The cover of Russell Brand’s How to Become a Christian in 7 Days features a swarm of flies, corralled into the shape of the cross. It is a curious choice, given that in the Bible, flies are associated with death, decay and divine retribution. In Exodus they are the fourth plague sent by God to “consume” the Egyptians as punishment for enslaving the Israelites. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Beelzebub, also known as the Lord of the Flies, is a major demon. Mostly, thanks to the use of this symbolism in horror films such as Hereditary (2018) and The Amityville Horror (1979), they made me think of an exorcism. Reading this book, I at times felt like I was witnessing one.
What do the flies represent here? The former demonic, depraved form of Brand’s life, now reshaped into something Christlike? Or is the imagery of the divine being used as a front for darker purposes? Many will come to this book feeling they already know the answer: that Brand’s conversion to Christianity two years ago was a cynical attempt to shake off the allegations of sexual assault detailed in a joint investigation between the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. After all, barely six months passed between the accusations in September 2023 – the moment, Brand writes, “Satan’s Blitzkrieg came to my doorstep” – and his baptism in the Thames.
What I felt as I approached How to Become a Christian was rather more complicated. I was raised in the religion to which Brand – if we take him at his word – belongs, and, whatever I now believe, my worldview is inescapably shaped by it. This experience tells me that there is a different, perfectly plausible interpretation of the timing of Brand’s conversion: that he found God in one of the darkest moments of his life – a moment when, he says, he considered suicide. The Christian speaking circuit is full of people with stories like his, former addicts and outcasts with powerful stories of how Christ transformed their lives.
Among Christianity’s key tenets are that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that none is beyond saving, and that no sinner can judge another. This is perhaps Christianity’s most discomfiting demand: God knows and loves Russell Brand just as He knows and loves me, and I must accept that this is beyond my understanding.
There is a visual metaphor that was often used in Sunday school teaching when I was a child. The minister would fill a series of plastic cups with different amounts of orange juice. Seated beside the table, we could clearly see the variations in quantity, but invited to stand and look down on the cups from above, we could no longer see which was the fullest. The orange juice was like our sin, we were told: we might compare how good or bad we each were with the person to our left or our right, but God’s perspective is altogether different.
I thought a lot about that orange juice as I read How to Become a Christian in 7 Days – the most obvious and immediate objection to which is that it doesn’t take seven days to become a Christian. It takes a moment – and then a lifetime. Brand, to his credit, addresses this fact in the opening pages. The title, he writes, is “figurative”, in the same way that the creation story is figurative: God didn’t literally create the world in seven days – at least not in seven days as we understand them. (There are Christians who would argue with this assertion; I am not one of them.) “I mean, you could spend forever and a day quibbling about the absence of diplodocuses in Genesis or the lack of descriptions of supernovas in Leviticus,” Brand writes, “but it won’t help you a jot when it comes to the more pressing problem of nagging futility at the core of your being.”
This is one of several passages in How to Become a Christian that produces in me the uncomfortable sensation of agreement. Brand reframes his life before his conversion – his addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex and fame, his experiments in other spiritualities – as misdirected attempts to find the meaning and fulfilment that can only be answered in God. This makes both instinctive and theological sense to me.
Brand is describing what Augustine of Hippo, and later Martin Luther and Karl Barth, called “Homo incurvatus in se” (humanity turned in on itself). Or, as Brand puts it:
“Consider that within you… there is a portion of the divine, shooting, roaming, spreading, and searching, and the function of the world is to entice, enchant, wrap, and shellac it, a new and choking womb. Enclosed in self. Trapped on an inward ricochet of solipsistic inner circuitry, caroming endlessly in here with constant wants and fears.”
This is typical of Brand’s verbose style, which, at times, feels almost deliberately obfuscatory. He writes as though he might batter you into submission with the sheer weight of his syllables; as though he might drown you in the rapids of his thought.
How to Become a Christian in 7 Days is structured around a seven-step “programme”, itself a loose interpretation of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps, through which Brand aims to tell his story of coming to Jesus and to “use [this] experience to, gulp, lead you to Him”. The only place this structure is truly discernible is on the contents page.
