This past week, social media was set ablaze by the news that Russell Brand converted to Christianity. I’m conflicted about what angle on this story is the most compelling. The options are:
That the Russell Brand conversion should be considered important news.
The polarizing responses to Brand’s newfound salvation.
The appeal of traditional religion in progressive society.
I decided to discuss all three.
Who is Russell Brand?
The first part of this article is about Russell Brand. It’s hard to imagine you haven’t heard of him, but may not know much more than what floats to the top of social media - a recovering heroin addict and theatrical British comedian who had a short-lived marriage with Katy Perry. To invest yourself in this article, you might need to have enough interest in Russell Brand, and I’m not saying you should. In some respects, I am using the recent Brand Christian conversion to discuss a larger issue. However, I have had an off-and-on interest in Russell Brand over the years. What has always been intriguing to me about Brand is how he challenges virtually every shred of status quo society - religion, government, capitalism, and mental health field. He seems to be an intelligent and articulate person, who has explored spirituality quite vigorously.
Who exactly is Russell Brand?
Russell Brand is an award-winning comedian, actor, author, public thought leader, and a passionate activist for mental health and drug rehabilitation. Russell Edward Brand was born in in Grays, Essex, England. He is the only child of actress Barbara Nichols and photographer Ronald Henry Brand. Brand's parents separated when he was six months old, and he was raised by his mother.
Brand's first significant stand-up appearances came in 2000, the same year he also became a video journalist for MTV. He debuted his one-man show Better Now, an account of his heroin addiction, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004. He became a popular British television star by appearing on Big Brother and hosting his own talk show and numerous other series, and in 2008 shot to fame worldwide as the rocker Aldous Snow in the hit comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008).
Brand's writing debut, My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, became a huge success in the United Kingdom. Subsequently published in the U.S. in 2009, it stayed on the New York Times' bestseller list for five weeks in a row. In 2013 he took a hilariously scathing look at our cultural craving for heroes, icons and divine wisdom in his show, the Messiah Complex. Here’s the trailer. Filmed live at the historic Hammersmith Apollo in London, I saw the show and thought it was brilliant, despite the unsavory aspects of a typical Russell Brand show. Brands next big show, Re:Birth. Here’s the trailer.
A former heroin addict, Brand became an activist and advocate for drug addition recovery. In April 2012, Brand testified in front of a parliamentary committee about drug addiction, sharing his experiences and view that drugs should be decriminalized. He asserted that drug addiction should be regarded as a disease to be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal or judicial matter.
Brand’s philosophy of addiction is rooted in the belief that addiction is not solely a personal failing, but rather a symptom of deeper emotional and spiritual pain. He argues that addiction is a response to trauma, a way to numb the pain and fill the void within. This perspective challenges the prevailing view that addiction is a moral failing or a lack of willpower.
Russell Brand has been in the spotlight for many different reasons. Brand married the pop star Katy Perry in 2010 in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Rajasthan, India. After 14 months, Brand filed for a divorce, which was officially granted in 2012. Russell Brand married Laura Gallacher in 2017, and they have three children together. Here’s Brand’s SNL monologue in 2011.
In 2017, Brand discussed in an interview his sex addiction. He also wrote about this in several publications, “On the morning of April Fools’ Day, 2005, I woke up in a sexual addiction treatment center in a suburb of Philadelphia.”
Controversy has had Russell Brand in the news most recently. Since mid-September, Brand has made headlines for reasons other than his comedy, after three media outlets published an investigation in which four women accused him of sexual assault, including rape. Vox published an article, explaining the sexual assault charges against Brand.
Brand issued a video statement denying the allegations, stating:
“Amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute," he said. Brand added that he has always been open about his years of sexual promiscuity, and said all of the relationships he had "were absolutely always consensual.”
The Spirituality of Russell Brand
Trying to sort of the spirituality of Russell Brand is a chore.
In 2014, he published the book Revolution In it, Brand advocates a non-violent social revolution based on principles of spirituality and the common good. Brand writes:
“If you can be free from pride, self-pity, self-centeredness, selfishness, jealousy, envy, intolerance, impatience, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, arrogance, and dishonesty, then there is a state of serenity and connectedness within.”
