in Jesus, you will be persecuted. Jesus Himself told us as much in the pages of the New Testament.
Owens then said, “I have never endured more attacks than when I tweeted last November that ‘Christ is King.’ Never in my life have I seen anything like it.”
The political commentator pushed back on the claim that her post was “an expression of antisemitism” as opposed to a statement of faith. She condemned “the amount of lies told about something that was so simple and so true.”
“One of the most beautiful things about coming into the Catholic Church is that I didn’t come here to be a celebrity,” she further explained. “For the first time, my celebrity made sense to me because it was a gift.”
Owens then added, “There is only one that we should be celebrating ever: that’s it.” She explained that she came to understand that “this platform was given to me because the platform’s not mine, it isn’t mine,” but rather, “a megaphone for me to do the real work.”
The truth of the matter is that we were told that we would have to endure much suffering for the glory of Christ. But in the end, we will be rewarded for our faithfulness, thus, we shouldn’t be worried or discouraged about taking some insults for the Lord. It’s well worth it.