Holy rolling with Vance and Brand
Two terrible Jesus journeys
“How did you spend the first sweaty week of July, David?” you ask. And my reply? Reading the books of two men, Russ and JD, recently spiritually reborn, who have ended up sharing a religious creed at what seems to be a fashionable moment on the New Right. Over those seven days I read the whole of Vance’s book and did my best to read all of Brand’s. People have been decorated for less.
Perhaps if they’d swapped pasts: Vance the recovering (or perhaps, more to the point, ageing) sex addict would have been more fun than Vance the Veep, carefully rolling the pitch for his run at the top job. Though I’m not sure anything could redeem Brand in my eyes.
So the books are:
Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is published by HarperCollins and promises “an intimate account of why Vice President JD Vance strayed from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to faith.”
And…
How to Become a Christian in 7 Days is the product of that new imprint, Tucker Carlson Books, which describes it as “best-selling author Russell Brand’s testimony and guide to a timeless, yet zeitgeist-capturing, grounded, yet psychedelic encounter with Christ.”
The authors are very different. Brand is the simpler man – a straightforwardly narcissistic monster, who now identifies with Jesus and, believing in himself, believes in Christ. I think he may be months away from declaring that he is the Messiah and a few years away from re-enacting Jonestown or Waco. The more complicated Vance had a famously terrible and chaotic childhood, from which he is attempting to retrieve something good while seeking new structure and authority to soothe his feeling of precariousness. He is months away from declaring himself fit to be Caesar.
There are some basic similarities in their books, since both purport to describe journeys into faith – specifically the Christian faith. The arcs are similar. The ever-presents of modern Christian apologetics are there: G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis, doing the usual things: explaining the need for the leap of faith, rationalising suffering and so on. There are sometimes lengthy Biblical quotations in both. Vance and Brand also have heroes or friends in common: Charlie Kirk was JD’s bestie and Brand’s inspiration; RFK Jr gets an obliging look-in from Vance and an adoring acknowledgement from Brand.
Both men see their fallenness as essentially the fault of others – having been pushed into error by social pressures and expectations – and their redemption as mostly their own work. Both may have purposes beyond their stated objectives. Brand’s is to try to persuade the reader that he is not guilty of the rapes for which he is due to stand trial in the UK; Vance’s is to demonstrate that he represents an ethic that makes him a good MAGA-era Republican candidate but which subtly distances him from the entirely un-Christian and now electorally unpopular Trump.
Jesus comes to Russell
“In September 2023 Satan’s Blitzkrieg came to my doorstep,” writes Brand. His latest child was ill and The Sunday Timesand Channel 4 published allegations of rape and sexual assault against him. In that prolix adversity he found Jesus:
…as the idol cracked open, as the serpent burst forth… as the paparazzi gathered like locusts at the end of the lane… and the faces of longtime friends melted into bland and empty stares, as the snares snapped shut, in the twisting of the gut, the portcullis fell and the long-awaited dread arrived, as the final hope that this world could ever deliver died, there He was.
Hallelujah. Jesus having arrived in the nick of time, Brand noisily baptised himself in the Thames the following April, then uprooted his family from the UK – “that most disunited and fallen kingdom” – and fled to Trump’s America, where foreigners seem not to be welcome unless they are charged with serious sexual offences.
I am creating a more coherent timeline here than Brand offers the reader. Theoretically, his book is split into seven chaptered days, which I think are supposed to parallel the steps taken in the Alcoholics Anonymous programme, but which, in Brand’s hands, become a jumble in which anything could appear pretty much anywhere else in the book without anyone noticing. Statements to the effect that Jesus is everything and you must surrender yourself to him pepper the text almost at random.
Running through all this are Brand’s two standard autobiographical themes: sex and addiction. And one new one: QAnon-style conspiracism. Brand insists that Satan is among us and takes the secretly organised form of anything he doesn’t like, from vaccinations and the World Economic Forum to people accusing him of rape.
Meanwhile, “your life is broken,” he informs his readers, “and you are broken”. And, he implies, the less broken you think you are, the more Satan has you by the short and curlies.
