I Read Russell Brand's New Christian Book So You Don't Have To

Russell Brand’s Book and the Question of a True Awakening

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, where we are forging a bold Christian vision for America. I'm your host, John Harris. We are going to talk today about Russell Brand's book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days.

It's hot off the press. It is trending on Amazon. We would not be talking about it if it was just Russell Brand's opinion, but it has a much wider, broader, and deeper meaning, and that's the reason I want to talk about it on the podcast.

I have been wondering for years whether or not we are in a spiritual awakening, and I've said so many times that I am cautiously optimistic. There is a renewed interest in the things of God and spirituality.

There's also a lot of error out there, and given the metrics that we're able to study, it does not appear that we are in an awakening, at least yet. When we start seeing a lot more people signing up for ministry positions, the church's membership busting, the people evangelizing, the understandings that people have in their relationship to God's law and to sin changing in extraordinary ways, these are the kind of metrics I'm looking at, and I'm not seeing that we're in something like that quite yet.

But there's a lot of interest in the things of God, especially post-Charlie Kirk's funeral. I've really wanted to be optimistic about this, but unfortunately, I become more and more cautious in my optimism.

I'm still optimistic, but I have a lot of caution there, and that caution is rooted in things like the message in Russell Brand's book. There's some truth in it, but there's also cults that can give you truth.

There's a lot of, unfortunately, bad things in it, lies in it, obfuscations of the truth, things that will lead you down the wrong path if you're not careful, and so I want to talk about those things.

Tucker Carlson, Censorship, and the Great Awakening Narrative

Now, it's also broader from this standpoint. This is the first book that is launched by the Tucker Carlson Network's bookstore, and Tucker Carlson is very proud of this fact. I want to read for you a transcript from an advertisement that he read on a video that was pushed on social media, and he says, For decades, Russell Brand was one of the most famous actors and comedians and agnostics in the world.

Today, he's one of the most sincere Christians we know, a follower of Christ. His personal transformation, we saw it up close. He's now recounted it in an amazing book called How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, and it recounts what happened to him, and it makes the cause, sorry, the case to all of us for stepping away from our secular assumptions and returning to the only thing that matters, which is God.

Then he tells you where you can find it. Now one of the other things I found interesting is he also says this. He says, We created Tucker Carlson books to bypass the censors and to bring you things that are actually worth reading and sharing, and we're starting this venture with what matters most, and that's Russell Brand's message of the promise of forgiveness and joy through Jesus.

Now, listen to what he's saying there for a moment. He's saying that there's lies, there's suppression of the truth, there's censorship, and we're going to break through all that stuff, and part of breaking through all that stuff is what Russell Brand's trying to tell you.

He's trying to tell you about salvation in Christ, coming to faith in Christ. This is something that, quote-unquote, they, the censors, don't want you to know about, so we want you to know about it. That sounds all well and good, but post -2020, there's been a lot of red pills.

There's been a lot of things that you're supposed to realize, a lot of things the censors, quote-unquote, don't want you to know about. Some of them are true, some of them are false, and if the purpose of Tucker Carlson books—we don't know at this point what other books he's going to be publishing—is to break through the censors to give you the truth, then I think it is appropriate to have a message that certainly the world doesn't really want you to hear.

At the same time, though, what I've wondered is whether or not the messages we're hearing now about spirituality are largely driven by this hunger to push against the elites, the censors, the institutions that control, whether or not they've just been lying to.

You.

And so the motive here is whatever they don't want you to hear, well, that must be the truth, which is not quite a correct assumption. You might be right many times if you assume that, but you're not always going to be right.

Tucker Carlson’s Great Awakening Clip and the Missing Gospel

And there's a clip from last year's Heritage Action Conference, which is put on by the Heritage Foundation, where Tucker Carlson is answering a question, and the question is about the First Great Awakening.

The question is about George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, what they did, okay? And they were bringing people to faith in Christ by telling them the message of salvation, that you're a sinner, that you are actually damned, you're on your way to hell, and if you do not repent of your sin and put your trust in Jesus Christ, you will be punished.

But if you do put your trust in Jesus Christ for salvation from your sin, you will escape the punishment of God, and you will have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you, and the Holy Spirit will help you to empower you to live the life of a Christian.

Now, this is a message that transformed our country. Of course, there were counterfeit, revivalistic-style things that happened during that time. I think the devil often does that kind of thing during a true revival, a true move of.

God.

