When the Mind Becomes Reprobate: Candace Owens and the Terrifying Romans 1 Logic

I feel like Candace Owens’s way of thinking has shifted. There are a lot of red flags now that I can point to that go beyond her talking about Israel and Jews. I’m not stating that all Christians need to be Zionists. There can be many Christians who will disagree with each other about Netanyahu and Gaza and America’s involvement and Zionism, etc. But what worries me most about Owens is her thought process. I think something is off about how she thinks about evidence. She seems to think something is hidden behind everything, and she possesses the gnostic gift to uncover it. Secret organizations, cults, or something along those lines. That when challenged, you can always expand your story to fit the need.

Christian Scripture provides a category that may help us better understand what we are watching. In Rom 1: 28 we read, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.” Ultimately, only God can judge whether Candace Owens herself has been given over to what Paul calls a “reprobate mind.” A fair question for Christians to ask is: does her public thought process look like Rom. 1:28?

What Is a Reprobate Mind?

Many Christians tend to use the phrase “reprobate mind” to describe someone who is just extremely evil. What Paul is describing in Romans 1:18-32 may be far worse than that. Verse 18 says that people suppress the truth through unrighteousness. Verse 21 says their reasoning was vain and their minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools in verse 22. They changed the truth for lies in verse 25. And finally we get to the adokimos nous, the Greek word Paul uses for reprobate, in verse 28. In Romans 1, we see people sinning against God. But more than that, they have reached such a state of moral depravity that it has begun to affect their thinking. Paul shows how moral depravity leads to humans no longer being able to correctly understand and process truth.

Adokimos means untested, failing to meet standards, or unfit for its intended purpose. Nous can mean mind, thought, judgment, or our intellect/moral sense. The phrase therefore describes a mind or judgment that has become unfit for its proper purpose. Everyone believes false things at some point. The frightening possibility is not merely believing something false, but becoming even more resistant to the ordinary means by which false beliefs are corrected. It’s no longer what they believe, but how they come to believe it.

Which brings us to Owens. What makes Owens’s reasoning particularly interesting is that it often begins with fragments of genuine history and then moves considerably beyond what those facts can establish. Jacob Frank was a historical figure, and Frankism was a real religious movement, and many scholars will attest to the anti-nomian tendencies and depravity found within its ranks. Scholars will also tell you that Frankists were in Louis Brandeis’s family tree. Mainstream scholarship says Frankism began to wane and dissipate in the 19th Century. Newer studies on Brandeis will say he had Frankist lineage, not that he was part of a current secret Frankist group that practiced depravity. So we now have to ask what happens when someone starts with real pieces of truth and uses them to construct something far greater than what we know to be true.

When Evidence Becomes a Worldview

She goes well beyond saying Frankism is a thing of the past. She stated in a video from 2024 that Frankism is still alive today as a religion; Leo Frank is a descendant of Jacob Frank, Louis Brandeis was Frankist, and she associated Frankism with incest and pedophilia as part of the rituals they performed. She also claimed the Brandeis family were all Frankists and believed in pedophilia, blood rituals, and sacrifice. As you can see, there is a big gap between having Frankist lineage and continuing to follow Frankist ways many generations after they began. Genealogical descent does not establish continuing religious adherence, much less participation in every transgressive practice attributed to the movement.

Romans 1 comes into play here because Paul talks about men suppressing the truth and engaging in vain reasoning. Men suppressed the truth in Romans 1:18. We shouldn’t assume we can look at Owens and say we know that she holds onto these things knowing they aren’t true. We can just analyze if she allows contrary information to correct her position. The warning sign appears when contrary scholarship, missing documentation, and legitimate reasons to reconsider are treated as reasons to reconsider a claim and instead become further evidence that the claim must be true.

Modern scholarship has a useful term for this. It’s called epistemic inversion. Normally, evidence disciplines belief. Under epistemic inversion, belief disciplines the evidence: every apparently new fact is interpreted beforehand so that the theory survives intact. If scholars don’t agree with you, then they must be under influence. If news agencies try to disprove your beliefs, then they must be under the control of powerful people. If there isn’t documentation to back up your claims, then they must have done a great job covering their tracks. If other people get upset with you for your conspiracy, then they must be close to the truth, and you’re onto something. That’s when you know your conspiracy is dangerous. The theory becomes most dangerous when evidence against it is transformed into evidence for it.

