I had a spiritual breakthrough thanks to Russell Brand

That’s the most improbable sentence I have ever written

Never in a million years did I ever think that one sunny Friday in 2024, I would have cause to commit to text the words: this week I had a spiritual breakthrough thanks to Russell Brand.

I’m as surprised as anyone. Yet here we are. 

Earlier this week, I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and came across a reel of Brand being interviewed by Jordan Peterson. In it, Brand said the following: “the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is certainty.”

This stopped me well and truly in my tracks. As you all may have noticed, my understanding of God has been evolving rapidly in recent months, but my understanding that certainty is a dangerous weapon goes back a few years. Perpetually annoyed by the smug condescension of liberal men in particular — women tend to the histrionic which at least is slightly entertaining — back in September 2022 I published two essays called “Liberal men who think they’re gods.”

In the first one, I wrote: 

“We are suffering from a catastrophic curse of certainty. And it turns out, we are certain of all the wrong things.”

I didn’t register the inherent religiosity of this observation at the time— but hearing Brand’s remark (which, he said, he had been recently taught by someone else) was one of those moments in which you can physically feel the truth of something.

He tells Peterson: “to live in the horror of uncertainty, and to live there with grace — a grace that I cannot self-generate - that is the ongoing challenge.”

The opposite of faith is certainty. Of course! When you say it like that, it’s so obvious, so simple. Yet it has taken me almost 50 years to see it. I thought faith was certainty — because I was young, and shallow, and did not see anything to God other than blind obedience to a creature that you could not see or touch.

I wonder what it is like for people who have always believed, deeply and sincerely, in the benign God of Christianity, but for a Johnny-Come-Lately like myself, it was doubt that brought me to faith. Doubt in everything that I had once considered real. Doubt in my own ability to steer my life away from the rocks. The kind of doubt you experience when everything you had previously thought turns out to be wrong. When your life fills up with doubt, like water rising in a flood, you realise that the only possible recourse is to accept and learn to swim as gracefully as you can in the not knowing, and that is faith. To me, anyway.

Actually, there is another recourse when you are swimming in a crisis of doubt — and that is to double down on certainty. But of course, that is an illusion. You cling to the rock of what you think you know, but that is probably what got you smashed up on those rocks in the first place. Certainty can lead you astray.

To give the most mundane of examples: in the last 7 years I have spent a huge amount of time driving my son hither and yon to football matches. When I got a notification that the match was at some obscure, out-of-the-way pitch I would have a moment of thinking — “I should look that up,” followed by “Nah, I know where that is.” Almost invariably I was wrong. I would find out when it was too late, on some winding country road where everyone was doing 60, and have to perform some kind of hair-raising manoeuvre to get off the wrong path so I could pull over and look to see where I should be going. 

“Ah!” I would say to myself. “I thought I knew, but I was wrong.”

We live in an age that is, to quote the immortal words of Benjamin Boyce, the gayest of times, and the fakest of times. This is because we are all told — from the cradle to the grave — that if we are liberal and believe the science, that makes us so smart. And being so smart, we do not practice discernment or stoicism. We don’t need to! We are smart! We don’t need to listen to that small voice of doubt, telling us that what we are about to do is fake or gay, because we are liberal, therefore we are smart! ¹

Of course, liberals are also wracked with doubt and anxiety, but they tend to misinterpret it as further proof that their worldview is correct, it’s just that other people are not doing it right. 

Who could possibly have predicted that underpants-prancing Russell Brand would turn out to be a conduit for clarity in the cacophony of a civilisation in chaos?

The entire hour and a half long Brand- Peterson interview is truly worth listening to. Brand’s torrent of complex discursive thoughts call to mind a half-mad prophet returning to society after years wandering in the desert. A once Byronic hedonist, Brand now presents as a holy man who cannot be contained as he is channelling insights into the human-divine connection.

What a time to be alive!

1. Benjamin Boyce is not the originator or sole user of the phrase “everything is fake and gay,” it’s something of a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fake-and-gay]. He’s just uses it to great effect. Also for those who are not chronically online and may not pick up on the sly humour of the phrase, when I say there is a small voice inside us telling us what we are about to do might be gay, it doesn’t really mean homosexual, it means uncool or lame. Like my explanation.