“The first consistent way I made money was altar serving,” Alessandro DiSanto has said. At the Holy Name of Jesus parish in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and while still only in eighth grade, he would organise the altar servers for funerals. One funeral home offered $5 a funeral, another $10, another $15. “We were always praying for the $15 home,” he’s joked. This wasn’t exactly a hustle, DiSanto insists, more a “service to the church that came with some economic benefits”.
Now an adult, and via a stint at Goldman Sachs, DiSanto has seriously scaled up his service to the church. In 2018, he co-founded Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app that has been downloaded over 20 million times. Securing investment funding of over $157 million, with notable investors including Peter Thiel and JD Vance, Hallow has gone on to be the most successful piece of religious digital technology ever. Following an ad during the Super Bowl, in February last year, it became the most downloaded app on the Apple store, ahead of ChatGPT, Google and Netflix.
“It aired in 15 markets during the big game,” Fox Business explained. “God is doing incredible things,” added Alex Jones, the CEO of Hallow. “All glory and credit and praise belongs to him.” The company doesn’t publish profits, but the former rapper and actor Mark Wahlberg has denied that he received $20 million for fronting the Super Bowl slot. It’s hard to follow the money, but there is certainly a lot of it sloshing around.
I have been on Hallow for a week now, and I can see why it is popular. There is a lot of nice stuff here. The interface is clean, the functionality great. And the theology is pretty mainstream Roman Catholic stuff, with cameos from well-known Catholic commentators like Bishop Barron, and even the old Pope. There is a bit of a meditation feel to some of it, which is fine if that’s your thing. There are parts of the app to help you sleep, someone whispering Bible verses almost as lullabies.
The Examen technique, developed by the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola, is used to help people review their day. The Lectio Divina, often ascribed to St Benedict, is used to encourage people to read the Bible in a more meditative way. The app feels a bit bossy to me, reminding me when to pray and how to pray. The more I stay on Hallow, the more I feel I am being managed. Today, I received an email from Hallow inviting me to join the waiting list for the Conclave Prayer Challenge. Oh sod off, I thought. I also really hate it when people try to supply too much meaning in their voice when they talk breathlessly of God.
That’s all a personal reaction. But what I can’t get my head round is why someone might spend $69.99 a year to have their relationship with God mediated by an app. For such a contemporary phenomenon, this feels like a pretty medieval issue: money, mediation and the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, remember, attacked the Church on two counts. First, that it came to interpose a level of clerical intermediaries between the individual believer and God. Second, that it came to monetise this role in the form of indulgences.
Hallow isn’t doing anything as crude as trying to sell you time off from purgatory. But certainly, to European sensibilities, the obscurity of Hallow finances raises considerable alarm bells. How much money is it OK to make from religion? $15 a funeral? My £29,000-ish-a-year stipend? Hallow’s estimated $51.4 million income? I told all this to a mate of mine who is in finance. “How do we get into this game, Giles?” he laughed, only half-jokingly. St Francis told his followers not to even touch money, lest they become corrupted by it. “Money is the devil’s dung,” advised St Basil of Caesarea. Pope Francis repeated the idea too, though I can’t find any of that in Hallow.
“The obscurity of Hallow finances raises considerable alarm bells”
Selling people prayer time is a bit like when they started to sell you water. You can get it straight out of the tap, but such is the dark genius of marketing that they can persuade us to pay silly money for something that is free already. Actually, it is worse than selling fancy water, because prayer isn’t the sort of thing that fits comfortably alongside technology. Fundamentally, it is the most low-tech thing there is: just you and God and time. You don’t need to join a waiting list. Just find some silence and sit in it.
At base, the values of modern technology and the values of ancient prayer seem deeply antithetical. Technology is fundamentally about efficiency: achieving things more quickly, more effectively, with less hassle and disruption. You don’t have to be Thomas Merton to work out that prayer doesn’t operate with this logic. It is not just another way of getting things done in the world. Prayer is not useful. It is not, to reference Foucault, just another form of self-management. Prayer is more like play. You do it for the sheer hell of it — though I appreciate that’s not really the best way of expressing things. You do it for itself, not because of any particular benefit it might bring. At its best, it is a state of being, not a means to an end.
I used to think that being a priest was the most AI-resistant job you could imagine. How could a machine or an algorithm take confession or celebrate the eucharist? Totally ridiculous, right? Hallow doesn’t quite give you that, though it travels some way down the road. And, with the app church, you don’t have to sit next to other annoying people in the pews. You don’t have to get up early and pray in the cold; everything is made easy for you. It’s cheaper than church and less demanding. So our relationship with God is being automated, digitised, and with that shaped and manipulated. Prayer is being forced down a narrow weir of ones and zeroes.
Despite being a catholic Christian myself, albeit of the Anglican kind, all this whizzy digital mediation brings out my deepest inner Martin Luther. Broadly speaking, the theology is perfectly fine. But the medium is also the message, and the medium is highly problematic. For unlike Luther, who through the printing press harnessed the power of new technology for evangelistic purposes, it is now young Catholics who have mastered the latest technology. They have brought to bear the power of finance, social media and advertising to turn God into some slick new product, something to be marketed and sold. But however much Hallow plasters its digital platform with improving quotes from Holy Scripture, the place still feels cold and Godless to me. More a digital temple to wellbeing than a place to encounter the living God.
