Russell Brand’s latest book, “How to Become a Christian in Seven Days”, was released on Tuesday to a chorus of scathing reviews, with one critic describing it as “an offence against God”.
In a zero-star review for The Telegraph, columnist Christopher Howse compared reading the book to “being locked in an empty pub all night with a garrulous drunk” and wrote that the prose was “the way he thinks, which is the frightening thing”. He added that it was “criminally painful to read” and that the “victim I feel most sorry for is God”.
Emily Bootle of The i Paper accused Brand of using “rambling biblical metaphors” as a vessel for “unfinished Notes-app thoughts” and “crackpot conspiracy theories”, describing the book as “a fountain of alt-right ideology” and “a manipulation of respectable Christian values for personal gain”. The Times reviewer John Maier concluded: “Brand has swallowed a dictionary, and it is not coming out again via his mouth.” In The New Statesman, Pippa Bailey wrote that his verbose style felt “almost deliberately obfuscatory”.
The book follows Brand’s baptism in the River Thames with Bear Grylls in April 2024. Brand, who is due to stand trial over allegations of rape and sexual assault against six women, denies all wrongdoing. During a promotional appearance on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, he struggled to locate a passage in the Bible he had brought, leading to an awkward 90-second silence. The same Bible was confiscated from him at a court hearing in February after he began reading it in the dock.
The incident was widely mocked online, with one person describing it as “one of the most painfully awkward exchanges” of the week, while another called for a “class act lawsuit” against Brand for making viewers suffer through the moment.