This Vanity Fair article on Brand and the book is a useful read.
As part of Brand’s drug addiction recovery, he started searching for meaning and reading the works of people such as: Gandhi, Malcolm X, Jesus and Che Guevara. He started practicing transcendental meditation helping him to recover from his drug dependence. He came to the conclusion that all of his addictions were the result of a lack of spiritual fulfillment. That was a changing point in his life. In 2002 Russell Brand, got drawn to Yoga, spirituality, and meditation. Brand writes, “It was a great triumph for me when I realized that I was praying and meditating more than I was having sex.”
In 2020, Russell Brand released an Audible Original recording entitled, Revelation: Connecting with the Sacred in Everyday Life, in which he “dives into the meaning of life, death, and the sacred space in between.” He discusses the book and leads a meditation exercise as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He has 6.79 million subscribers on YouTube and close to 12 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Probably the easiest way to explore the evolution of Brand’s personal spirituality would be to watch the video. Russell Brand - Awakened Man. In a much longer video, Russell Brand has this conversation with Eckhart Tolle. Rich Roll also had a very illuminating discussion with Russell Brand on The Rich Roll Podcast. He also had a long conversation with Joe Rogan. Brand’s podcast Stay Free with Russell Brand and YouTube channel is probably the best way to explore his latest thoughts. Interestingly enough, part of the description of his podcast reads, “Religion is dead.”
Brand’s Recent Christian Conversion
Brand has, up to very recently, promoted many “New Age” ideas and philosophies across his social media platforms and hosted conferences on meditation and transcendentalism. He has also been a strong proponent of Eastern mysticism and spiritualities that are found in Buddhism and Hinduism.
On Sunday, April 28, 2024, Russell Brand was baptized a Christian. There is uncertainty or confusion about what kind of “Christian” he became. Presumably, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, though some Catholics aren’t buying it. Brand’s wife is Roman Catholic. Brand is not the only public personality who has recently become Catholic. Two additional controversial figures, Candace Owens (pictured below, no political message intended) and Jordan Peterson’s wife.
To be honest, I don’t follow this kind of thing and generally don’t really care about who does what in terms of their religious commitments. That’s one reason why I was conflicted about covering this story. For a season of my life I traveled the world with an international human rights agency, investigating cases of forced child prostitution and child slave labor. I worked with an international human rights agency, based out of Washington D.C. and posed as a customer in brothels where girls as young as 12 years old are forced to provide sex to customers 4-6 times a day, six days a week. I also visited a slave labor camp, under the guise of being an investor, where boys that same age were chained to poles and worked around the clock rolling cigarettes to meet their quota or be beaten with electrical cords.
Given this, Russell Brand’s Christian conversion controversy doesn’t really qualify as a legitimate concern. The part of this story that appeals to me is the recent trend of people turning to high church religion in what is often considered a post-religion progressive Western society. Recently, an article was published claiming that a Christian revival is under way in Britain.
With respect to Russell Brand, this is Brand’s recent TikTok announcement about his conversion and baptism.
The response to Brand’s conversion has been varied, including:
Brand’s conversion is not genuine and a strategy to rebrand himself as a public figure of interest.
Brand’s conversion is a ploy to garner goodwill and sympathy, in the face of sexual assault allegations.
Brand is confused or deceived about what true Christian conversion is, and making a mockery of the Christian faith.
I did a Facebook article just letting people know I’d be publishing this article and got 200+ comments, including:
“Dude is just a shifty grifter and shapeshifter. That’s all. Pretty typical narcissist “finding Christ” after horrific credible sexual abuse allegations.”
“If he finds peace in Christianity, then I’m honestly happy for him. It’s not my path any longer but it do recognize it works for others.”
“It smells of self serving PR. He’s an intellectually insatiable egotist. He’s doing this for curiosity and attention. He’ll convert to a new religion in a year or so.”
“How about this, why should anyone really give a fuck?”
“May he find deep peace.”
The Russell Brand conversion to Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism, became interesting to me in the wake of discovering that Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson’s wife, Tammy, also reportedly joined the catholic church. In my mind, Russell Brand, Candace Owens and Tammy Peterson are on my list of people most unlikely to become Catholic. It would be a reach to claim that these three cases share something in common and read too much into it. On the other hand, it raises a question: What is the appeal of traditional high church religion in an increasingly post-religion society?
