Still Standing: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Carrie Prejean Boller by Jeff Callaway

Still Standing: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Carrie Prejean Boller

A Texas Outlaw Poet's Witness to a Woman Who Refused to Bend the Knee

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

There is a moment in every person's life when the road they are walking narrows down to a single, unavoidable choice — say the truth, or swallow it. Say it, and you may lose everything the world has handed you. Swallow it, and you keep the crown, the apartment, the salary, and your soul quietly rots from the inside out. Most people swallow it. They smile for the cameras, nod at the right people, and go home having traded the only thing they ever truly owned — their conscience — for applause that won't last through the weekend.

Carrie Prejean Boller is not most people.

She has proven that twice now in the fire of the national spotlight. The first time, she was a twenty-one year old beauty queen standing under blazing lights on a Las Vegas stage, and she told the truth when a lie would have made her famous in a way that was safe and comfortable. The second time, she was a Catholic woman sitting before a federal commission in Washington, D.C., wearing a pin bearing the American and Palestinian flags on her lapel, and she looked the machinery of Zionist political pressure dead in the eye — and she told the truth again.

Both times, they came for her. Both times, she was still standing when the dust settled.

This is her story. And God help me, I am proud to tell it.

Born Into the Fracture: San Diego, 1987

Caroline Michelle Prejean came into this world on May 13, 1987, in San Diego, California, born to Francine Coppola — a woman of Italian American blood — and Wilbert Prejean, of French descent. She was raised with her sister Christina and her brother Bill in the sunny suburb of Vista, California, in a household steeped in evangelical Protestant Christianity. Church was the center of gravity. Faith was the language spoken at the table. God was real, and Jesus was King — these were things she learned early.

But in 1996, when Carrie was nine years old, the center cracked. Her parents separated and began bitter divorce proceedings that would drag on for an entire decade. She would later describe it in her autobiography as "a trauma that irrevocably shaped the rest of my life," and say that her parents "were being selfish" when they broke apart the family. The divorce brought financial hardship, emotional wreckage, and a custody war that seemed to have no end. Children raised in the shadow of a broken home either retreat from it or run toward something greater. Carrie ran toward something greater.

She graduated from Vista High School in 2005, and went on to attend San Diego Christian College in El Cajon, where she studied special education and poured herself into volunteer work with children with developmental disabilities through Luv-em-Up Ministries. She volunteered at the Rock Church. She worked with JC's Girls outreach ministry. She was not just a girl with a pretty face building a career — she was a young woman of genuine conviction, shaped by brokenness, pointed toward service.

Her grandfather had fought alongside General George Patton in World War II. Grit ran in the blood.

The Crown and the Cross: Miss California 2009

She had already been modeling — for Target, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, for E! Entertainment Television. She served as a Pad Squad ambassador for the San Diego Padres. She competed in the Miss California USA 2008 pageant and finished first runner-up. She came back the following year and claimed the crown: Miss California USA 2009.

Then came the Miss USA pageant on April 19, 2009, in Las Vegas. She stood on that stage as the clear frontrunner, the girl most likely to wear the national crown. And then Perez Hilton — a pageant judge who had made his name mocking and destroying people for sport — stepped to the microphone and asked whether every state in the country should legalize same-sex marriage.

She knew what he wanted. She knew what the crowd wanted. She knew what the crown required.

She answered anyway.

"In my country," she said, "in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman."

The crowd turned on her. The media came down on her like a hammer. Hilton called her answer "awful." She lost the crown she had nearly won. But she wrote later in her memoir Still Standing what she had felt in that moment — that she was being dared to give a candid answer to a serious question, and that she knew if she told the truth, she would lose everything the pageant was offering. She knew she was likely the frontrunner. She could have gritted her teeth and given the politically correct answer.

She didn't.

The Lord sees into the hearts of men and women, and what He saw in Carrie Prejean that night was courage. The kind that costs something. The Book of Proverbs tells us, "A righteous person is bold as a lion" (Proverbs 28:1). She was twenty-one years old, standing in the lion's den, and she did not blink.

