Russell Brand’s Salvation Tour Comes With A Price Tag
(ANALYSIS) Russell Brand recently found Jesus. He has also found a publisher willing to charge $33 for 134 pages of him writing about his conversion.
The book is called “How to Become a Christian in Seven Days,” published by Tucker Carlson Books, an imprint of Skyhorse (Carlson, you may recall, is another man who really, really found Jesus once he pivoted from Fox News to independent media).
I bought a copy. And yes, the joke is on me.
READ: Meet The Man Who Forever Rewired Christianity
The timing of the release, much like Brand himself, is not particularly subtle. In October, the erudite Englishman is scheduled to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, involving six women. He has pleaded not guilty to everything. He has also, in the meantime, become a hardcore Christian.
For those of us who came of age with Brand on the TV, the pivot is whiplash-inducing. The Brand of the 2010’s was the patchouli-scented anti-capitalist who told Jeremy Paxman on the BBC not to vote, who waved his book “Revolution” at hedge funders, who befriended Naomi Klein and harangued the bankers of Mayfair.
He was a free-loving yoga lad with a Che Guevara energy and a vocabulary thieved from a community theater Hamlet. Religion, when he mentioned it, came swaddled in vague Vedic vibes, sprinkled with sutras, sourced from a Goa beach hut.
Then came September 2023. The Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, the scandalous reports, the allegations. Then came Mar-a-Lago. Then his baptism in the Thames in April 2024. And now comes the book.
There is also the matter of the 16-year-old. Brand admitted earlier this year, on the record, to sleeping with a 16-year-old girl when he was 30. He framed it not as a crime, since the age of consent in England is 16, but as something his fame and addiction enabled.
He has called himself an “exploiter of women” in that interview. Having watched it myself, I saw no remorse when he spoke, just a rehearsed line ready for mass consumption. That not-so-minor detail about a borderline-minor is, conveniently, missing from the new book.
Brand's account of his conversion has it happening while walking his German Shepherd, Bear, after watching a clip of pastor Rick Warren on television. He calls the encounter “theophanic,” then helpfully informs the reader, “I just learned this word myself, don’t be embarrassed, it means ‘God came to me.’”
He dedicates the volume to Bear and to Jesus Christ, in that order, calling them “both Shepherds.” There is a metaphor for everything in this book, and most of them are unserious in a way the author clearly believes is profound.
He frames his criminal exposure in the candid prose of a man auditioning for sainthood. Asked to list things causing him pain, he writes: “No matter what happens in court, such as acquittal, or the evident presence of malign power, some people will always think I'm a rapist.” That line appears just a few pages into a book presented, somehow, as a spiritual exercise for the reader
Brand cites Carl Jung, Bill W., Saint Paul, Ricky Gervais, Doug Stanhope, Anthony Bourdain, Meister Eckhart and Alex Jones, sometimes in the same chapter. He floats the theory that “the devil is in charge of this world,” located variously in “D.C. (or Westminster or Davos or Jerusalem).”
He also suggests the Titanic may have been sunk on purpose by powerful interests. He name-drops Charlie Kirk’s death as a sign of the End Times. Genuine tragedies are conscripted into the same paragraph as cruise-ship conspiracies, and asked to mean the same thing. He grieves and speculates in the same breath, and means neither.
People convert. People should be allowed to convert. Saul became Paul and the Christian story is built on the radical proposition that the worst sinners are capable of redemption. None of that is in dispute. The dispute is whether the timeline here is divine or strategic.
A man who built a populist empire on the premise that the system is rigged against truth-tellers, who has admitted to sleeping with a teenager when he was old enough to know better and who faces multiple sex offense charges in London, has discovered that the same audience on Rumble, a conservative video platform known for fewer filters, also buys hardcovers about Jesus. The infrastructure of the rebrand is bolted together with industrial precision. Behind it is a man of formidable intelligence, and possibly something bordering on the sociopathic.
Brand writes that he was worried readers might see him as “an out-of-control egomaniac trying to rewrite the Bible and charge you for the privilege.” Dear reader, he is charging you for the privilege. For $33 you get 134 pages, which works out to roughly 25 cents per page of testimony from a man who, not that long ago, was warning his audience about exactly this kind of upsell.
Brand is a pariah in the U.K., where people are intimately familiar with the charges, the testimony, and the man. Which explains the recent move to Florida, and the bet that American Christians — many of them on the right — will buy the hardcover and not the indictment.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.