But overall, the First Great Awakening had a tremendously positive impact, and Christians recognize it as this, outside of even America, that this was a great move of God. Now, Tucker Carlson has asked a question about that.

Hey, are we in something like that? Is something like that on the horizon? And I want you to hear Tucker's answer. This is a little long, but it sets the stage for why we're talking about Russell Brand's.

Book.

Why Tucker might be interested in Russell Brand's book, and whether or not Russell Brand, who thinks that he is part of this awakening, that his conversion is part of this renewed sense of spirituality, whether or not this is a true spirituality or a false spirituality.

Check this out.

The revolution of 1776 was either at the same time, or preamble to, or followed the Great Awakening in America. Is there an opportunity for a new Great Awakening, for a spiritual revival, like that guy who healed that man who lost his ear?

I mean, we are in the middle of it. We are just in the middle of it. And I am like the last person to ask on this subject, because I'm just from such a, what's the phrase you use, different religious tradition.

So I'm like not an expert on this stuff, but I just see it all around me everywhere. It's unbelievable. The one thing that, as I said in my remarks, that we never talked about in my family or the culture I grew up in was religious faith or spirituality.

I mean, that was like, we have religious cousins in Texas, and we would always make fun of.

Them.

They all turned out to be like happy and prosperous and long married, and now I'm spending Easter with them this year. But like, I just didn't grow up around that. And so now I find every single day, someone will come up to me and start telling me about God, sometimes in like halting, you know, in the way that people who haven't grown up talking about God talk, well, I guess like me, you know, in this sort of slightly awkward, stilted way, they're trying to explain something, whereas an evangelicalist will come up and like fluently tell you what you're, you know what I mean, oh, that's Ephesians 9.

But what I'm saying is people who didn't grow up with it, who haven't spent their lives thinking about God are all around me, it's insane, are clearly responding to something they're hearing inside. And the last thing I will say is that that is the divide.

It really is. That is the divide. You were wondering like, what happened during COVID when totally reasonable people became like filled with hate and angry, and then some people became like braver and bigger and kinder and less about themselves and more about other people and just sort of glowed with this holy joy.

I'm sure you saw that. We all saw that. It was the dividing line. It was like no one was in the middle. And that has not decelerated, it's accelerated, not because of COVID or any political issue, even because of Trump.

It's just this great divide is going on. You can feel it. When I was literally pulling out this morning, this is so dorky in my golf cart because I'm in Florida, and I raised the guy who's trimming the trees, and he stops me, he's like, oh, man, I've been wanting to talk to you, and I've been reading the Bible, it's like a random guy.

And my father just died, and he's like, I heard your father died, I'm so sorry. All of a sudden, I was like, oh, I was so emotional, like I had this like wild connection with this like crazed landscaper from Wisconsin.

And anyway, I'm not exactly sure what I'm saying, other than that happens to me every single day. And that's never happened to me for the first 53 years of my life, like what is going on? And so maybe the last great awakening was, you know, famously symbolized by the tent revival.

I think that's not happening now. Maybe it's the X revival. You know, I don't know, like, it's a cliche, but it's true, God works in ways that we don't anticipate and that we don't recognize at first.

But we know that something really wild that we're not creating is happening. And I definitely, definitely see it every single day.

Now listen to what you're hearing in that clip. You're hearing Tucker Carlson articulate a position that we are currently in a great awakening style revival. And what's his reason for it? Well, I have people coming to me, they're telling me about things.

Did you hear the gospel? It's articulated in that. Is it about repentance? Is it where sin, where's the punishment and wrath of God and escaping that? Do you hear any of that? Or is it just, hey, there's an uptick in spiritual interest right now.

And is that related to directly what happened during 2020? And in fact, it is. It's related to COVID. It's related to those who are on one side who are pushing what happened in 2020 and those who are on another side who are against what was being pushed in 2020.

That's the fault line. That's the fracture line in Tucker Carlson's mind that connects to whether or not there's a spiritual awakening. Now, I want to ask you as an Orthodox believer in Jesus Christ who believes the Bible, is that the dividing line of humanity for those who are in Christ and those who are outside of Christ, those who are children of God, those who are children of the devil, those who are sheep, those who are goats, is there a dividing line that says, well, we can identify the same dividing line according to a sociopolitical perspective.

Now, you may say, look, born-again Bible-believing Christians are going to be more likely to take conservative views because of their religion, because it dovetails. It actually inspires the conservative views that we find in our political spectrum.