The battle that followed was ugly. Controversy erupted over photographs from her modeling past. Donald Trump, who then owned a stake in the Miss Universe Organization, ultimately agreed to strip her of the Miss California USA title in June 2009, citing contract issues. She sued. The pageant countersued. In November 2009, both sides settled. She had fought them on her feet and walked away on her feet.

She released her memoir in November 2009 and appeared on The Today Show and The View, refusing to be silent, refusing to be defined by the machines that had tried to grind her down. She had lost the crown, but she had kept herself.

The Life Built in the Quiet: Kyle, Grace, and Brody

On July 2, 2010, in the Capella Church inside the Grand Del Mar resort in San Diego, Carrie Prejean married Kyle Boller, a former NFL quarterback who had played for the Baltimore Ravens and Oakland Raiders. They had met in July 2009, been engaged by February 2010, and committed their lives to one another before God.

On May 11, 2011, their daughter Grace Christina was born. In 2013, their son Brody followed.

She had said publicly more than once that watching her parents' divorce had motivated everything — that whatever else she did with her life, her children would grow up with a stable, loving home. And so she built it. She stepped back from the national spotlight, poured herself into motherhood, into family, into the quiet and real work of building something lasting. She was not performing Christianity. She was living it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that "the family is the original cell of social life" and that "the home is the first school of Christian life" (CCC 2207). Carrie understood that before she ever crossed the threshold of the Catholic Church. A woman who knows how to protect her children, who knows what a broken home costs, who knows the price of a divided heart — that woman builds something solid.

Back Into the Arena: 2020 and Beyond

In 2020, she stepped back into the arena. She joined Donald Trump's Campaign Advisory Board and represented the Women for Trump 2020 Coalition, appearing on Fox News to promote conservative values. She spoke at school board meetings in Encinitas, California in 2021, decrying mandatory masking of children during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, she was back in front of cameras, challenging a school board Halloween event she believed was being used to expose children to inappropriate content.

She was never going to be the kind of woman who disappears quietly.

But something was shifting underneath the surface. Something deeper than politics. Something that no camera could fully capture.

She was searching.

Coming Home: Easter Vigil, April 2025

On the night of April 21, 2025, at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Little Italy, San Diego — a beautiful old Italian parish that breathes with centuries of Catholic blood and prayer — Carrie Prejean Boller walked through the Easter Vigil fire and into the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

She received baptism, the Holy Eucharist, reconciliation, and confirmation in a single sacred night. She chose Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini — the first American saint, a woman of Italian descent, a woman who crossed oceans and broke barriers for the poor and the immigrant and the forgotten — as her confirmation patroness.

And then she posted what was in her heart for the whole world to see:

"I was welcomed into the one, True, Holy, Apostolic Catholic Church at the Easter vigil last night. I have received the sacraments of baptism, Holy Eucharist, reconciliation, and now confirmation. Thanks be to God. Christ is King. Here I am, Lord. Send me. I am finally home."

Here I am, Lord. Send me.

Those are the words of the prophet Isaiah, standing before the throne of the Almighty, hearing the voice of God ask "Whom shall I send?" and answering from his whole burning chest: "Here I am. Send me" (Isaiah 6:8). That is not the language of a social media performer. That is not a press release. That is the language of a soul that has found what it was made for.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone welcomed her publicly, saying he was "so glad to welcome you home." She had not converted from nothing. She had converted from evangelical Christianity — and she explained later that her conversion had exposed what she had been taught in American evangelicalism: a version of Christianity she described as one that had "fused Jesus with a political agenda and called it God's prophecy being fulfilled." She had seen through the Christian Zionism baked into the evangelical world she had come from, and she had walked away from it into the fullness of Catholic truth.

She was not a tourist. She came in hungry and she came in serious. She was received at the Easter Vigil — the most sacred night in the Catholic year — the night the Church lights the paschal fire in the darkness and declares that death has been defeated forever.

She came home on the night of resurrection.

