The man helping Silicon Valley find God

Telegraph

20-04-2025

The first of the Glorious Mysteries is the Resurrection. The second is the Ascension. The third is the Descent of the Holy Spirit. The fourth is the Assumption, the fifth is the Coronation. A sixth mystery could be added to that list: how Hallow, a Catholic prayer app, became – even if just briefly – the most downloaded app in the world.
Its American co-founder, Alex Jones (not to be confused with the prominent conspiracy theorist and radio host), is as surprised by this success as you might be. 'Initially, I built it just for myself,' he says. 'If you had told me 1,000 people would use the app, I would have said you were crazy. That seems like a lot of people to me. But 10,000, 100,000, one million, 10 million? That's just God showing off.'
It becomes clear that Jones has a habit of deferring to a higher power at any given opportunity. Why has the app been so popular, I ask? 'Jesus,' is his response. Later, he says that 'God could have chosen someone better for this job'.
Perhaps Hallow's success really is divine intervention. After all, it is not an easy sell: a religious mobile phone app that guides its users in contemplative Christian prayer, from the well known (Our Father) to the esoteric (the teachings of St Ignatius of Loyola, for example). Or perhaps it is a sign of the times. In the United States, evidence from the think tank Pew Research Center shows that the decades-long decline of Christianity has plateaued. In Britain, church attendance is on the rise, driven by young people, and young men in particular. According to research published last week, 21 per cent of men aged 18-24 in England and Wales are regular churchgoers. And among Gen Z churchgoers, Catholics outnumber Anglicans two to one.
Jones, a 31-year-old father of three, co-founded Hallow in 2018 with two friends from the Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Like secular meditation apps such as Headspace and Calm, it offers guided meditations and sleep aids. Unlike others, however, it offers content such as a session on the nine steps performed during an exorcism – perhaps not an easy sell for a secular audience.
Nevertheless, the app has been downloaded 23 million times, is available in eight languages, and claims to have more than half a million users in the UK. It costs $69.99 per year, or $6 per month (roughly £5 per month in the UK), although some of its content is available free. Jones is fighting what he refers to as 'over-regulation' threatening to shut down Hallow in the European Union. The app has already been banned outright in China.
'It's a difficult one, and we don't know all of the details,' says Jones, claiming that 'in the EU, you can still download it, we just can't market it' – a limit that is 'being applied across the board to faith-based apps or any religious apps in the EU, It's not an easy regulatory environment to navigate'.
Hallow's users are fairly evenly split across age groups, Jones says: roughly a third under 35 years old, a third aged 35-55, and a third aged 55-plus. The slick interface of a social media app and the millennia-old wisdom of contemplative Christianity are unlikely bedfellows, but it seems to work. Even more curiously, only roughly half of its users are Catholic. The other half, Jones explains, are from other Christian denominations, other faiths, or none.
'It is certainly focused on people who are interested in Christian spirituality, as everything on the app is about Jesus,' he says. 'But one of the beautiful things about this faith is that it has all these ways of re-engaging you.' In other words, the app is built primarily for people like Jones: the lapsed and the lost. 'The core of Hallow's mission is to reach out to the folks who have most fallen away, and the people who are in the darkest places,' he says. 'To do that, you have to reach out to them where they are. And where they are is scrolling on their phones.'
We are speaking over the telephone as Jones walks around his neighbourhood, a western suburb of Chicago. I downloaded Hallow and used it to pray the Rosary this morning on my walk to work, I tell him: my first experience of Catholic prayer, and it was from a portable church in my pocket. He asks who my 'guide' was, referring to the available prayer narrators. Naturally I had chosen Mark Wahlberg, the Hollywood actor (more on him later). 'If you're in a time crunch, Mark will get it done,' Jones says. 'People love [him], but it stresses me out, it's way too fast. Usually it goes, 'Hail Mary, full of grace…' but Mark is like, 'HailMaryfullofgrace…''
Jones was raised Catholic, but by the time he was at college, studying mechanical engineering, he had lapsed into an indifferent agnosticism. He started using secular meditation apps. But over time, in the quiet, he felt an undeniable pull towards the church of his childhood.
'There is this deep hunger for real peace, real rest,' he says. 'Not just scrolling, not just distracting yourself, busying yourself – but real rest, real peace. For me the only true source of that is a relationship with God, which has changed my own life radically.' He was supported in rediscovering his faith by his wife, Meghan, whom he met while at Notre Dame. 'She is 98 per cent of the reason I'm a Catholic and not a terrible person,' he says. Soon, he quit his graduate job as a management consultant to focus on Hallow full time.
The app's three co-founders – Jones, Alessandro DiSanto and Erich Kerekes – were named in Forbes's 30 Under 30 list in 2022. Last year, after advertising during American football's showpiece Super Bowl, Hallow reached number one in the Apple App Store, briefly surpassing the likes of Google, Netflix and every social media giant – the only religious app ever to have done so. At the time of writing, 897,783,519 prayers have been prayed with Hallow – a number that ticks up and up as the seconds pass. By the time you read this, it will be higher still.
The app has also become something of a start-up wunderkind, raising more than $100 million in multiple funding rounds and winning backing from, among others, Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and US vice-president JD Vance, through his former venture capital fund. Jones considered making Hallow a non-profit, but wanted to build 'a really high-quality app'. In an industry where developers can command seven-figure salaries, a non-profit budget wasn't going to cut it. In a recent post on X, Jones announced that he had 'made a deal with God' and would be donating all his Hallow equity to the Church.
I made a deal with God
All of the equity / ownership I have now in Hallow will go back to the Church
All of this was a gift given to me by the Lord and His Church. It deserves to be returned.
I am the largest individual equity holder in Hallow, so I guess that makes the…
— Alex at Hallow (@alexathallow) January 30, 2025