The Expansion of the Explanation

Owens’s rhetoric concerning Jewish influence has moved far beyond specific disagreements about Israeli policy. Owens spoke in Feb. 2024 about separating regular Jews from “Political Jews” and described them as a few “vile, dishonest people who manipulate others,” and went so far as to say there are people working to stop antisemitism who cause it. She also made it clear that she has Jewish friends and that not supporting America financially helping Israel isn’t antisemitic. I believe this is important because not supporting aid to Israel is a logical stance and should not be tied to hating Jews. However, if you start including Jewish people as the driving factor, something else is happening; your argument starts to take a turn.

After she left Daily Wire in March 2024 due to multiple arguments about Israel and being accused of antisemitism, her statements did not end. In January 2026, she had an episode on her verified YouTube channel that explained she would be talking about how the head of the World Jewish Congress was driving Trump’s interest in Greenland. Two months later, she had another episode with the chapter “Zionists on the offensive to control Charlie’s Legacy.” And continued to discuss Israel and how America should handle foreign policy. The significance lies less in any single allegation than in the recurring central explanatory role increasingly assigned to Jewish or Zionist actors.

Once you start noticing a certain race/religion taking on many different roles that may not even have anything to do with them, be aware. There are Jewish lobbyists; they have power just like there are Christians who lobby. Every Government, business, religion, lobbyists, rich people, spy agencies, colleges, and unions have some type of power over our country. When seemingly everything becomes related to Jew’s/Zionists/Frankist.

Professing Themselves to Be Wise

Next, Paul says that they became foolish. What I mean by this is not that intelligent people aren’t smart. Smart people can become incredibly smart at defending. Just because you are smart does not mean you are wise. They can research things deeply and find flaws. Find things that people lied about. Dig up things that people didn’t know about and seemly put the puzzle together better than most people could. But they aren’t always wise. When someone decides to use their intellect not to learn whether something is true, but to defend it as true. Then that person can become very dangerous.

It’s easy to fall into this online. You’ll be rewarded for knowing what other people “didn’t”. Sometimes asking tough questions can lead you to good information. Our government tells us false things. Some experts are incorrect. Things that we once knew to be true were actually false. It becomes dangerous when you decide something must be true because others don’t believe it. Anything society doesn’t accept is automatically going to be a good thing. Because all these smart men don’t think it’s true. Once you reach this stage, you’re not using contrarian thinking; you’ve become a contrarian.

So that’s why Owens is especially interesting to analyze. Regardless of your political stance on her.

Is she against Israel? Yes. Does she call out Ben Shapiro? Yes. Does she attack the IDF? Yes. Does she think that America shouldn’t help other countries? Probably. Are some of those things wrong? Maybe. What I’m trying to get at is: can she honestly accept she is wrong about something? Does she actually allow herself to be falsified? If she came across information that went against her beliefs, could she look at it and say, “No, I was wrong, and I should change my beliefs”? If you want to learn the truth, you have to allow your beliefs to be falsified.

The Terrifying Judgment of Romans 1

So once again we run into adokimos nous. Paul is teaching here that judgment sometimes doesn’t come down on us from heaven. Judgment can just be God allowing us to walk away from him. “God gave them over” is a common theme in Romans 1. Romans 1 is a scary example of judgment when God allows us to give in to our desires. They will begin to look alike. As you turn away from truth, you become more out of touch with truth.

So no, I don’t believe we should get on a soapbox and declare that Candace Owens is an adokimos nous. That would be us declaring something we don’t know. I believe that as Christians we should refrain from putting people under that with Romans 1. But I do believe there are some similarities. We can start to see pieces of her argument align more with that. Starting with questions, then trying to explain why, then almost reaching that point of an adokimos nous. It may or may not be what God is seeing in her life, but we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion too quickly.

That goes for all conservatives. Liberals. Any scholar, pastor, journalist, or Christian who has dedicated their life to finding fault with others.