And they are less likely to trust the government because of instincts that have been born and bred into conservative Christians for centuries related to the depravity of man and not trusting man with power.

I mean, you can look at all those sociological things and say, look, there's going to be overlap. But to say that is the dividing line, to say that is the spiritual awakening, to identify people who are suspicious of COVID and might have some kind of perspective of spiritual faith in God, but there really isn't even an articulated gospel, to say that must be it, that's the dividing line, well, that's pretty vague, and that's on the best day.

I'd say there's actually something more dangerous to that, because you might think that you are following God. You might think that you're in Christ. You might think you're on the right spiritual track, simply because you're just not believing what the elites quote-unquote are telling you, and you're going the opposite direction in your mind, or according to the new podcast you follow, or you didn't get the vaccine, and so this puts you in good spiritual standing or something like that.

None of those things are true. The truth is that we are divided between those who are sinners and those who are redeemed, those who are in Christ, those who aren't. And if you are in Christ, you are a sinner, but you're a sinner who's been forgiven through the faith that you have in Jesus Christ, which is only by his grace.

So it is repentance, it is faith, it is a humility that you have before Jesus to say, I need you to forgive me, because I cannot please God. Nothing can please God in me, even my righteous deeds. I come to you with empty pockets, I have nothing to offer, I cast myself on the mercy of God.

It's that heart posture, and it's the awakening that God does within you as a spiritual being who is dead in your trespasses and sins, as Ephesians says, and you are now made alive in Christ. Christ is now, he's taken your place, he's taken the wrath of God for you, he did that on the cross, he did that through his death burial, and then he was resurrected, proving his promises to be true, and he transferred to you the life that he lived, which was perfect.

So on your account, you are credited with Christ's righteousness. When God looks at you, he doesn't see your sin, he doesn't take that into account, he takes the righteousness of Christ into account. That's what conversion is.

And after that process takes place, which is instantaneous, not going to take seven days, like Russell Brand seems to indicate in his title, you are now a follower of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit empowers you to live the Christian life, to be more and more and more like Jesus Christ every single day.

It's called sanctification. Now Russell Brand, I think, has a very different understanding of all of this. And those who don't have a theological understanding, they haven't read the Bible, and thankfully Russell Brand says you should read the Bible, which is a really good thing he does, by the.

Way.

He says, look, if this is keeping you from the Bible, go read the Bible. I think that's an excellent thing he does say. But if you don't read the Bible, if you don't understand the Bible, and you just read Russell Brand, you are going to walk away with some bad, flawed assumptions about everything that I just said.

And so that's what we're going to jump into. That's why I think this is important. Russell Brand frames his conversion experience as part of this global Great Awakening. And if that's true, we may be in trouble, if that's representative.

So I published all of this, if you're more of a reader, at my Substack from the desk of John Harris. You can go to johnharris .substack .com or go to the link in the info section of this video. And I'll skip through some things and add some things here and there.

Why the Book’s Style, Profanity, and Structure Raise Suspicions

But one of the things that I think is important, perhaps, for me to mention off the top, is that Tucker Carlson doesn't even mention this in his advertisement. There's a subtitle to the book. It's How to Become a Christian in Seven Days May Take 50 Years of Sin and Serious F-Ups to Get Started.

Now, this is one of the things that I have a problem with. There is a lot of profanity in this book. In fact, hell does not come up except as a cuss word in the book. You might think a book about becoming a Christian is going to mention hell in some way, because hell shows you the character of God, that his wrath and his justice are so great that he can't turn a blind eye to sin.

He's got to punish it. And that gives you a sense of why you need forgiveness. Hell doesn't come up. The term hell is only used in this book as it relates to cussing. And it's not the only word that is used that is profane in the book.

Now, if this is someone who's regenerated in Christ, that's not something that you would.

Expect.

They're going to try to stay away from salty language, and especially language that makes the wrath and justice of God into—it minimizes it, makes it into a simple phrase or saying. That's something that they're going to want to stay away from, you would think, at least.

Especially if they're being thoughtful and they're trying to persuade people. Now, I understand, look, everyone who comes to Christ, your language doesn't immediately clean up. There's people who are Christians who are still sometimes using language probably they shouldn't use.

I think it's important to maintain standards. I think we have to be careful of the language we use. I think coarse jesting is a sin. But at the same time, if you're literally putting the F word in your subtitle for your book and you're only bringing up hell as it relates to being a cuss word, that should arouse your suspicions.