Brand veers wildly from sharing his story of coming to faith – which includes being led to his moment of epiphany by his dog (yes, really) – to tirades against the mainstream media and the “liberal state”, to heartbreaking recollections of his son’s heart surgery at 12 weeks old. From spiritual instruction to musings on the nature of time and consciousness, to sideswipes at Yuval Noah Harari, “per-ma-twerp [sic]” Justin Trudeau, who is dating Brand’s ex-wife Katy Perry, and even the BBC TV show Songs of Praise (which “made the Son of God as appealing as a cat-tongue enema”). He spits bars (“All my life I’ve been trying to make matter divine, to make it luminous with the numinous, but matter ain’t like that”), makes extraneous cultural references to the Kardashians and Megan Thee Stallion, namechecks Jeffrey Epstein and Sigmund Freud, Erika Kirk and Aleister Crowley. Sometimes he does all this within a few sentences. The effect is confounding.
At times, I catch glimpses of the Jesus I know, seen, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “as through a glass darkly”. Brand has flashes of true, humble introspection. But if you were expecting a book called How to Become a Christian in 7 Days to be about Jesus, you’d be wrong. It’s about Russell Brand.
There is good reason no mainstream publisher would touch this book; it is, instead, the first title on the American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s new imprint at the US publisher Skyhorse. Skyhorse’s other writers include Donald and Melania Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr (who is thanked in Brand’s acknowledgements), Woody Allen and Blake Bailey, whose biography of Philip Roth was pulled by its mainstream publisher after allegations of sexual misconduct against Bailey.
In October, Brand will be tried for allegations of rape and sexual assault, dating from between 1999 and 2009, made against him by six women – charges Brand denies. As I write, clips of him discussing the “exploitative” (his word) sex he had with a 16-year-old when he was 30 dominate social media.
Britain’s contempt-of-court laws, which prevent the publication of anything that might influence a jury during a trial, mean Brand, by his own admission, “cannot write anything that will prejudice the proceedings”. He then proceeds to do just that. Sometimes, references to his impending court case are abrupt and direct, others are more oblique. At times, I could not believe what I was reading.
Contempt-of-court laws also prevent me from republishing any of these comments. But, weaving it through his testimony, his commentary on Western culture, even his exegesis of the Bible, he begins to mount his defence. He recounts his past sexual experiences, not only to give an account of his former life of sin but also to demonstrate “the sheer abundance” of willing women available to him.
The Bible is a kaleidoscopic, contradictory text, forever being re-translated and reinterpreted. Every believer, every preacher, to some degree takes from it what suits their particular purposes, what affirms their pre-held ideas, what speaks to them at that time in their life. For those who know their Old Testament, it will not be hard to see what speaks to Brand in the Bible stories on which he chooses to dwell.
If Brand has privately confessed to and repented of any wrongdoing – as his God demands that he must – he cannot admit so here. Instead, he alternately insinuates and states outright that he is the victim of a conspiracy to silence a free-thinking agitator, whose “inclinations are generally counter-culture and trend towards truth” and leave him “at odds with existing media and governmental power”.
There is significant confluence between Christian fundamentalist beliefs in the approaching end times, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon. After all, if you believe that a spiritual war is being fought, unseen, between the forces of good and evil, it is not such a leap to also subscribe to the theory that a secretive elite is plotting to impose a single, authoritarian government on the world. “The current culture war provides a futile approximation of the real spiritual warfare in which we are all participants,” he writes. And so Brand dedicates large parts of a book ostensibly about the Christian faith to advancing the same conspiracy theories he once peddled on YouTube, railing against Covid vaccines, globalisation and the mainstream media. There is understandable appeal, to a man who admits to having a problem with authority, in recognising no authority but God’s – especially when that God is individually experienced and interpreted.
All this conspires to makes How to Become a Christian in 7 Days a near-unreadable book. That does not necessarily mean that the faith described within it is not genuine. It means only that Russell Brand is broken, complex, confused, sinful, self-interested, blind to his own faults, taking from scripture what suits him and discarding the rest. That he is, in some mysterious, unfathomable way – I think of the orange juice again – like me.
[Further reading: God loves Lily Phillips]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment