Silicon Valley attorney, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan became a household name last year when she stepped into the political spotlight as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in his 2024 independent presidential campaign.
Many also know Shanahan for her outspokenness about severing ties with the Democrat Party and her MAHA enthusiasm, but now she has another story to tell — one that blows the rest out of the water.
Nicole Shanahan is a born-again Christian.
She recently joined Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable” to share her incredible, yet tragedy-ridden journey to faith in Jesus Christ.
Things started to shift for Shanahan when she realized that there was “something happening globally as it relates to the spirit of humanity” — something that was “bigger than politics.”
“Part of my journey to my baptism was really challenging and painful,” she admits, noting that many of these hardships took place while she was on the campaign trail.
While she’s believed in God since she was a child, Shanahan says that her “interpersonal relationship” with Him evolved dramatically during the election season that put her “through the fire.”
“You get put on your knees quite a bit,” she says. “I needed to hear God’s voice. I needed guidance.”
Not only was it “not an ordinary election,” but Shanahan and her partner, Jacob Strumwasser, suffered a horrific personal tragedy. In September 2024, Shanahan had a miscarriage at 20 weeks pregnant.
“It was really scary. I almost lost my life,” she tells Allie, adding that she “lost over four liters of blood” and that her condition was so severe that “the chaplain came in” before she was sent into surgery.
“I was taken so close to the end … and I could feel it,” but “I came back; I woke up,” she says.
On top of her miraculous recovery, Shanahan says that she witnessed several events that “in the strictly materialistic world don’t make sense” but “in the spiritual world [are] well defined.”
On January 19, 2025, the day before President Trump’s inauguration, Shanahan was baptized in her back yard in Atherton, California.
She shared her spiritual journey and baptism in a touching X post last month.
However, before she became a Christian, Shanahan had converted to Judaism.
“At what point did you realize ‘wow, this Jesus person is who He says He is, and Christianity is true’?” Allie asks.
Shanahan says that when the campaign was launched, she started spending a lot of time with Zach Henry, a Texas-born evangelical Christian who “helped launch Vivek Ramaswamy’s political career” before he joined RFK Jr.’s campaign team.
“Zach’s presence and his love of the Bible and Jesus is one of the things that really changed me and my perspective of evangelicals. … I’m from Oakland; I spent all my time in progressive circles, and white Christians and evangelical nationalists were ‘destroying America,’” Shanahan reflects.
In her circle, Christians were seen as “unempathetic,” “unintelligent,” and “hateful.”
“And here I am with Zach Henry, the first evangelical Christian in my life, and I’m like, this guy is incredibly nice, also really smart … incredibly compassionate, and so my biases all go out the window,” she recounts.
People in her world, she says, “spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapy” to have the kind of level-headedness Zach exemplifies every day as a result of his faith.
The woman who baptized her, Diane Robinson, also played a pivotal role in her Christian journey.
The week after Nicole came out of the hospital after suffering a miscarriage, she met Diane Robinson, the lead chaplain at the Santa Rita Jail.
At that time, her life, she says, was in “such incredible discord” between her recent tragedy, her political position as RFK Jr.’s running mate, and her recent divorce and custody battle with ex-husband Sergey Brin.
Then “Diane Robinson comes into my life, and she opens the Bible right in front of me,” says Shanahan. “She’s like, ‘You need to think about Jesus’ blood”’ — specifically “the power of Jesus’ blood.”
While blood was the last thing Shanahan wanted to think about at the time, Diane was right to point her to Jesus’ blood because it’s “the most sacred covenant.”
“My world was so full of pain in that moment, and there’s still pain. There’s so much pain. But to know that you’re not alone, that Jesus’ blood was shed for us humans in this world of pure discord so that we know our souls belong to Him … and that God loves us so deeply and that even in our moment of pain and death, we actually can know with 100%, without any doubt, that we are in God’s kingdom,” she tells Allie.
It’s this knowledge that allows her “to do the right thing.”
To hear more of Nicole Shanahan’s incredible journey to faith in Christ, watch the episode above.
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