My Booky Wook author Russell Brand’s latest literary effort hits shelves today – but if the reviews are anything to go by, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is a self-help memoir that you’ll be better off skipping.
The 50-year-old embarked on his Christian redemption arc after he first faced sexual assault allegations in 2023. Later this year, he will stand trial to face allegations of rape and sexual assault related to six women. Brand denies all wrongdoing.
The comedian, who was formerly Buddhist, was baptised in the River Thames – with the assistance of unlikely friend Bear Grylls, no less – in April 2024. In his new book, Brand turns his hand to preaching, but perhaps he’d have been better off putting the writing on hold and spending more time reading the Bible itself before television appearances. (Although when he recently tried to read the bible on TV that didn’t go too well either.)
In a review accompanied by the headline ‘Russell Brand’s disturbing memoir is an offence against God’, The Telegraph’s critic Christopher Howse gives the book zero stars, and writes: “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.”
“It is criminally painful to read and it is not a victimless crime,” Howse adds. “The poor fool of a reader suffers, but the victim I feel most sorry for is God.” Ouch.
The i Paper’s Emily Bootle also takes aim at Brand’s prose, writing that he “uses rambling biblical metaphors and Christian ideology as a vessel for unfinished Notes-app thoughts, crackpot conspiracy theories – and mainly for talking about himself, despite many protestations that Christ has finally freed him from the cult of selfishness and individualism to which the rest of us are still enslaved”.
The book, she adds, is “a fountain of alt-right ideology, an embarrassing display of hubris (save for a couple of anecdotes where he shows rare, human vulnerability: his son’s heart surgery and the death of his dog) and a manipulation of respectable Christian values for personal gain”.
In The Times, reviewer John Maier brutally concluded that “Brand has swallowed a dictionary, and it is not coming out again via his mouth.”
It comes after musician Nick Cave, who is well known for dealing with religious themes in his work, was asked about Brand’s book in the latest installment of his Red Hand Files email.
He replied simply: “Good for atheism.”
And in a review published last month, Pippa Bailey wrote in The New Statesman that Brand’s “verbose style […] 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,” she said.
The book has been published by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s imprint. Brand has been on the promotional trail in recent weeks, making an already infamous appearance on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored show for an interview characterised by his failure to locate a passage in the Bible.
Brand attended the interview clutching the same Bible he took to a court hearing in February. The religious text was confiscated by the dock officer after the comedian began reading it in Southwark Crown Court.
When asked which passages he was looking at in court, Brand spent an excruciating 90 seconds flicking through the tome as Morgan sat in silence, making awkward glances to the camera. He eventually conceded he could not find the section of text he was reading in court and plumped for reading out another.
The moment has been roundly mocked online since, with one person describing it as “one of the most painfully awkward exchanges” of the week in a post on X.
Another tweeted: “There should be a class act lawsuit against Russell Brand for making anyone suffer through this awkward moment. 2 mins of my life I will never get back.”