They should at least be a yellow flag that this person's saying they're leading me to Christ. Is this the kind of language Christ uses? How does Christ think about hell? Christ doesn't. Christ takes it very seriously.

So just FYI, now, I say that Russell Brand himself sees his conversion, like I said before, as part of this global awakening. I do have a hope that God can use the article that I'm presenting to you, but also use Russell Brand's book.

There might be people who read it, and the truth that is in it is something that they hear, it lands well, and the Lord uses it. That can happen. But it can also lead you astray. So I want to give you the basic themes in his book.

First of all, I put these under subtitles. So I have Escaping the Matrix, The Great Awakening, and Sin and Evil in the Gospel and Salvation. So these are the categories we're going to be looking at. But I start off by just giving you a general feel for the book.

I could never recommend this book, guys. It's not well written. It is all over the place. It reads like a chaotic stream of consciousness that makes it difficult to follow. If it were a video, it would be a series of shorts, not a comprehensive movie.

Brand jumps from various thinkers like Carl Jung and Rick Warren to Alcoholic Anonymous's 12-step program, to the creation account in Genesis, to the climax over his son's heart condition, to indicting the elites, to a repetitious and consuming defense of his innocence over charges related to rape and assault.

So this is one of the things that annoyed me. In the book, randomly, out of nowhere, after telling us multiple times that he's innocent and people are going after him for things that he didn't really do, he just inserts it over and over and over again and impugns the motives of the people that are accusing him and charging him with these egregious acts.

Now, I'm not going to weigh in on whether these, on the charges, right? Let's just give him the benefit of the doubt here. At the same time, it consumes the book. It just is all over the place in the book.

And there's one portion of the book that I made a note, actually, I'll read you my note. I said, this sounds like a drug hatch stupor. That's so, I sometimes will talk to myself by making little notes in a book, let me, and this was all over the place.

Let me just read for you. This is one paragraph from the book, just to give you an idea of the language in this.

Book.

We have created a type of consciousness and consciousness, it's not even pollutes, it's pollulates, pollulates, okay. With archetype and myth, time itself is flexing and fluxing under the weight of conscious and unconscious attention.

When you consider that neither time nor attention can be reliably measured, we must hear, except that we are in a new realm. Indeed, Charlie Kirk and Erica Kirk have probably accrued in a year, an epistemological freight bought in typed bytes that Jack Kennedy and Jackie O acquired in heavy tomes and Hearst's spilled ink in over half a century, all oozing forth in an online instance.

We see how she quakes under its unholy weight. Now, do you know what that is talking about? If you sat down and you really, really took the time to try to understand what he's saying, maybe you could arrive at an answer.

In fact, what would my answer even be for this? What he's trying to say is we have created a mindset that is false, okay, and it's really draining people, this mindset. I mean, the way that he talks, though, in the book, it is so stream of consciousness.

The word choice, the examples, the squirrel, we're going to go over here for a time and then come back to my point, it is just all over the place, very hard to follow. So I read the book so you don't have to.

I'll put it that way. I read it so you don't have to because it is a little difficult. Now, Brand tells us what his purpose in writing the book is. He says that he writes it to lead people to Jesus, to offer his testimony, and to do so by distilling Alcoholic Anonymous' Twelve Steps into a seven-day program with exercises and questions.

So that's why he says he's writing it. The book also continually veers into how global elites are controlling us and Jesus helps us escape their trap. So he calls the place of their influence the world.

Now, this is kind of key because if the world, as described by 1 John, right, the lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, the boastful pride of life, if that is the global elites and what they're trying to push down on you, it's a top-down thing where they're imprisoning you with their mindset, we are technically talking about different things, but Russell Brand seems to equate these two things.

And this becomes, I think, a big part of the book, is top-down what the elites are trying to impose upon you that isn't really part of your authentic self, the self that, if I were to map out what Russell Brand thinks of anthropology, there would be like your deep authentic self, which seems to have a spark of good in it, and then there would be sort of your outer self, which is sinful, and then there's your actions, which are not sin in and of themselves, they're just expressions of this sort of deceptive outer self that you have, which is partially, perhaps the majority of it, impressed upon you, given to you by elites.

That's the impression I walked away with. But his intentions, his stated intentions, seem good, right? But we have to get into what he's actually saying. Brand wants people to reject the world, which he perceives to be a trick, a distraction, a scam, controlled by the devil, page 16.

He is technically right about this. The world system described in 1 John includes the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, boastful pride of life, 1 John 2 -16. These things obviously deceive people into living for themselves.