The Commission: Appointed to Fight for All of Us

In May 2025, just weeks after her reception into the Church, President Donald Trump appointed Carrie Prejean Boller to his newly created Religious Liberty Commission — a federal advisory panel established by executive order on the National Day of Prayer, tasked with studying threats to religious freedom in the United States and delivering recommendations to the White House. The commission was chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

She accepted. She brought her Catholic conscience, her courage, and her Palestinian flag pin to Washington, D.C., and she sat at that table as one of the few voices willing to say what needed to be said.

The commission had already held four hearings — on religious freedom in education, in the military, and on other related topics. The fifth hearing, held on February 9, 2026, was convened specifically to address antisemitism in America.

What happened next shook the country.

The Hearing: February 9, 2026

The room was packed. The witnesses were largely pro-Israel voices — university presidents, law students, communal leaders — testifying about their experiences of antisemitism in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Several of them made the argument that anti-Zionism is identical to antisemitism. Full stop. No distinction. No nuance. No room for conscience.

Carrie Prejean Boller was not interested in staying in her lane.

When Yeshiva University President Rabbi Ari Berman finished his remarks, she spoke plainly from where she sat:

"As you know, I'm a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know. So are all Catholics antisemitic?"

The crowd booed. Chairman Dan Patrick interrupted her. She kept going.

She pressed the witnesses on whether speaking out about what many Americans consider a genocide in Gaza — where over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians, in what the Israeli military itself has acknowledged — should be classified as antisemitism. She challenged the premise that opposing a political ideology makes a person hateful of a people. She asked witnesses to "condemn what Israel has done in Gaza." She wore her American-Palestinian pin on her lapel and did not apologize for it.

She also challenged Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, who was testifying that conservatives need to push back on antisemitism within their own ranks and who had taken aim at commentator Candace Owens. Boller pushed back on the characterization of Owens as an antisemite.

Dan Patrick slammed his gavel. He interrupted her repeatedly. He told her and another witness to "have coffee" to discuss their disagreements, as if the questions she was raising were mere social irritants rather than legitimate constitutional and theological concerns. As if a Catholic woman exercising her religious freedom on a Religious Freedom Commission was an inconvenience to be managed rather than a commissioner doing her job.

On February 11, 2026, Dan Patrick announced that he had removed Carrie Prejean Boller from the commission.

"No member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue," he wrote on X. "This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday."

She fired back with everything she had.

Her Answer to the Hammer

Carrie Prejean Boller did not go quietly. Not in 2009. Not in 2026.

"Forcing people to affirm Zionism on a 'Religious Liberty' Commission is the opposite of religious freedom," she posted on social media. "I will not resign, and I will not be bullied for following my Catholic conscience."

She wrote an open letter to Dan Patrick informing him directly that only the President of the United States had the authority to remove her — not a commission chair. "Unless and until I receive written notice from the President of the United States requesting my removal, I will continue to defend religious freedom for all religions on this Commission," she declared.

She posted her position of faith clearly and without apology: "The Catholic Church has never taught that the modern State of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy or that Catholics are religiously obligated to support any political nation as part of God's plan of salvation. Vatican II is clear. Christ instituted the New Covenant in His Blood."

She challenged JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Ron DeSantis publicly — all Catholic men with presidential ambitions — to speak out in defense of Catholic religious liberty. Their silence, she said, spoke volumes.

And in a moment of raw, gritty, unapologetic courage that made me want to stand up in my living room in Texas and shout amen, she posted this for the record:

"I'm not suicidal, I love my husband, my family and friends support me, I love my children, I don't have depression, I don't drink alcohol, I don't take drugs, or any medication, I didn't get the Covid shot, I eat healthy, I'm in good health, I just had my car serviced, I am a practicing, devout Catholic, being spiritually advised by several priests. If anything happens to me, Go Max. #CHRISTISKING."

That is the statement of a woman who knows exactly what kind of world she is operating in, who has counted the cost, and who has decided that the truth is worth more than her safety.

That is Still Standing.

Dan Patrick: A Texas Embarrassment

Now I have to say something about Dan Patrick, and I'm going to say it plainly because I am a Texan and I am embarrassed by this man.