My So-Called Catholic Life
There are roughly 52 million Catholic adults nationwide. Despite the steep decline of several Christian denominations, such as Southern Baptists, The percentage of Catholics has virtually been unchanged since 2014. Likewise, the Anglican Church in the U.S. is seeing significant growth. Though there are differences between Catholics and Anglicans, they are both considered “high church”.
The term “high church” refers to a form of Christianity, which emphasizes liturgy, ritual, rites, priestly authority, sacraments, especially the weekly or daily celebration of the Eucharist.
I was loosely raised Catholic by an alcoholic mother. I walked past Jesus several times a day. He was there on the crucifix, hanging on our front-room wall. Attending Catholic Mass as a teenage boy, I watched as the bread and wine became the sacrificial body and blood of Jesus Christ, and I heard stories about Jesus from the gospels. I can’t say that any of this really mattered to me. I was more interested in dating Debbie Byrd than the Nicene Creed. Passing Algebra was more pressing than making sense of the Catholic catechesis.
The memory of childhood Catholicism that most stays with me is being petrified as an 8-year-old at my First Confession. When the priest slid open the ominous booth window, I drew a blank, and confessed to sins I made up in my head, which included the false admission of throwing snowballs from behind a front-yard bush at cars driving down McBride Drive. I knew better than to throw snowballs from my yard.
In college, I left my Catholic roots and became an evangelical Christian. As a good Evangelical, I learned that Catholics weren’t even Christians, and how important it was for me to point this out so they could truly be saved. After college I went to divinity school, and spent many years in professional Christian ministry. A crisis of faith eventually led to my leaving Evangelicalism, organized religion and my megachurch pastoral career. It didn’t take long for me to deconstruct and discard most of my Christian theology.
After leaving religion, I started writing books about my journey. My first book was, Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you). Divine Nobodies is the story of the undoing of my religiosity - my religious assumptions, judgements, formulas, hypocrisy and pat answers. Chapter 13 in the book is titled, “The Great Reversal (Father Jeff)”, and tells the story of how my Evangelical judgements of Catholics dissolved through my friendship with a local Catholic priest. Through that friendship, I was introduced to a book that deeply impacted me: Living Liturgy by Sofia Cavalletti, an Italian Roman Catholic catechist who created the The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.
It was also the Catholic church that introduced me to contemplative spirituality. After leaving Protestantism, I decided to go on a personal spiritual retreat at the nearby Trappist Monastery, the Abbey of Gethesemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. Not realizing it at the time, this is where Thomas Merton was buried. Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. During my visit, I found his books in the Abbey library, which became my gateway into contemplative spirituality, which wasn’t the string suit of Evangelical Christianity.
Is traditional religion making a comeback?
I took these photos at the Catedral-Basílica de Santa María de Mallorca, Spain
In an increasingly post-religion and progressive society, why would someone be compelled to seek out or return to high church traditional religion, such as Catholicism, Anglicanism and Episcopalianism?
A couple interesting articles about this are:
A quote in the above article reads:
“The single greatest threat to our generation and to all young people is the deprivation of meaning in our lives. The millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that their current churches cannot provide.
Tom Holland is an English author and religious historian. Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realize he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom. Holland is not alone as an agnostic trying out church again. In contrast to the usual ageing demographic of many Anglican churches, Anglican church growth seems to mainly consist of young professionals, both male and female. Tom Holland’s lecture, Why I changed my mind about Christianity may be interesting to some.
I have a theory about the current appeal of high church religion. It’s my sense that some people feel that the some aspects of traditional religion are comforting, centering and stabilizing in an otherwise fractious world. Here are a few examples:
Established Route to Meaning
There’s a reason why religion has endured as a significant feature in the evolution of our species and trademark of human civilization. As flawed, misguided, corrupt and wicked religion at times has been and is, it has also provided an enduring pathway to what all human beings desire. At its best, religion is a pathway to meaning, purpose, forgiveness, transcendence, community and salvation. Organized religion gives people practical access to our deepest longings through a system and structure of beliefs, practices, rituals and gatherings. Sure, people find and cultivate deep meaning in their lives without religious beliefs and structures, but perhaps it requires a little more effort.
