The Free Press
Sarah’s life was in tatters. Her affair was over, and so, it seemed, was her marriage. She was living in a hotel in Chicago, alienated from her husband and three children. All attempts to fill the void—with drugs, alcohol, anything—had failed.
“My options were to sit in misery,” she said, “or just to try to pray.”
Sarah, 39, was raised Catholic, but growing up, the religion seemed to her like little more than a list of rules—what you “shouldn’t do or you’re going to hell.” But after she hit rock bottom, in the summer of 2022, she wondered if the God of her childhood could help. She prayed for guidance, and a day or so later, she saw something on Instagram that felt like a sign.
It was a video advertisement for a religious app called Hallow, featuring a familiar but unexpected face: Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg. He was inviting people to join him in praying the rosary, by listening to a recording on Hallow. (He owns part of the app.)
When Sarah saw this video, she felt seen. “It was just a complete, like, God-answered prayer,” she said.
She downloaded Hallow onto her phone and “went down this giant rabbit hole of consuming all that I could find within the app.” Hallow’s homepage offers a number of options you can listen to, from featured prayers to morning routines, plus courses and music. There’s also Magisterium AI, a chatbox which answers questions on the Church’s teachings.
Sarah began listening to rosaries in the morning and homilies (short sermons) by popular priests while on long walks in the afternoon; she’d end the day with a guided “examination of conscience,” then fall asleep to Hallow’s prayers.
After five months, Sarah—not her real name—moved back in with her family, and began going to therapy with her husband. She shared Hallow with him, and told me he experienced “a huge spiritual awakening with his own faith.”
Now, three years later, Sarah volunteers at her local parish as a cantor, and goes to confession at least once a month. She is convinced God used Hallow to save her soul, her marriage, her career—perhaps even her life.
Sarah is far from the only lost soul to arrive at Hallow. Since it was created in 2018, the app has been downloaded more than 23 million times, in 150 countries. (It’s available in eight languages.) At last count, Hallow has guided more than 800 million prayers. The app has had high-profile endorsements from celebrities across the political spectrum, from Liam Neeson to Tucker Carlson, and it’s successful enough to have bought a Super Bowl advertisement last year (which, at the national level, was valued at roughly $7 million).
And, right now, 1.75 million users are engaged in Hallow’s “Pray40” challenge.
Every year, at the beginning of a Lent, Hallow does a big advertising push, urging people to download the app and say a daily prayer in the 40-day lead-up to Easter. For the past three Ash Wednesdays, the app has soared to the top of Apple’s App Store, getting more downloads than Google, Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify. This year, 1.19 million signed up the day the challenge was announced; up from 1.05 million last year.
And the booming popularity of Hallow is part of a bigger trend, which is starting to look like a religious revival in the West. Though recent Pew data suggests Christianity’s decline may have stalled, among younger generations—especially men—it may even be in resurgence. On March 5, 2025, the first day of Lent, Catholics across the Western world reported unusually high turnout at Ash Wednesday services.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” wrote Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, on X. “Is something happening?”
Sarah has an answer, and it’s simple. There are many more people like her, she said, who are “starved for connection, for meaning.”
And people are beginning to realize that, really, they’re “starved for God.”
Investor Katherine Boyle first came across Hallow in 2019, at a pitch competition hosted by Stanford University. She watched as young entrepreneurs pitched “the hot thing” of the moment—financing things like crypto or emerging voices in the creator economy.
Then, she remembers, a 25-year-old Stanford business student “stood up in front of the 200 people that were there and he said: ‘I’m creating a Catholic meditation app, and I’m building it for myself.’ ”
“There were jaws on the floor.”
Boyle estimates that the app had fewer than 500 users at the time. It needed seed funding to grow. Boyle, a practicing Catholic, was impressed by the pitch, and promptly downloaded the app in the Stanford coffee shop.
“It was a magical product,” said Boyle—who became an investor, a board member, and a self-described “superfan.” “And that comes from the founder deeply understanding his user.” (Boyle is a contributor for The Free Press.)