Dan Patrick has been in Texas politics so long that he has confused the lobbyist money in his pocket with the voice of God in his ear. He chairs a Religious Liberty Commission while simultaneously demonstrating that the only religious liberty he cares about protecting is the liberty to agree with the political priorities of those who fund his campaigns and keep his name in the papers.

Here is what this man did: he sat at the head of a commission convened in the name of religious freedom, and he used the gavel of his authority to silence a Catholic woman for speaking from her Catholic conscience. He interrupted her repeatedly. He compared her legitimate theological questions to a personal and political "agenda." And then he removed her — not because she violated any rule, not because she broke any law, but because she made powerful people in that room uncomfortable.

That is not defending religious liberty. That is suppressing it.

Every Texan with an ounce of sense knows that Dan Patrick has always been a political creature first and a man of principle second. He is the kind of politician who wraps himself in the flag when it's convenient and wraps himself in scripture when it moves votes. But the moment a Catholic woman dared to say that Zionism — a political ideology, not a religion, not a people — is not something she is obligated to endorse, he showed his true colors. He did not defend the commission's integrity. He defended the agenda of its most powerful stakeholders.

The Book of Micah cuts through it cleanly: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). There was nothing humble about what Dan Patrick did. There was nothing just about it. He was given a position of authority to protect religious freedom and he used it to crush the religious freedom of a woman who inconvenienced him.

Down here in Texas we have a word for that. Several, actually. I'll keep it clean and just say: it ain't right, and Texans know it.

Judaism and Zionism: The Distinction That Must Be Heard

Let me be absolutely clear about something, because this article will be read by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and the truth deserves to be stated without compromise.

Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable. Collapsing them is intellectually dishonest, and it causes real harm — to Jewish people who oppose Zionism, to Catholics and Christians who have legitimate theological reasons to reject political Zionism, and to Palestinians — Christian and Muslim alike — who have been displaced and killed beneath the banner of a political movement they never asked to be subject to.

Judaism is one of the world's great religious traditions. It is the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is the faith into which Jesus of Nazareth was born and in which He was formed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself affirms that "the Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant" (CCC 839). The Jewish people hold a singular place in salvation history. The Church condemns antisemitism — hatred of Jewish people as a people — absolutely and without reservation. Nostra Aetate, the landmark document of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, made this unambiguous. We do not hate the Jewish people. We love them as brothers in the covenant of Abraham. We pray for them. We honor what God has given through them to all of humanity.

Zionism, on the other hand, is a nineteenth-century political ideology — founded in Europe, rooted in nationalist theory, and built around the project of establishing a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine through processes that involved the displacement of the Arab population already living there. The modern State of Israel — whatever its legitimate right to exist as a recognized political reality — was not born through divine prophecy being fulfilled. It was born through the mechanisms of twentieth-century colonialism, the 1948 Nakba, the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of more than 400 villages. The United Nations formally recognized the actions in Gaza as genocide in September 2025. Pope Francis himself, before his death, stated that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza bore "the characteristics of a genocide" and merited further investigation.

The Catholic Church rejects a theological basis for Zionism. The Church recognizes the State of Israel diplomatically — a recognition extended in 1993 on the basis of political and civic reality, not on the basis of Christian Zionist theology, which is primarily a Protestant evangelical invention. Catholic theology does not teach that the modern State of Israel represents the direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches of the Holy Land have specifically condemned "Christian Zionism" as incompatible with authentic Christian faith.

To say, as Carrie Prejean Boller said, that Catholics do not embrace Zionism is, in its theological and historical substance, a defensible and important statement. The way she articulated some of it in that hearing room was imperfect — human beings in the heat of confrontation rarely speak with the precision of a papal encyclical — but the core of what she was saying was not wrong. Questioning a political ideology is not the same as hating a people. Condemning the killing of tens of thousands of civilians is not antisemitism. Wearing a Palestinian flag pin is not hatred of Jews. It is solidarity with the dead.

The Catechism calls us to recognize the inherent dignity of every human person (CCC 1700). Every Palestinian child killed in Gaza had that dignity. Every Catholic is bound to say so.