Practice of religious ritual
In a future article, I may address the topic of religious ritual in more depth. The BBC produced a useful piece titled, The surprising power of daily rituals. According to research, religious ritual offers a range of positive mental health benefits, from reduced anxiety to meaning in life and sense of community. The field of the anthropology of religion explores the evolution, meaning and significance of religious ritual. Ritualistic practices can help bring a degree of predictability to an uncertain future. They convince our brains of constancy and predictability.
Liturgy of smells, bells, symbols, and visuals
Protestantism and Evangelicalism are mostly a book/teaching religion. It revolves around the exposition of the Bible. The Sunday sermon is the focus, all the other programming (contemporary music, video, theatrical performance, high-tech components) is building toward the crescendo of the charismatic leader’s discourse. In contrast to the dogma fetish in Protestantism, high church liturgy is a multisensory spiritual experience. It’s more of a ceremony than a service, more grandeur than tinsel. The cerebral and literalist approach to faith, is replaced by the experience of stories, symbols, silences, movements, gestures, readings and prayers. The blend of sacred choral music, candlelit arches and incense-infused worship can be an intoxicating experience.
Poignant sense of the sacred
Can I ask you a question: which of these two spaces better evoke a sense of the sacred?
The art, architecture, design and aesthetic of church buildings and worship environments of high church religion are much more compelling than stackable chairs in a monochromatic multipurpose room. Cathedrals, with their intricate art, sculptures, and stained-glass windows, serve as a backdrop for the liturgy, enriching the spiritual experience. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “The world will be saved by beauty.” Well, it certainly isn’t going to be by the Baptist church down the street. A person might have a coffee table book with the world’s greatest cathedrals, but probably not with American megachurch stadiums. There is a timeless, awe-inspiring, spiritual nature to these spaces.
Tradition, structure, and roots
High church traditional religion may appeal to people who feel crushed beneath the pressures and strain of daily life. I recently published an article on tradwives titled: Deconstructing the Tradwife Movement. One of the points I discuss in the article is how traditional lifestyles have resurged in interest, possibly in response to a more fractured, frenetic, exhausting and demanding American society. Traditional religion may also garner new interest from those looking for something that feels solid, rooted, dependable and enduring. I’ve noticed on occasion that when I have used the term “traditional church”, it can have a negative connation to it. Words like “new”, “fresh”, “innovative” and “progressive”, “current”, “advanced” seem hopeful. Right? But words like “old”, “conventional”, “outdated”, “bygone”, “traditional”, and “antiquated” don’t seem very inspiring. Right?
Community
By far, the most common struggle I hear from people who leave religion is the absence of community, dissolution of one’s familiar social network and loss of meaningful relationships. Starting over or a major re-build of one’s relational world can be distressing. In fact, it might be a reason why someone might return to church. For example, I have discovered people who have joined the Unitarian Universalist Church because of their inclusive principles and open-minded approach to spirituality, while maintaining certain aspects of traditional church.
If you are interested in learning more about the high church traditions, a few useful books are:
History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium by James Hitchcock
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods
The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch
A History of the Church in England by J. R. H. Moorman
A History of the Episcopal Church by Robert W. Prichard
For a useful and interesting overview of religion, Lapham’s Quarterly has a religion edition of interest.
Will the Real Religion-Returner Please Stand Up
It seems to me that a few profiles of people returning to traditional religion are:
People turned off or burned out on contemporary, casual, trendy, flashy, feel-good, Starbucks non-denominational Christianity.
People who feel betrayed by progressivism and secular humanism.
People whose leaving-religion deconstruction, post-religion spirituality, or atheism/agnosticism wasn’t properly grounded.
It has often been the case that in the wake of religion’s decline, there can be a crisis of meaning and existential dread that tumbles into nihilism. It is often felt as extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. However, Nietzsche saw a way through it.
(WWND?) What Would Nietzsche Do?
It’s useful in this discussion to remember and revisit Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement, “God is dead.”
