From Atheism to Daily Prayer: Jenny Holland on the Power of the Rosary

BEN HARNWELL (HOST): When we started doing the show, you said that you were an atheist. I don’t think you might be moving toward agnosticism, I’m not quite sure, but you said that, in your words, an atheist who prays the rosary every day.

What I didn’t realize, Jenny Holland, was that this was literally a proper regimen of praying every day. Complimenti to you. Tell us a little bit about that. You’ve written this in your Substack. Folks, very strongly, I read it. A very powerful witness, actually. Go to Jenny’s Substack, where she says the consequence of how she came about it.

We’ve only got like five minutes here. Seeing as you did this, and I was praying the rosary every day at the time of my conversion some 25 years ago, and it’s a discipline I sadly lost, but I remember the spiritual graces from that time.

I think some of the important takeaways here in your article is how you set about doing it. Because you said that you didn’t set out to achieve a year long stretch. Basically, you did it for a day. That sort of rolled into a week and you saw how that went. That rolled into a month, still without intending to do it for the whole year, but marking it away on your little app. The habit became the discipline. Tell us a bit about that then, please.

JENNY HOLLAND (GUEST): So Sunday was the 365th consecutive day that I prayed the rosary. Actually, this is the perfect place to discuss it because, as I say in my article, the seed of my rosary habit was planted on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom, right here on this very show, quite a few years ago.

I want to say maybe 2021 or 2022, when he did a whole extended segment on the power of prayer. I was taken aback because I love Steve’s show for his biting analysis and his realpolitik and his very of the world motivation and insight. Hearing him and others, his guests, talk about prayer as a real world thing that actually made a material difference in the world, communal prayers, sending up prayers, and specifically mentioning the rosary. He also had a rabbi on. I mean, it was a really big show.

But specifically mentioning the rosary, it just opened a door of possibility in my mind. It took a few years to fully germinate. But as I started intermittently praying in 2024, yeah, just this time last year, I just started doing it every day without any specific goal in mind. It became something that I looked forward to. It became something that I sort of relied upon.

I found that it made my mood better. If I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I would pray the rosary and I would be a lot more cheerful and gracious to my husband and to people around me. I found that it just produced a peacefulness and a stability within me that became stronger and stronger as the year went on.

BEN HARNWELL (HOST): Jenny, that’s my experience as well. You also say something here. There’s so much in here that I’d like to share, and we’re going to have to come back to this. There are two profound things that you said here to squeeze into the final moments of the show.

But there is one thing that you said, and that’s this. You said, "I tried not to let perfection be the enemy of the good.” When making progress in one’s prayer life, one’s interior life, that is so profound, and it’s absolutely true, of course. Just put that again, I know that that is your own words, but add a little to that particular insight.

JENNY HOLLAND (GUEST): Yeah, it’s not just prayer life. It’s life in general. I think anything you do, you have to adopt that as a mantra. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good. Otherwise, you’ll be paralyzed. We’ll never get anything done.

Look, I came into this calling myself an atheist at the beginning of this. I can’t honestly call myself an atheist anymore, so I’m going to lose that branding, I’m afraid, Ben. I had some sort of trepidation. Was I being an impostor? Was I doing it for some sort of clout or something? I don’t know. I felt slightly awkward about it. But I thought, who cares? Who’s looking at me? I’m just going to keep doing it.

There were definitely mornings when I was rushing through it and thinking about other things, or maybe even washing the dishes or something. Again, I just kept doing it. I just kept on doing it.

Another thing that I found very, very helpful was the meditation on detachment from things of the world. That is my favorite one for a couple of reasons. Obviously, we all have problems. You know, 2025 was a year of personal crisis for me in a couple of different ways. The reason I didn’t make it worse was because I had that sense of detachment. Let God take care of it.

Limiting myself and my restlessness and my yearning, these are very valuable tools. It’s also a very valuable meditation when you’re in this business, when you are delivering hot takes and looking at the attention economy. It’s a reminder all the time to let God guide you and not the attention economy.