'In Silicon Valley, there's been this radical change over the past four years,' Jones says. When Hallow was a fledgling app, he estimates there were only a handful of out-and-proud Christians in the whole of the industry. 'There are, however, many millions of people in Silicon Valley, but [Christians]? There were like eight of us,' he says. 'There's an HBO show called Silicon Valley, and there's an episode where a character 'comes out' as a Christian. That is pretty perfectly representative of what it felt like. When we first spoke to people about this idea, they thought it was insane – even those who took their own faith very seriously said they wouldn't be publicly associated with it.' Jones describes the small group of Christians in venture capital circles as a 'rebel Church'.
Jones may be based in the Chicago suburbs but he runs in Silicon Valley circles. 'I would go around and ask people, 'Are you religious?' and everyone would say no, that's old news, we don't do that anymore,' he says. 'But then I would ask, 'Are you spiritual?' and everybody would say yes. That's actually one of the things that got me interested – the emergence of people who are interested in spirituality but still against religion. What's happened since then… it's been really cool to see, especially in Silicon Valley, in a world that was so anti-religion, this interest in spirituality and faith come back to the surface.'
Now, however, San Francisco – long one of America's most irreligious cities – has found God. There were Christians among Silicon Valley's ranks already: Thiel, an early Hallow investor, has long spoken of his evangelical Christian beliefs – and has been 'phenomenal to work with' and offered 'a lot of really great advice,' according to Jones. But Christians were previously in the minority, in the shadows, swimming against the cultural tide. Now, that tide has changed.
Elon Musk describes himself as a ' cultural Christian '; prominent Christians in tech – such as Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator, an influential start-up accelerator – run events where they discuss their beliefs. On the panel at a recent event, Francis Collins, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health who worked on mapping the human genome, shared his own story of moving from atheism to Christian faith. 'Science answers questions that start with 'how,'' he said. 'Faith answers questions that start with 'why.''
Hallow may not have become so successful without the muscle of its celebrity 'partners', Wahlberg in particular. It has featured Chris Pratt, Liam Neeson, Gwen Stefani, and the actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in the television series The Chosen, but it is Wahlberg who has become the de facto face of the Hallow movement. Many of the app's users were introduced to it by an online advertisement that shows Wahlberg inviting viewers to pray the Rosary. This is deliberate: when someone's TikTok feed is interrupted by a video of Wahlberg – in Jones's words 'that guy from that bear movie [ Ted ]' – praying, 'it's just weird enough that you might give it a try.'. If that was a savvy marketing move, the app's other celebrity partnerships have perhaps been less well thought-through.
The app has a long-term partnership with Jim Caviezel, the star of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. One year, he was the voice of the app's Lent series, and Jones says, 'I thought we could never beat how cool that was.' The partnership is one Jones stands by, despite Caviezel's links with the discredited conspiracy movement QAnon. He spoke at a Right-wing conference called the Health Freedom Summit in 2021, where he made a reference to 'adrenochroming,' a fringe conspiracy theory popularised by QAnon which suggests people are harvesting adrenalin from children.
In 2024, Hallow began a partnership with Russell Brand, who in early April this year was charged with rape and sexual assault, which he denies. The app has since cut ties with Brand, but didn't do so until news of the charges broke. 'We respect the judicial system and the belief of innocent until proven guilty, and of course believe in authentic repentance and forgiveness, but in a spirit of prudence while the process unfolds, have decided to stop advertising on Russell's show.' The integrity of Hallow's contributors is taken 'very seriously', Jones says, and 'we have tried to get better over time.' Caviezel's content is still available on Hallow.
'We certainly take into account what [celebrity partners have] said, or political perspectives, and make sure that we create a place on the app that's welcoming and open to anybody,' Jones says. 'Hopefully we can build a place for spirituality – for both people on the Left and Right politically, whether that's in the US or abroad.'
Jones 'hates' interviews. 'But this one is fun,' he adds, a little too quickly. And he welcomes negative feedback, which he says 'probably makes me holier than any positive feedback'. He has only done a handful of interviews since founding the app six years ago – the most high-profile being a recent two-hour-long sit-down on the Tucker Carlson show, the YouTube channel of the former Fox News anchor. (Carlson, incidentally, has also recently interviewed Brand and the other Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracist who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.) Does he accept that even if the intention, as he says, is to create a prayer platform that is as 'apolitical as possible', it currently skews to the Right? 'You know, honestly, I don't,' he says, before adding, 'I mean, maybe a little bit.'
The app is also unapologetically anti-abortion, with a section dedicated specifically to 'Pro-Life Prayers'. Jones says it is 'authentically Catholic' and 'we stand very strongly with the Church on all issues, especially the pro-life issue'. If there is ever a question of what he believes – or what Hallow stands for – 'our stances are whatever the Church teaches, and whatever the Holy Father, Pope Francis, is standing behind or calls us to… the Church would call [abortion] the pre-eminent social issue in the US'.
Perhaps as a result, Hallow has not had trouble finding users, but it has struggled to find places to advertise. 'We advertise on as many places as are willing to help us reach out to people to help them learn more about their faith, whether that's CNN or Fox, or NBC, or the Super Bowl,' Jones says. 'Maybe TV channels are a bit different, but in terms of podcasts, online influencers, we get a ton of nos. Probably the majority no. There are a lot of people who still aren't fans of Jesus, unfortunately.'
Hollow is converting 'fans of Jesus', one Hail Mary at a time. 'What [we see] is that it changes people's lives,' Jones says, with a double dose of zeal that comes from being a Christian and a start-up founder. 'Our job is to take what the Church has had for thousands of years and introduce it in an accessible way.'