The founder she met that day was Alex Jones—not to be confused with the far-right conspiracy theorist. (“When we first started sending out emails, most people were like, ‘Alex Jones is the Devil!,’ ” he said with a laugh, when we spoke.) He started Hallow with Alessandro DiSanto and Erich Kerekes, two friends he met as an undergrad at the University of Notre Dame.
Jones was raised Catholic, but stopped practicing in college. He still needed to quiet his mind during this time, so he used secular meditation apps like Headspace. And, he said, “every time I would meditate or sit in silence, my mind kept feeling pulled toward something spiritual, like an image of Jesus, an image of the cross, the words Holy Spirit, which I thought was very strange because I would have considered myself agnostic.”
He became curious about the church he was raised in—and ultimately discovered a “whole world of this spiritual life within Christianity that I had never heard of before”: the centuries-old tradition of contemplative prayer, which shares many qualities with meditation. “Scripture is really clear that God speaks primarily through silence,” Jones said.
The way to find Him, he said, is to do something that many people, including Christians, have forgotten how to do: Sit still, in silence, and open your mind.
And that’s what Jones wants to help people do.
There are 1.39 billion self-described Catholics in the world and 53 million in America alone. The majority don’t practice, but how many might, if given a nudge? In Boyle’s view, those fallen-away Catholics were “a market hiding in plain sight.” And it’s here where Hallow has excelled most—among the lapsed and the lukewarm.
“My hope and vision for Hallow,” Jones said, “is just that we continue to reach out through God to the people who are most fallen away.”
There are plenty of stories like Sarah’s—about lives being transformed by Hallow. Boyle recalls that, when she was a board member, Jones would begin every meeting by sharing testimonies from users whose lives had been changed by the app.
When I spoke to him, he told me about a nurse who used Hallow to play a rosary to a patient whose heart had stopped—then watched as the patient’s heart miraculously restarted at the end of the prayer. He also spoke of a school employee in Uvalde, Texas, who had been praying with the app on his drive to work one morning, then felt strangely compelled to park in a different spot than usual. This Hallow user later learned that, had he parked in his usual spot, he would have been in a school shooter’s direct line of fire.
But though these stories are a great way to sell the app, there are plenty of less dramatic—and possibly more representative—stories of salvation.
Robin is a wife and stay-at-home mom of three, with another baby on the way. She converted to Catholicism shortly before her wedding in 2017, but found it difficult to carve out time for prayer. Even when she goes to church on a Sunday, she finds it hard to concentrate. “I miss so much of the homily because I’m dealing with my children’s demands,” she said. “They’re not an age where they can sit still and be quiet.”
But after she discovered Hallow, she found she could use the app to pray while doing other things, like cleaning the kitchen. “I made a habit of listening to Father Mike’s homily, usually on Sunday night,” she told me. She loves it because it helps her stay connected to her faith and to the bigger things in life, no matter how busy her week has been.
Chris, too, is a Christian who finds himself easily distracted by the concerns of everyday life. An optometrist, husband, and father of nine from Omaha, Nebraska, he has always been a faithful Catholic. But he never gave much thought to silent prayer—until he got access to Hallow through his Catholic business group in November 2024.
He was hooked from the first guided prayer, “where they put you next to a creek sitting on a bench, and Jesus sits down next to you.”
“When that happened,” he told me, “I felt there was a presence.”
The stress of juggling his many commitments faded away, and he felt “a wave of calm or peace.” He said the anxiety that had become the backdrop of his life disappeared. “And it’s been gone for months.”
Despite Hallow’s popularity, not everyone is convinced that an app can be an effective aid to prayer. Many Catholics I spoke to said it was a poor substitute for worshipping in a church, and they were skeptical that spiritual progress could be tracked the same way that workouts and calories can.
James Majewski, the director of customer relations for Catholic Culture, said: “I think that there's a certain irony in the kind of marketing that I’ve seen surrounding Hallow—that it’s simultaneously calling people to prayer and then also showing, you know, like a giant picture of an iPhone.
“For me, cultivating real interior silence, and a real sort of encounter with God, has to take the form of turning away from these devices and from these distractions, from the internet,” he said.
