I can understand why Russell Brand turned to God. Being accused multiple times of rape and sexual assault in the public eye and subsequently falling spectacularly from grace would be enough to push anyone to respond this way – especially if Bear Grylls texted to ask if you wanted to get baptised. It’s a tale as old as time: when everyone has abandoned you and you feel devoid of hope, you seek the readily available forgiveness of the Lord.
What I cannot understand, though, is why in such circumstances you would not then retreat to your newfound church community or your loving family to reflect quietly, but instead write a religious self-help book. Yet, this is precisely what Brand – who will be tried in the UK in October for allegations of rape and sexual assault by six different women – has done.
How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is a book that ostensibly seeks to convert its readers to Christ after its author found himself Saved, but which in reality uses rambling biblical metaphors and Christian ideology as a vessel for unfinished Notes-app thoughts. For example: “The point of the culture is to destroy you by stealing your soul.” This coupled with crackpot conspiracy theories (“our food is poisoned at the point of manufacture”) – and him talking about himself, despite many protestations that Christ has finally freed him from the cult of selfishness and individualism to which the rest of us are still enslaved. There are, to be fair, a couple of reflection exercises and a QR code leading you to instructional breathwork videos on Brand’s website.
If you think it will answer questions such as: does God exist? If so, why does he allow suffering? How can I become a Christian in seven days? – then you are sorely mistaken. Perhaps it hardly needs saying that the man who brought us My Booky Wook would be unlikely to produce a serious theological work but instead a pretentious, solipsistic ramble of which the guiding principle seems to be never to use one word where 15 will do. It is a fountain of alt-right ideology, an embarrassing display of hubris (save for a couple of anecdotes where he shows rare, human vulnerability: his son’s heart surgery and the death of his dog) and a manipulation of respectable Christian values for personal gain. Joseph, for what it’s worth, is described as “another show-off loudmouth falsely accused of rape”.
Brand does not shy away from the allegations, about which he’s not allowed to write much (nor, for the record, am I) lest he prejudices the trial. Rather, he provides extensive context about the environment of promiscuity and “easy sex” in which the events are said to have taken place, of how he as a young, impressionable famous person got swept up in sin. “All of a sudden I could have all the sex I wanted… I had sex with multiple women, often at the same time, most days, for years,” he writes, before going on to emphasise in these circumstances “the implausibility, the pointlessness, of coercion (if you own an orchard, you don’t steal apples)”.
Later, he recounts his debate with Chat GPT – an entity that he describes elsewhere as Satan incarnate – about whether David rapes Bathsheba in the book of Samuel. Chat GPT argued that David had systemic power over her. This, according to Brand, “excludes the possibility that King David was sexy, fun, seductive and brilliant – all of which, based on what we know about him, seems pretty likely, and in attempting to criminalise sex itself, the moral teachings of the story are lost”.
No comment. Luckily, Brand has provided a proxy comment for me, on a podcast in April on which he admitted to having sex with a 16-year-old girl at age 30. “Consensual sex with a lot of people, when there is a strong power differential, as there is when you are a famous man who has the ability to attract women that I had at that time, I think… is exploitative,” he said. Well, on that we can agree. Pity we can’t ask Bathsheba how she felt about the whole thing.
But despite the frustrations provoked by these in-depth deflections, along with the many spurious claims about vaccines (“Boosters? What were they boosting other than Moderna profits and male infertility?”), plenty of reactionary hyperbole (in the UK, he writes, “you can basically be aborted up till your 18th birthday and euthanised if you say you have a headache”), buckets of arrogance (the “centralised” media don’t seem so bad when you can pious-brag about being crowned The Sun’s “Shagger of the Year” four times) and my fundamental objection to being spiritually preached at by a man who still has not learned how to button up his shirt, the greatest difficulty I had with this book was simply hacking through the turgid prose.
Ironically, or perhaps not, the clearest parts are when Brand switches wholesale to talking about himself; the bits about the Bible are so obtuse that I could barely get through a page without my eyes closing. Most of the time the sentences are so florid, so pretentious, that they take five goes before you get the gist. Words such as “negentropic”, “theophanic”, “lapidarily”, “apostasy” and “recidivist” flow freely from the pen of an author who claims to want to help us. He readily admits that his primary issue is “pride”, but who still seems pathologically obligated to prove his superior intelligence through the use of egregiously obtuse vocabulary, a habit that is made only more annoying by the fact he explains what the words mean as he goes along.
Elsewhere, pseudo-philosophical sentences glimmer like fool’s gold. Some personal favourites: “Sex is at very least a lower chakra defibrillation and at best a voyage into a parallel reality where intimacy with a stranger serves as a fleeting facsimile for a brief and shared transfiguration”; “Time itself is flexing and fluxing under the weight of conscious and unconscious attention”; and, best of all, “The liminal preternatural twilight that one encounters when touching the hem of His garment” — which at least gives us some context around the divine inspiration for those necklines.
At a point, I stopped finding it funny and instead started feeling a bit sick, particularly when Brand veers into the ironic quirk of his 2000s comedy heyday: “I thought I could use God’s power to get me grubbies on the derma-pleasures and skin-fiddles, the tutty-boobs and sweet-nooks.” I wonder if another dunk in the Thames would get the sin that it didn’t manage the first time: namely, the linguistic variety.
Brand, who could have become a dodgy reiki healer in Phuket espousing the benefits of kambo over a horrible blue cocktail just as easily as a born-again Christian, is the most obnoxious kind of ideologue: one who you suspect has latched on to the view that served him the best and is now forcing it on everybody else (one is reminded of Boris Johnson’s two Brexit columns).
In his recent appearance on Piers Morgan: Uncensored, he fumbled for a full, excruciating minute in his Bible to find a verse he had recently quoted, leading viewers to wonder if he was trolling everyone. Again renewing the theory that he has in fact been trolling everyone the whole time (in the book, Brand addresses the accusation that his baptism was a PR stunt, saying that he would at the time have been capable of doing that “morally” but not “strategically”). I had similar suspicions as I got wound up by his affected verbosity; this is, of course, exactly how he wants me to feel.
But, for what it’s worth, I also believe he has actually been converted. He describes being in a pretty desperate place in the book: news of the allegations broke while his baby son was in hospital, and he writes in detail about his suicidal thoughts. It’s not hard to believe that Christianity has helped him. But this book isn’t helping anyone else.
Brand has not converted me to the word of Christ, though having made it to the end of How to Become a Christian in Seven Days I think it’s only fair I jump the queue to becoming a saint. You, I hope, shall not have to suffer such a fate. Religious or not, don’t bother reading the book. Suffice it to say that Brand is in God’s capable hands – and, come October, the jury’s.