They are blinded by the God of the sage, according to 2 Corinthians 4 -4, and they need spiritual understanding, for a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, according to 1 Corinthians 2 -14.

However, it is very interesting that in Brand's conception of the evils of the world and its binding influence, he indicates elites are somehow in control. He states in the same paragraph, where he is describing the dangers of the world, how the world's most powerful elites benefit from crisis that punish the common people.

This is different from a biblical understanding of the evils of the world, in which everyone outside of the Christ is blinded by their own sin and the mechanisms that reinforce its grip. If the world represents economic or cultural oppression, but not sin, he is not talking about the same things scripture talks about.

So the conflation between authoritarianism, as represented by guys like Steve Jobs apparently, and demonic movements is a persistent problem in the book because it fails to separate between spiritual salvation and political liberation.

Political Liberation, Liberation Theology, and the First Great Awakening

This conflation runs through Brand's treatment of sin and revival as well. I want to say this. I studied social justice pretty deeply, and that was the problem with liberation theology. Liberation theology is all about political liberation, but it masks itself as a spiritual liberation.

It says that what it's doing is actually the same thing Jesus was doing. It's doing what the Bible says we should do, but it's a political liberation against the.

Elites.

It's against those who have promoted by those who have not. It's those who are in economically advantageous positions that become the substitutes for universal evil. Everything really traces back to them, their lies, their control, the things that they're been doing to benefit themselves.

And one of the things that I think we need to say regarding the first great awakening and what's happening now, since now they're so often compared, Glenn Beck's actually been doing this for years. We need an American revival, just like the first great awakening.

Well, you're a Mormon. What do you mean? Well, what they are talking about, they meaning people like Tucker Carlson, people like Glenn Beck in different ways, people like Russell Brand, people like, frankly, and I mentioned this at the beginning, people like Alexander Dugan.

He literally wrote a book and I read it at the time in 2021 called The Great Awakening. I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast. Yes, I've read Dugan and I've read him because I want to understand what he was saying.

I kept being told that his influence was within right wing circles. I didn't see a lot of it. I saw what potentially could have been some of it. Now I'm seeing a lot more of his ideas, but I read that at the time in 2021 and I thought, well, this has some major problems because in Dugan's great awakening, you have different religions that accompany different national identities and he doesn't want to mess with those things.

He thinks Russia should be Orthodox, China should be Buddhist, Iran should be Muslim, that kind of thing. These are particular truths for particular regions and if there's a universal truth, it's nationalism versus globalism.

Now in reality, what Dugan's doing is, I think, he is trying to bind together a global resistance against the West. He wants Russia, Iran, China, et cetera, to be in a powerful position to resist the forces of the European Union and he sees America as kind of up for grabs.

As America's kind of back and forth on as to whether they're going to be with Europe or whether they can join in a resistance effort against the forces of globalism. Now this isn't about Dugan though, I just wanted to let you know that Dugan also uses the same language, that there's this great awakening happening.

You have the great reset versus the great awakening, that's the title of his book. Now all of these figures who are political, sociopolitical, if you will, when they talk about the great awakening, they're talking about social and political things that translate into spiritual things.

The first great awakening, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, that was different. John Wesley, that was spiritual things translating into sociopolitical things. Okay, what do you mean by that, John?

Well, there's a lot of historians that say the first great awakening led to the American Revolution or at least the American Revolution could not have happened without the conditions that the first great awakening allowed to take place.

Was that intentional?

No.

That was simply just preaching the gospel, people were saved. People came to, in the colonies, an understanding that they were Christians and this helped bind the colonies together. They gave them a moral posture.

This was helpful in also the resistance against what they thought was happening in Canada. This was one of actually the reasons that we even had an American Revolution was they felt, they thought, they feared that Canadians were going to have an official Catholic church and they didn't want that.

They didn't want that on their border. They were Protestants, freshly suspicious of Rome. Well, the first great awakening set the spiritual tone for what came later. It was a spiritual movement though.

It had sociopolitical ramifications, it had fruits that made their way into society. In fact, one of the things that just came to my head because in reading Thomas Kidd's book about all this, one of the things George Whitefield tried to impart to those who held slaves is you need to catechize, you need to teach the gospel to your slaves.

You can't just neglect that duty and you shouldn't abuse them. These were the kinds of social things that were changing as the result of a spiritual movement. This is not that, as far as I can tell. I am hopeful that there will be spiritual things, spiritual conversions, fruit that does come out of this that is spiritual post -2020.

