Jesus for Sale: Hallow Prayer App’s $7 million Superbowl Spot.

Easier it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the politely Christofascist for profit conversion tool kicked off with venture capitalism dollars to pass into the Kingdom of God.

The profit-generating Catholic prayer app spent $7 million for a smarmily sanctimonious Catholic Superbowl commercial. Here’s the teaser. If I were faith shopping, I might have bought the latter. The Scientology commercial was more tasteful, and wasn’t using the most solemn 40 days of the Christian calendar to make a buck off of Christ. Even the fascist Hobby Lobby commercial was less loaded with manipulative treacle.

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I have had my eye on the Hallow app for a while now. In September of 2022 I wrote a five-part piece about the prayer app after trying to “pray” with it courtesy of the free trial. (A subscription costs $69.99) Alex Jones, the founder of the Hallow App has said in interviews that the idea for the app grew out of his desire to connect with the Roman Catholicism from which he had fallen away.

Hallow is not owned by the institutional Roman Catholic Church, but parishes all over the United States have endorsed and used Hallow’s for profit ( “public benefit corporation”) prayer app.

The Hallow App launched in 2018 but the Covid-19 gave it a boost. In September of 2022, wrote about it in a five-part piece on Indie Theology (See the links below.) because I noticed that some of the most prominent “New Evangelization” lens louse preachers, Opus Dei adherents, nationalists, public trad Catholics, notorious male supremacists, homophobes, so-called “pro-lifers”, grifter clerics, antisemitic/supersessionist Bible Scholars, and Hollywood Catholics had collaborated under the auspices of Hallow to use tech to hawk a conservative Catholic (New Evangelization) worldview by means of the meditation and sleep functions of the $69.99 per year app.

Jonathan (‘I’m not Jesus but I play him on TV’) Roumie and Mark Wahlberg appear in the in the Superbowl 2024 spot. Both men appear to have ties to Opus Dei. Roumie, stars in the popular crowd-funded charming enough but manipulative and fancifully anachronistic series The Chosen, and Wahlberg directed and starred in Father Stu, a movie about a pugilist priest with a terminal illness via which he gave traditional Catholic Mel Gibson a role and a chance at Hollywood penance, perhaps.

Hallow is a profit-generating project whose goal is to support the institutional Roman Catholic Church in increasing the fold, converting the lost but Catholicism-curious, enticing Catholics who have left the Catholic Church in disgust to return, and — in the United States — to impose Catholic doctrine and law upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Think MAGA Jesus.

MMS

Feb 11, 2024

Hallow and the New Evangelization Project , Part 1

September 18, 2022

Read this piece in its entirety on Indie Theology.