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After Gwen Stefani came under fire for promoting an anti-abortion app on social media, she’s opening up about her faith. Even though it seems like the 56-year-old singer only recently started leaning into Christianity (and a more MAGA ideology), apparently, her journey has been going on even longer than that, and she even credits her ability to naturally conceive her youngest son at the age of 44 to prayer.
Gwen promoted an app called Hallow on Instagram.
In February, Gwen shared a video on Instagram launching her partnership with an app called Hallow, promoting their 40 day Lent Prayer Challenge and encouraging her social media followers to join her.
It wasn’t so much the religious aspect of the app that fans took issue with, though. One big problem that many had? The fact that the app requires a subscription, which made them believe she was promoting the monetization of prayer. Another was Hallow’s anti-abortion stance. According to the app’s website, features include “Pro-Life prayer challenges, meditations, litany, and novena,” and though they claim they don’t want to make any political affiliations, they do say there is one exception: Politicians who are “fighting for a topic on which the Church also has an explicit political stance, e.g., pro-life activists.”
She sat down with evangelist Jeff Cavins to talk about her faith for the app.
A new video that shows a conversation between Gwen and Jeff Cavins, an evangelist who is a prominent figure in Hallow’s content, was shared on YouTube this week. Gwen explained that even after growing up in a Catholic household, she still considers herself a “baby Christian” and didn’t really come back to the religion until after she worked with someone who got her reconsidering her faith.
“I started working with this guy and he was [really like] an atheist Jew, right, that converted after being atheist growing up in Israel,” she said. “And he was studying the Torah and he had this big epiphany awakening and he starts talking to me about the Torah.”
At the time, Gwen admitted she was “desperate” to have another baby, but since she was 44 at that point, it felt impossible… but she was willing to try anything.
Gwen said God helped her conceive her son Apollo.
She went on to say that her oldest son, Kingston, also truly wanted a younger sibling and was even praying that he would have one.
“He was like ‘Please God let my mom have a baby,’ and I just was just sitting there going wow, look at my little boy. He’s praying for me. Like he was doing it every night and I never asked him to do that, never taught him that really,” she said. “I think it was like four weeks later and I was pregnant with Apollo who you know, I had at 44 years old naturally. Totally a full-on gift. And that was the first miracle.”
While Gwen is hardly the first person (or celebrity) to turn to prayer for comfort, is promoting an app that charges people for help on their spiritual journey really the right move? It doesn’t seem like this interview is going to do a lot to sway fans, but then again, Gwen has been pretty unapologetic about the changes she’s been making in her life lately.
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