People that saw there's real evil, I need to be close to God and they do in fact find God because God's drawing them. At the same time, there is, I think, a concerted motivation here that the sociopolitical move against whatever it is, vaccines, government control, the APAC now, the medical community, Turning Point USA, whatever it is that people are wanting to quote unquote red pill others to, that this is the prime factor, the prime motivator that is going to lead to spiritual.

Fruit.

It doesn't work that way. That's not an awakening. That's not a revival. It starts spiritually and then works itself out. It's always been that way. There's nothing wrong with cultural Christianity, okay?

There really isn't anything wrong with people who behave in Christian ways outwardly who are not Christians. In fact, we want that, but we would much prefer people to actually become Christians and without actual Christians, you don't have the cultural Christianity either.

You need that core. All that to say, getting back to Russell Brand here, this conflation between a spiritual awakening and what's happening politically is frankly dangerous because you have to ensure that people understand spiritually what their duties, responsibilities, and condition is.

If they don't understand that, if they just think, well, I am dodging the COVID stuff and I'm dodging government coercion here and I'm not believing the narrative, then I am.

Good.

I'm good to go, I guess. I'm spiritually superior. I have some kind of spiritual level that I've attained. No, you haven't actually. Brand sees the world as on the cusp of a great revival, which he equates with the quickening, the reckoning, the awakening.

Brand says his own conversion is part of this global revival. It's on page 13 of the book. In order to escape the elite's plans, we need to understand the spiritual realm, which Brand presents as a mysterious, secretive, and hidden thing.

For Brand, the Bible contains the secrets of the universe. We must remystify Jesus. He presents God in unorthodox ways, such as saying he was in wave form when he created.

Light.

He is the divine energy and quotes a Tony Robbins prayer that refers to God as the divine mother. Now, some of you are already out. You're just like, that's it, and I don't blame you one bit. I'm out too, actually.

I saw that and I was like, this is wrong. God's a person. He's not a force. This is, at best, someone who hopefully is saved being very inarticulate and ignorant, and that is the best hope that I can give for this kind of careless language.

Faith, New Age Language, and a Distorted View of Sin

To catch a peek behind the spiritual curtain, Brand sees faith as necessary. He states that faith is an entry point into another reality. It is ontological alchemy. He goes on to describe how we can all achieve what he sought through drugs in the New Age and enter into a spiritual condition through faith in Christ.

In contrast, Scripture refers to faith in more concrete terms, like assurance and conviction. That's in Hebrews 11, right? Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things hoped for, the assurance of things not seen.

Or rather, I got that backwards, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things.

Unseen.

It is not so much about unlocking a euphoric spiritual dimension as it is clearly understanding the truth about God and depending on Him as a result. Faith allows believers to see divine purpose and is the mechanism by which they are saved by grace apart from works, Ephesians 2.

Brand appeals to mystic Emmett Fox's teachings on the Sermon on the Mount, which reveals its coded methodology wherein we are taught how to become a living, breathing extension of Christ and of God. So Emmett Fox is not a Christian.

He is a mystic, and he is telling you his own interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, and that's what Russell Brand, unfortunately, is believing is true. Now, if you had someone come to you and they said, hey, you know what being born again is like?

You know what being a Christian is like? It's like that drug trip. You'd be like, um, why don't you flesh that out for me?

Okay.

Like I understand, do not be drunk with wine, be filled with the Spirit. There is an element of control the Spirit has on you, and you can compare that to other things that would control you and say that that's, but are you saying that what you're seeking in a drug trip, a euphoric experience of some kind, like that's, like, what are you saying exactly?

Right?

Uh, if now, if he just said this in an interview, I probably wouldn't have thought it was a big deal, but he's saying this in a book that is supposed to be edited and fine tuned to help people understand what a relationship with Jesus is like and how to come into that relationship and to say, well, it's just like this drug trip that I used to have.

That's what I was really seeking in those drug trips was I was a, I was seeking a faith in Christ and that this is a, uh, it's becoming a leading, living, breathing extension of Christ and of God, living, breathing extension of Christ and of God.

Again, I can come up with ways in which, okay, if I define that according to you're the hands and feet of Jesus, because you're doing his will, the good works that he's prepared for.

You.

Okay.

Okay.

You're using figurative language. I got it. But if you really think that you are the living, breathing extension of Christ, some kind of consciousness, Christ consciousness, which I think is a term he also uses in the book.