After leaving religion in my own deconstruction process over two decades ago, I vigorously poured myself into studying various fields of knowledge including philosophy. You can’t get too far into Western philosophical thought without running into Friedrich Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche was German, born into a family that was religious and Christian, which he would later denounce. His father was a Lutheran pastor and there had been hopes Friedrich would have followed in those same steps. For a season, Nietzsche pursued this course and studied theology academically, but ultimately abandoned his interests in religion. Consider how similar Nietzsche’s journey is to people currently in their deconstruction process:
Nietzsche was raised in religion
Experienced a crisis of faith
Deconstructed his beliefs
Underwent a process of deconversion
Denounced orthodox Christian theology
Cultivated a post-religion spirituality
So, where did Nietzsche’s “God is dead” statement come from?
One of the most famous lines attributed to Nietzsche is the phrase, “God is dead.” These words are put in the mouth of one of Nietzsche's characters in his book, The Gay Science. Section 125 depicts the parable of the madman who is searching for God. He accuses us all of being the murderers of God.
“‘Where is God?' he cried; 'I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’”
The significance of this statement became paramount in the forefront of Nietzsche’s thinking. Obviously, Nietzsche's point is not meant to be taken literally, as though he believed that the God of Christianity existed and then died. Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea is that what the God of Christianity represented in the human religious imagination, died. Darwin's Origin of the Species and theory of evolution (and other scientific discoveries of his time) had been published, and now science had answers to the origins of the universe and our species, which did not necessitate belief in a creator God. Through the revolution of science, the path was paved for a world that no longer necessitated the need for the theistic God of the Christian religion.
The progress of science and the triumph of reason, took religion out at the knees, in Nietzsche’s estimation. He believed that God died in the hearts and minds of his own generation of modern men - killed by an indifference that was itself directly related to a pronounced cultural shift away from faith and towards rationalism and science. He wrote, “The greatest recent event—that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.”
Nietzsche viewed the “death of God” as a net positive for humankind. He wrote, “Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.”
The Downside of the Exodus from Religion
Nietzsche also understood the dire ramifications of the idea that “God is dead.” He understood this could spark an existential crisis of epic proportions. Think about it: the origins of the universe, the basis of personal identity, the meaning and purpose of life, how to live, what happens when you die – all of this was based upon Western religion and the Christian construct of God. Take God away, and you’ve got nothing! A universe without God can quickly start to feel random, meaningless, empty, dreadful, lonely, directionless, pointless, purposeless, hopeless, and terrifying. Virtually every shred of Western civilization was tied to the idea and belief in God. Kill off God, and there’s not much left!
What can happen after deep-sixing religion, which concerned Nietzsche, was the possibility of Nihilism – the idea that nothing matters, life has no intrinsic meaning or value, all notions of “right” and “wrong” are pointless, and any single human or even our entire human species, is insignificant and inconsequential. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote,
“The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.”
I’m not aiming to be a doomsday prophet here. I realize that the secularization-of-society panic button gets hit every few years or so. On the whole, I agree with Nietzsche that any exodus from religious fundamentalism or even classic Christianity is a step in the right direction for actualizing our fullest possibilities and potentialities as a species. The whole point of breaking free from religious domination is liberation. Nietzsche took the position that to shed the chains of slavery, it is necessary to kill the slave master - to “kill” the religious conception of “God”. Mikhail Bakunin said it explicitly, “As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.” In “killing” God, we can perhaps overcome dogma, superstition, conformity and fear.
Nietzsche believed that we were deceiving ourselves as long as we held to the idea that there was some superior external deity we must answer to and depend upon. In other words, Nietzsche believed that what the above picture represents is the impediment to the continuing survival and thriving of our species. Bertrand Russell, in Why I am Not a Christian, said it quite scathingly:
“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
So whereas it might be that the exodus from religion is a net positive, I am seeing in my deconstruction work that fewer people are wanting to reframe or reinterpret religion as a path forward.
Many people who leave religion, deconstructed their belief-system, and disavowed their former theology, feel the impact of the “God is dead” reality. Most people attach their sense of self and identity to their religious persona. Their fundamental existential security is based upon their religious beliefs, which supply answers to all the big questions about God, existence, purpose, and the afterlife. A person's religious group and sub-culture is also the hub of their relationships, community, social life and support system. When a person leaves religion, everything that “God” represented - identity, security, community - comes crashing to the ground. As Nietzsche put it, when a person comes to see that “the Christian God has become unbelievable”, the fall-out of this realization is often volatile and destabilizing.