A Hero for Catholics Everywhere

Let me tell you why Carrie Prejean Boller matters to me and why she ought to matter to every Catholic who reads this.

We live in a country where there is a commission convened — in the name of religious liberty — that functionally required its members to affirm a political ideology in order to avoid being removed. Where a Catholic woman asked legitimate theological questions from her Catholic conscience and was called a hijacker, was booed, was silenced, and was ultimately expelled by a chairman who showed far more deference to Zionist political pressure than to the First Amendment principles he was sworn to uphold.

She was on that commission as a Catholic. She was appointed because of her record of standing up for conscience when it cost her. And when the moment came to stand up for Catholic conscience at the highest level, she stood.

She did not cave. She did not split the difference. She did not perform a cowardly half-answer dressed up as nuance. She spoke as a Catholic. She asked the questions a Catholic is bound to ask. She refused to be silenced.

The Catechism teaches us that "the right to religious liberty is neither a moral permission to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities" (CCC 2108). What happened to Carrie Prejean Boller on February 11, 2026, was the violation of that right by a political authority — not in the name of truth, but in the name of a political ideology's supremacy.

She called it out. And she paid for it. And she kept her feet.

I think of what Jesus told the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you" (Matthew 5:11-12).

I am not calling Carrie Prejean Boller a prophet. I am saying she did what prophets have always done: she told the truth in a room full of people who didn't want to hear it, and she paid the price without apologizing.

For Catholics, and For Everyone

This story is not just a Catholic story, though it is certainly that. It is a story for every person of faith who has ever sat in a room where power demanded they go along to get along, where silence was the price of a seat at the table, where the cost of speaking was losing something they had worked for.

Muslim Americans who watch their communities demonized in the name of a foreign policy agenda know this story. Black Americans who have had their history colonized and their pain minimized in the service of political convenience know this story. Native Americans whose sacred lands have been ground into parking lots for profit know this story. Palestinian Christians — Catholics among them — who are watching their ancient communities erased while Western political machinery defends the erasure know this story intimately.

The Church of Jesus Christ stands with the poor, the displaced, the silenced, the killed. The Catechism is thunderous on this: "The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with 'communism' or 'socialism.' She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of 'capitalism,' individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor" (CCC 2425). The Church refuses to put political ideology above human dignity. She always has. She always will.

Carrie Prejean Boller, standing in that hearing room in Washington, D.C., in her American and Palestinian pin, asking whether it is antisemitic to mourn the dead — she was doing Catholic social teaching. Imperfectly. Humanly. But she was doing it.

She wrote after the hearing: "My conversion to the fullness of the Catholic faith exposed what I was taught in American evangelicalism, a version of Christianity that fused Jesus with a political agenda and called it 'God's prophecy being fulfilled.' It isn't."

That is a woman who came home to truth and is not going back.

Still Standing

Carrie Prejean Boller has been booed, stripped, sued, mocked, removed, and dismissed at every turn of her life. Each time, she has gotten back to her feet. Each time, she has walked forward.

She stood on that Las Vegas stage in 2009 and told the truth about marriage when a lie would have made her famous. She walked out of the evangelical world she was raised in and into the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church at the Easter Vigil, when the fire burns in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. She sat before a federal commission and refused to bend her Catholic knee to a political ideology that has no authority over her conscience.

She has never been perfect. None of us are. That is what the confessional is for. But she has been, in the moments that counted, brave. And in this era of cowardice dressed up as prudence, of silence dressed up as diplomacy, of capitulation dressed up as nuance — bravery is the rarest and most necessary of virtues.

I am a Texas Outlaw Poet and a Catholic, and I am not in the habit of hero worship. But I am in the habit of calling a thing what it is when I see it. And what I see in Carrie Prejean Boller is a woman who heard the Lord say "Whom shall I send?" and answered from her whole chest: Here I am. Send me.

They sent her to Washington.

She went.

She spoke.

And she was still standing when they tried to knock her down.

Christ is King. May God protect her. May Catholics everywhere be proud.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

© 2026 Texas Outlaw Press. All rights reserved.

https://texasoutlawpress.org