But Jones argues that Catholicism, if it is to help, needs to meet these people where they are. “We are trying to reach out to the folks who are in really tough places,” he said. “Where are they spending their time? The answer is, fortunately or not: They’re spending their time online, on Instagram and TikTok and social media, and so we have to reach out to them there.”
Hallow can offer a form of togetherness. It has a “community” function which allows users to start prayer campaigns, invite others to pray for a cause, and leave one another “notes of support.” Over 800 people are currently praying for one man’s campaign for his 23-year-old daughter who is in a coma, battling brain cancer.
But Jones emphasizes that Hallow is not being used as a substitute for church: He said the app typically sees a spike of activity on Monday through Wednesday, and a drop later in the week, with Sunday as the lowest day. This, to him, is as it should be.
But Hallow has also been criticized, from both the left and right, for its celebrity partnerships. In November 2023, for instance, the app partnered with Liam Neeson—prompting some prominent Catholics to disavow Hallow, because the actor publicly backed a 2018 campaign to legalize abortion in Ireland.
The following year, Hallow advertised with Russell Brand, a British comedian who had only recently converted to Christianity. He was recently charged with rape and sexual assault. The decision to advertise with him prompted pushback from some Catholics, with one writing that the collaboration “smacks of poor taste, bad judgement, and a scant regard of the feelings of victims” and sends the message that “Catholic culture still doesn’t care about rape.”
Also in 2024, Hallow sponsored an episode of Candace Owens’s show, which has faced multiple accusations of antisemitism. Jones has also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.
Does Jones regret any of these celebrity collaborations?
“I think we’ve made a lot of mistakes with learning how to frame things,” he said, adding that there needs to be a clear difference between “someone leading you spiritually” and “someone who’s maybe just an advertising partner, or somebody who is a celebrity.”
The aim of Hallow, he insists, is to help people—rather than to make money. Jones considered setting up the app as a nonprofit—but advisers from that world warned that he’d struggle to be competitive against leading apps like Instagram, Netflix, or Spotify, or to attract the most talented employees. And so, he established Hallow as a public benefit corporation—a type of company that balances the pursuit of profit with the advancement of a social good—in which he is the largest shareholder. (So far, the company employs 87 people.)
Hallow doesn’t publicize how much it’s worth, but so far it has raised nearly $160 million. In January, Jones posted on X that he has pledged to return all the profit he makes from equity to the church. He told me: “God is very clear. Money is corrupting. It can lead you to terrible things.”
For all the criticism that’s leveled at both the app and its marketing, it’s hard to deny that it has helped people. Like Lauren, 20, from New Hampshire, who was raised Catholic but decided at age 14 that she was an atheist, for both moral and political reasons. “I was like, what the Catholic Church says about X thing is stupid, and I don’t want to have to engage with that,” she told me.
In the year that followed, Lauren struggled with what she described as “a lack of purpose.” She had a hard time making friends in high school and, as her mental health began deteriorating, felt alienated. Reflecting on that time, she was frank: “I was angry and miserable.”
Things got so bad for Lauren that, at age 15, she wrote her dad a suicide note, then got in a bathtub with razor blades. Before she went through with it, though, she made one last plea to God.
If you exist, you have to prove it to me, because this is the last chance I’m ever giving you, she remembers thinking.
Then she picked up her phone, which she’d put on a stool next to the bathtub. At that precise moment, a notification from Hallow, which her mom had downloaded for her, flashed across the screen.
Lauren clicked on it. And what happened next led to a “shift moment in my life,” which pushed her to seek treatment for her mental health issues through therapy.
On the app she saw a meditation on the Passion of Christ, the story of the Crucifixion as found in the Gospels.
“I just started sobbing,” said Lauren. “Realizing that if all of this is real then literally: The God of the universe, the King of everything, died for someone like me who doesn’t even care about Him right now.”
Lauren has gone on to graduate from college, and will soon take a job teaching third and fourth grade at a Catholic school in her home state. Back in June 2024, she reached out to Jones to tell him her story.
Like any founder, Jones presents a rose-tinted view of his product, but stories like Lauren’s genuinely seem to move him.
“If I worked my whole life for 50 years and played a role in just one of these lives,” he told me, “I’d be so grateful. What a gift from God.”