A Grounded Post-Religion Spirituality
You know me. My final answer on all these things is: You do you. You want to be religious. Be religious. You want to be non-religious. Be non-religious. If you were a Christian, now turned Atheist. It’s all good. If you were an Atheist, now turned Christian. Great! Martin Buber wrote, “Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
But to conclude this article, I want to say a few words to the person whose leaving-religion deconstruction process, post-religion spirituality, or atheism/agnosticism seemed to have failed them.
In my view, Atheism as a reaction to religion is on shaky ground. I’m not saying that Atheism as a reaction to religion isn’t logical. It’s just, in my view, it doesn’t go deep enough in establishing a solid foundation for life of meaning, well-being and liberation. Don’t get me wrong, I cut my teeth on Christopher Hitchens debates after leaving religion. However, hating religion doesn’t go far enough in cultivating a deeply-rooted non-religious spirituality.
In my series “Philosophers You Have Never Heard Of” I covered three philosophers who had a deep and grounding non-religious philosophy to life:
In more recent times, Atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris is a popular voice for non-religious spirituality.
I’m currently reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks 1951-1959. Here are a few quotes:
“A love that does not bear collision with reality is not a real love.”
“As a man, my passions have never been ‘against.’ They have always been addressed toward things bigger or better than myself.”
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
“One must not cut oneself from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make contact again. But even within this sadness I feel a great leap of joy and a great desire to love simply at the sight of a hill against the evening sky.”
My point is that Albert Camus’ non-religious outlook was not simply a reactionary campaign against the easy target of religion, it was deeply grounded and profoundly personal.
Whether it’s religion or humanistic philosophy, one has to work at making it something more than going to church or existential pontification. No one saves us but ourselves. We ourselves must walk the path. It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
My encouragement to you is to possess your own soul, whatever that means for you, with or without religion.
Russell Brand is a complicated and controversial person. Former comic turned activist, former yogi turned Roman Catholic, defender of the oppressed and accused of sexual assault. As the saying goes, every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. Some say Russell Brand is an enlightened, loving and compassionate recovered addict, some say he is an unscrupulous and narcissistic grifter. Maybe he’s a man longing for forgiveness and salvation. Maybe he’s pulling a stunt to save face and his career. Maybe you’re a fan or maybe you were his victim.
In Summary
Russell Brand converted to Catholicism and every one has an opinion.
Traditional high church religion may appeal to people who are done with contemporary Evangelicalism, searching for roots in a teetering world, feel betrayed by progressivism, or didn’t go deep enough into religious deconstruction and post-religion spirituality.
Possess your own soul, whatever that means for you, with or without religion.
"Nothing in human life, least of all religion, is ever right until it is beautiful."
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Clearly Brand has an addictive personality and these different religious affiliations can perhaps become another form of addiction. It is, perhaps, just what he needs right now. Whether that makes him narcissistic, I don't know. But he will probably get over Catholicism just like he's gotten over other forms of traditional religious expression in his past. Maybe as the fires of his current passions die down, he is left with the simmering hope of a new day dawning. Including a brand new religion to go with it. There is a song by the British band Duran Duran called "New Religion" whose lyrics are ringing true here for me: "I can't help myself, it's a new religion"
All the best to Russell Brand. I hope he finds His way.
MORE: As Thom Hartmann says we are all hardwired for "Awe". Or "Wonder" where Spinoza says it is when your mind comes to a standstill. As Tolle says "Religion is the attempt to put into words the spirit." And you my friend Jim Palmer have said it so clearly, the state of Awe can easily be misused, abused, made into a drug and weaponized.
Have you heard of "Glimmers"? Capturing the "Moment of Wonder and Awe". Psychologists tell us now if we focus and remember these "Glimmers" they will diminish the traumas we may have experienced in our lives. So "Glimmer" Away my dear friends. Fall into “Wonder” as often as you can.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-awe/201704/the-emerging-science-awe-and-its-benefits
Blessings to you !