One of the most influential Catholics in the United States right now is 32-year-old tech entrepreneur Alex Jones.
Jones is CEO and co-founder of the prayer app Hallow, which has been downloaded more than 20 million times, according to the company.
It's big enough that last year, Hallow had its very own Super Bowl commercial starring Mark Wahlberg, an investor in the company.
Hallow has also attracted the financial support of high-profile conservative Americans like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, before he became vice president. At this turning point for the Catholic Church, All Things Considered host Scott Detrow spoke to Jones about the new pope.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Scott Detrow: For more than the past week, cardinals have been having all these meetings, talking about the big issues facing the church. I'm curious, what is most important to you when it comes to the directions the church could go under whoever is elected next?
Alex Jones: As a church more broadly, from my perspective, what we need to focus on is what's changed my own life radically — is just having our hearts open to the Lord and having him enter them and change them radically, and making sure that we are living our lives on fire with a love for Jesus.
Detrow: Can you give me specific examples of how you do that outside the prayer space, how you do that day to day in your life, in the real world?
Jones: Yeah, I mean, the prayer is a really interesting thing. It's very different from just meditating. If you spend 15 minutes in prayer in the morning, it has to lead to a life of deeper love. And so what does that mean? I mean, for me, I'm the dad of three little kiddos and the husband of my wife and the question is, "How can I love them better?" But then it's also loving the poor. It's loving those who are most marginalized. It's helping to try to spend time in service to those who are in the most difficult places in their life.
Detrow: We've talked to a lot of people who talk also about the church as a political actor in the real world. What is the stance that the church, the next pope, is going to take on immigration, specifically, on things like climate change? What do you think about the church's role as a political actor, the pope as a global leader? How important is that to you?
Jones: Yeah. It's important. The church's primary role is to start with something higher than politics, which is a relationship with Jesus and trying to share that relationship, the real love and peace of God with people. And to reach out to people and introduce them to God's mercy and his love.
And then, yes, politics and action and service and love for the poor and everything naturally flows from that. The thing that we try to focus on at Hallow, the thing I try to focus on in my life, is certainly not the politics, but is the relationship and the love of God.
Detrow: NPR did an interview the other day with Cardinal Czerny, who used an interesting phrase, he talked about the "digital continent" in the way that he thinks the Catholic Church needs to [be thinking] about spreading itself to continents throughout the world --- being more online, getting its message more online.
Obviously, that is a space where you have been very successful. What do you think specifically this institution can do to have a greater presence online, where so many people spend most of their days?
Jones: The church, especially over the last 50 years or so, has leaned much more into trying to reach out to people where they are. It's not enough just to sit in our parishes and hope that people come into our stores or bring their kids. You have to reach out to people where they are. And whether we like it or not, where people are spending their time today is on their phones and scrolling. And so the question of how do you reach out to folks, especially people who have fallen away, is how can you get somebody to stop scrolling for half a second and let Jesus into their hearts or maybe just spend a couple of minutes in silence.
For us, that's really what it's been about. It's about, "Hey, can we take 30 seconds and just sit in silence and just give Jesus like 30 seconds, 60 seconds? My guess is he's going to change your life." And what we've seen is that happen countless times. We have people who haven't been to church in 10, 20 years, who hate religion or are opposed or have been hurt radically by it, who, once they spend 30, 60 seconds, it's not anything we say, it's not in the audio — it's just Jesus. It's just God speaking to them in silence. And he just tells them exactly what they need to hear and changes their life.
And so that's what we've seen —just leading with spirituality, leading with silence and God enter into that space even in the digital world, which you know, it feels kind of like a contradiction, but God can do it.
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