4 October 2024

Russell Brand’s weird Christian comeback

A cynic might say that his conversion is not really a conversion at all.

Earlier this week a colleague asked me about my baptism. I was 21, I answered, in my final year of university. It was all very non-ceremonious, in a birthing pool in a squeaky-floored church hall, and I wore – cringe – a Harry Potter T-shirt. Afterwards we helped ourselves to crisps and Shloer from a buffet table. No tighty-whities were involved.

I mention tighty whities because last weekend Russell Brand posted a photograph to his social media channels of him baptising a man in a river wearing just that. Both Brand and the other man doing the dunking (whose ponytail and tattoos mark him out as the same man pictured baptising Brand along with Bear Grylls in April) stood mid-thigh in the water, wearing only their pants. Some commenters considered it inappropriate and immodest – words that have surely never before been attached to Brand. Others cheered his newfound Christian faith and praised his “innocence” (presumably referring to Brand’s unawareness that near-nakedness is not a traditional part of modern baptism). A few pointed out that it was obviously a spontaneous baptism, and so they’d had no choice but to take off their clothes; none of this explained why the man being baptised was wearing a wetsuit.

Brand himself waded into the knicker-twist on X with a video asking whether his “tighty-whities” were “satanic”. Spoiler: he thinks not, because Philippians 1:15-18 says “thou shalt baptise men in pants that reveal the whole glory of creation” (jokes, obviously. It does, however, say in the Psalms that the Lord “taketh no pleasure in the legs of a man”.)

Brand has also been seen this past week leading an arena-worth of people in prayer at the Tucker Carlson Live Tour. And onstage with Jordan Peterson, kneeling as they say the Lord’s Prayer at a rally in Washington DC organised by “Rescue the Republic”, the gruesome lovechild of the anti-vaccine Defeat the Mandates and Rage Against the War Machine, which campaigns against continuing support for Ukraine. Brand’s X, meanwhile, reveals him to be a big fan of the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance – who is an investor in the Catholic prayer app Hallow, which Brand began endorsing earlier this year, and Rumble, the alt-right platform on which Brand regularly features. Interspersed with all this, his X feed features hot takes such as “I’m praying all over the place these days – it’s amazing” and “Self-Centredness = Satanic Energy”. (Does Brand still consider himself a comedian? Because I find these one-liners funnier than all of his stand-up.) It’s All A Bit Weird.

A cynic might say that Brand’s conversion is not really a conversion at all, but an attempt to wash himself clean of the multiple accusations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse made against him in a September 2023 episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches. The timing of his baptism in the Thames, a mere seven months after it aired, seems convenient. This is just the latest reincarnation of a notorious shapeshifter – the former Buddhist, professor of Noughties TV nihilism and Sun “shagger of the year”, a born-again Christian? I confess that this interpretation of events is the one that comes most naturally to me. It is also the one that led many of my church-adjacent friends, on seeing British Christians in public life welcoming Brand into the fold – Bear Grylls, the evangelist J John – to ask: what were they thinking? What idiot PR signed off on that?!

But here’s the alternative version: Brand has been found guilty of no crime, and these men truly believe his conversion to be genuine. How can they not? There is, at least in Anglicanism (it’s unclear exactly what denomination Brand was baptised into), no formal threshold for salvation, only that “you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead”. The Christian who believes that God absolves and loves all who put their faith in him has no choice but to take Brand at his word, whatever the private position of his heart may truly be (though they do have a choice about whether to embrace him on social media). This is one of the many uncomfortable parts of the Christian faith: can I believe in a God who loves me and Russell Brand, just the same?