Russell Brand’s disturbing memoir is an offence against God

Christopher HowseTue, May 12, 2026 at 5:09 AM UTC

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Brand’s book intends to be a guide to conversion but is more a mangled world-view - Youtube

Reading Russell Brand’s How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is like being locked in an empty pub all night with a garrulous drunk. Except that Brand is now sober. His prose is the way he thinks, which is the frightening thing.

His idea for this self-help guide to becoming a Christian, based on the experience of this recovering bad boy, is to divide the process into 12 stages, based on the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step programme. These are then parcelled into seven days. But 12 into seven doesn’t go, which is the first jumble, but by no means the worst.

Chunks of prose approximate to rap: “Not till I was cracked and smacked then uncracked and unsmacked and therapised and had been through Sartre and sutras and Nietzsche and sex creatures, until I’d turned my childhood shame into adult fame… as my son’s chest was carved open, as my wife’s breast milk bloomed, as we left the anaesthesiologist’s room, as the dog leash loomed…”

It is criminally painful to read and it is not a victimless crime. The poor fool of a reader suffers, but the victim I feel most sorry for is God. Some commentators suggest that Russell Brand is unpleasant because he believes in God. In reality, the greatest minds in Western civilisation, from Augustine to Newman, have defended God autobiographically, but they have not required readers to accept a shoddy, mangled world-view like Brand’s as a prerequisite.

Russell Brand appears to have logorrhoea, which sometimes made him fascinating on television, even charming, as Jeremy Paxman seemed to find him on Newsnight in 2012. Brand often mistakes the meanings of words, confusing “inertia” and “momentum”. He mentions “Bruno Giordino”, probably meaning not the Italian football manager Bruno Giordano, but the Renaissance esotericist Giordano Bruno.

Brand’s word-vomiting, though, is of a particular kind. He exhibits pressure of speech fuelled by a flight of ideas. Both are characteristic of the hypomanic phase of bipolar disorder, which Brand says he has suffered from, and both can characterise cocaine use, with which he says he has also been familiar. It is not a good frame of mind in which to write a book.

Brand was baptised in the River Thames in 2024 - @russellbrand

Then I came across a line that made me sit bolt upright: “someone kindly assisting me with the writing of this book”. So, there’s an accessory who shares the blame. (The publishing imprint, created by Right-wing American television pundit Tucker Carlson, must ultimately bear the responsibility.) This may explain fairly lucid passages, such as a lengthy and squirmingly embarrassing paraphrase of the story of David in the Bible. Another is the description of Brand’s baptism in the River Thames, assisted by, but not at the hands of, Bear Grylls, the UK’s former Chief Scout.

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I’d wondered whether, like John Smyth the Se-baptist, who baptised himself in 1609, Brand would go it alone. But no, an unnamed vicar performed the sacrament. The formula is given: “I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” That suggests it was valid – and at a stroke Brand became a Christian. Whether Brand will be a good Christian is a different question.

Bear Grylls confirmed that he assisted with Brand’s baptism - Television Stills

He has never looked very nice. His head is like a Lego version of Michael Jackson’s, but the big problem occurs lower down, where his necklaces become tangled with his chest hair, which appears to be dressed with olive oil. Oddly, he thinks his appearance attractive.

Later this year, Brand will go on trial,charged with rape and other alleged sexual offences. He is innocent unless proven guilty, but that is not how it seems to him: “No matter what happens in court, such as acquittal or the evident presence of a malign power, some people will always think I’m a rapist.” That “malign power” is not just that “fascists and the tyrants are trying to bore us into submission in a lukewarm bath of totalitarianism” but that “an organised, demonic intelligence is in control of the world”.

Brand arrives at Southwark Crown Court earlier this year after charges were added to his rape and sexual assault case - Toby Melville

In the meantime, I wish he’d stop making jokes about penises, not because they’re a deadly sin, but because – as he might guffaw – they leave a nasty taste in the mouth. He’s like Finbarr Saunders (and his double entendres) in a Viz comic. “I don’t want to bow down in front of a man (steady),” he jokes, or: “I retired with dignity to give Harry Styles ‘room to grow’, not that he needs growth, from what I hear.”

The wisdom that Brand dispenses in this book is often of the kind written on tea towels. Perhaps he imbibed it when he took a request to dry up literally. “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you,” he quotes from German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Except Heisenberg didn’t say it. Nor did pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer utter his supposed quotation.

But Brand’s biggest hero is Bear – not Grylls, but his dog, who died. Brand feels it is significant that his dog is a German Shepherd, or at least a shepherd. In a strained observation, he notes that “dog” is “God” backwards. To Bear and to Jesus Christ the book is jointly dedicated.

How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is published by Tucker Carlson Books at £16.85

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”