Cover of Russell Brand’s How to become a Christian in 7 days contains a bunch of flies, tied in the shape of a cross. It’s a curious choice, given that in the Bible, flies are associated with death, decay, and divine punishment. In Exodus they are the fourth plague sent by God to “devour” the Egyptians as punishment for enslaving the Israelites. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Beelzebub, also known as the Lord of the Flies, is a great demon. Mainly, thanks to the use of this symbolism in horror films such as heiress (2018) and The Amityville Horror (1979), made me think of an exorcism. Reading this book, I sometimes felt like I was witnessing one.
What do the flies represent here? Brand’s once demonic, depraved life form, now reshaped into something like Christ? Or is the image 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 get rid of sexual assault allegations detailed in a joint investigation between Sunday Times, Times and Channel 4 delivery. After all, barely six months passed between the charges 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 it was quite a bit more complicated. I was raised in Brand’s religion – if we take him at his word – and, whatever I believe now, my worldview has been inescapably shaped by it. This experience tells me that there is a different, entirely plausible interpretation of the timing of Brand’s conversion: that he found God at 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 changed their lives.
Among the main tenets of Christianity are that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, that no one is beyond salvation, and that no sinner can judge another. This is perhaps the most disturbing claim of Christianity: God knows and loves Russell Brand as he knows and loves me, and I have to admit that it is beyond my understanding.
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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 at the table, we could clearly see the differences in quantity, but invited to stand and look at the cups from above, we could no longer see which was fuller. Orange juice was like our sin, we were told: we could compare how good or bad we each were to the person on the left or on the right, but God’s perspective is completely 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 does not 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 did not literally create the world in seven days—at least not in seven days as we understand them. (There are Christians who would argue with that statement; I’m not one of them.) “I mean, you could spend forever and a day arguing about the lack of diplodocus in Genesis or the lack of descriptions of supernovae in Leviticus,” Brand writes, “but it won’t help you one iota when it comes to the more pressing problem of being more pressing.”
This is one of several passages in How to become a Christian which produces in me the unpleasant sensation of agreement. Brand reframes his life before his conversion—his addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, and fame, his experiments in other spiritualities—as misguided attempts to find meaning and fulfillment that can only be answered by God. This makes instinctive and theological sense to me.
Brand is describing what Augustine of Hippo, and later Martin Luther and Karl Barth, called “A man bent over himself” (mankind turned on itself). Or, as Brand puts it:
“Consider that within you… there is a part of the divine, shooting, roaming, spreading and searching, and the function of the world is to lure, charm, envelop and smooth it, a new and suffocating belly. Closed in on itself. Trapped in an inner ricochet of solipsistic inner circles, seeking a continuous end of fearless, caromed inner circles.”
This is typical of Brand’s speaking style, which, at times, feels almost deliberately dark. He writes as if he could beat you into submission with the sheer weight of his syllables; as if he could drown you in the thresholds of his thought.
How to become a Christian in 7 days is structured around a seven-step “program,” itself a loose interpretation of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, through which Brand aims to tell his story of coming to Jesus and “use (this) experience to, swallowlead to Him.” The only place this structure really stands out is on the content page.
Brand veers wildly from sharing his own story of conversion – which includes his epiphany behavior from his dog (yes, really) – to tirades against the mainstream media and the “liberal state”, to heartbreaking memories of his son’s heart surgery at 12 weeks old. From spiritual guidance to musings on the nature of time and consciousness, to side-kicks with Yuval Noah Harari, “per-ma-twerp (sic)” Justin Trudeau dating Brand’s ex-wife Katy Perry, and even a BBC TV show Song of praise (which “made the Son of God as attractive as a cat’s tongue enema”). He spits iron (“All my life I’ve tried to divine matter, to make it shiny with the numinous, but matter isn’t like that”), makes outlandish cultural references to the Kardashians and Megan Thee Stallion, name-checks Jeffrey Epstein and Sigmund Freud, Erika Kirk and Aleister Crowley. Sometimes he does all this within a few sentences. The effect is confusing.
Sometimes, I see the Jesus I know, seen, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “as through a glass darkly.” The brand has flashes of genuine and humble introspection. But if you were expecting a book called How to become a Christian in 7 days to be about Jesus, you would be wrong. It’s about Russell Brand.
There’s a good reason no mainstream publisher would touch this book; is, instead, the first title in American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s new imprint at American publisher Skyhorse. Other Skyhorse writers include Donald and Melania Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr (who is credited in Brand’s acknowledgements), Woody Allen, and Blake Bailey, whose biography of Philip Roth was pulled by its main publisher after allegations of sexual misconduct against Bailey.
In October, Brand will stand trial on allegations of rape and sexual assault, dating 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 are dominating social media.
Britain’s contempt of court laws, which prevent the publication of anything that could influence a jury during a trial, mean that Brand, by his own admission, “cannot write anything that will prejudice the proceedings”. He then proceeds to do just that. At times, the references to his impending court case are abrupt and direct, at others more oblique. Sometimes I couldn’t 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, and even his interpretation of the Bible, he begins to make his own case. He recounts his past sexual experiences, not only to give an account of his former life of sin, but also to demonstrate the “great abundance” of willing women at his disposal.
The Bible is a kaleidoscopic, contradictory text, forever being retranslated and reinterpreted. Every believer, every preacher, takes from it to some extent what suits their particular purposes, what affirms their preconceived ideas, what speaks to them at that time of their lives. For those who know their Old Testament, it won’t be hard to see what Brand is talking about in the biblical stories he chooses to dwell on.
If Brand has privately confessed and repented of any wrongdoing – as his Lord requires – he cannot admit it here. Instead, he alternately insinuates and openly states that he is the victim of a conspiracy to silence a free-thinking agitator whose “tendencies are generally anti-culture and anti-truth” and leave him “at odds with existing media and government power.”
There is a significant overlap between fundamentalist Christian beliefs in the approaching end times, and conspiracy theories like QAnon. After all, if you believe that an unprecedented spiritual war is taking place between the forces of good and evil, it is not such a step to subscribe to the theory that a secret elite is planning to impose a single, authoritarian government on the world. “The current culture war provides a poor approximation of the true spiritual war in which we are all participants,” he writes. And so Brand devotes large portions of a book, ostensibly about the Christian faith, to advancing the same conspiracy theories he once peddled on YouTube, opposing Covid vaccines, globalization and the mainstream media. There is an understandable appeal to a man who admits he has a problem with authority, in recognizing no authority but that of God—especially when that God is experienced and interpreted individually.
All this conspires to do How to become a Christian in 7 days an almost unreadable book. This does not necessarily mean that the belief described within it is not true. It only means that Russell Brand is broken, complex, confused, sinful, self-interested, blind to his own faults, taking from the scriptures what suits him and discarding the rest. That he is, in some mysterious, incomprehensible way – I think of orange juice again – like me.
(Further reading: God loves Lily Phillips)
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