As Ron DeSantis wrapped up a 12-stop campaign tour that began in an Iowa evangelical church and ended here in a South Carolina convention center, dozens of pastors met backstage to pray for the presidential candidate. Later, to the 1,500 people in the auditorium, DeSantis closed out his stump speech with a paraphrased Bible verse: “I will fight the good fight, I will finish the race, and I will keep the faith.”
The governor’s religious rhetoric and hard-charging policies are at the center of his outreach to white evangelicals — an important voting bloc in the early GOP nominating contests. And yet, when it comes to his own Catholicism, the culture warrior is much more guarded, rarely mentioning the specifics of his faith and practice.
“I don’t think he’s a wear-your-religion-on-your-sleeve kind of guy,” said Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy organization that hosted a rally for DeSantis last fall.
Burch argues DeSantis’ policies are the true measure of his faith, from Florida’s six-week abortion ban to a spate of laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights and gender-affirming care: “Perhaps a good Scripture reference that may describe him is, ‘By their fruits you shall know them.’”
DeSantis officially entered the presidential race last month and is the leading alternative to former President Donald Trump, who remains the dominant force in the GOP for now. But if the Florida governor captures the Republican nomination and takes on Joe Biden, two Catholic presidential candidates will face off for the first time in U.S. history.
Both have publicly clashed with Catholic bishops: DeSantis over immigration and the death penalty; Biden over abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. The current president, though, speaks often about being Catholic. He is known to wear a rosary and is regularly photographed attending Mass in D.C. and on the road — in contrast to DeSantis, who is intensely private about his personal life.
He’s “nominally Catholic,” according to a New York Times essay from the conservative writer Nate Hochman, who later joined the DeSantis campaign. Last year, Hochman wrote that DeSantis is “politically friendly to conservative Christians. But he rarely discusses his religion publicly and almost never in the context of politics.”
The campaign did not respond directly to questions about Hochman’s essay or where the DeSantises go to church in Tallahassee. A spokesperson for Never Back Down, the DeSantis super PAC, did not have information about the governor’s current church attendance.
Maria Sullivan, a supporter who lives in DeSantis’ former congressional district, remembers worshipping regularly with DeSantis and his wife Casey at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church when they still lived in Northeast Florida. “He’s a very low-key man, not looking for attention, just there with his family,” she said, recalling them at 7 a.m. Mass with young children in tow.
Sullivan said she attended the baptism of DeSantis’ older daughter at the church. The large, active parish was also a polling place in 2018, and where DeSantis cast his own ballot when he was first elected governor.
DeSantis grew up Catholic. He attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Dunedin, Florida, and according to his political memoir, he was expected at church every Sunday. He noted in his book that his mother’s family is so Catholic she counts a nun and a priest among her siblings.
His uncle, a parish priest in Ohio, figures into another of the few religious anecdotes that DeSantis shares for laughs on the campaign trail. After his first inauguration, his uncle baptized their son at the governor’s mansion, using water that the DeSantises had collected from the Sea of Galilee on a congressional trip to Israel. The punchline is that custodial staff threw out the plastic water bottle afterwards, not knowing its holy contents.

apnews