Take sex. “The culture at large,” he tells us at one point, “is unduly fixated on sex. The devil uses sex as a snare.” “Snare” is a favourite word for Brand. But who, in this formulation, is the snarer and who the snaree? When I was a boy my younger brother invented two characters, Mr Eagle and Mr Owl. One or other of them was always to blame if something got broken or eaten or spilled in circumstances suggesting Owen was the culprit. My brother was six. Russell Brand is 51. And if sex is the devil’s work, what is this post-baptismal shirt (below) all about?
There are ten pages about the death of Brand’s dog and the various ways in which this experience connects him with the Lord, even as the reader experiences it as a disconnection from the will to live. But then that kind of reader is probably deeply troubled, Brand proclaiming:
If you are not in Christ, then you may begin to feel deep down, through brokenness or unawareness, you actually worship yourself. We kneel at the altar of perverse self-worship and try to summon from our dead flesh something that is categorially not there.
I think, in this instance, the masturbatory imagery may be unintentional but (forgive me here) even its unconscious use reminds you that much of Brand’s life has been one bad, loveless wank.
The conceit, though, is the same as Vance’s: the author once was lost, but now he’s found. Take his word for it: he’s a better person than he was. Fit to be your cult leader or your president.
JD returns to Jesus
J.D. Vance was baptised into the Catholic Church in August 2019. It was a return to the faith – if not the denomination – of his youth, which was evangelical Protestantism. Vance wanted a Church of Christ that was a bit less unreasonable about evolution than the church of his youth and far more enduring and rooted in ancient traditions, flowing robes, and aesthetically pleasing things such as ancient cathedrals and magnificent music, rather than speaking in tongues and constant appeals for money.
That much is convincing. What isn’t so plausible is Vance’s claim that this return to the faith came after years as a “strident atheist”. Even in college Vance was reading the Narnia books as religious texts, and his non-religious phase seems to have lasted less than a decade, during which, at most, he appears to have been an agnostic.
For example, Vance declares (as they all tend to) that everyone is “searching” for something. But the atheist – strident or passive – isn’t looking for transcendent meaning. I speak as one. A good friend of mine used to talk about a “Christ-space vacuum”, but I don’t have one. An atheist recognises that religion is created by man for social reasons, which is why it differs from place to place and from time to time. Intellectually, an atheist understands that the Christian story is no more “true” than the Mormon story or the Buddhist story. He or she can admire the impulse that built beautiful cathedrals, temples or mosques without feeling obliged to regard their sense of wonder as divinely inspired.
So no, in my book Vance was never an atheist. His “decade of irreligion” was rather a decade of non-attachment to an institution that would tell him how to worship.
In practice, as he tells the story, his irreligion came about because of his post-Marine Corps attachment to a philosophy and an aesthetic belonging to the ultra-free-market Right. He had a desperate desire to succeed in the rat race (a desire otherwise known as the “American Dream”), and the works of Ayn Rand appealed strongly to him. “Her hyper-individualistic, selfish way of understanding achievement over duty dominated the elite mainstream,” he writes, and that was the stream in which Vance wanted to swim. But Rand’s messages – “the celebration of aspirations and achievements, the refusal to accept excuses” – would “reorient my entire life in subtle and ultimately destructive ways”.
Not destructive enough to stop Vance making a highly successful and lucrative career in corporate law and then - operating under the wing of tech billionaire Peter Thiel - in venture capitalism. But increasingly the now wealthy JD felt there was something missing. So, he tells us, “the fruits that I had reaped since discarding my faith were rotten”.
And not rotten enough for him to want to become a Franciscan, donate his worldly goods to charity and wander the world helping the poor, but enough for him to feel there was something missing that active affiliation to a church might help remedy.
Saved
So the Randian JD feels something is missing. But how to find it?
Sometimes life imitates The Archers. In 2008 Ambridge’s vicar, Alan Franks, fell in love with the village’s first Asian, Usha Gupta, and – to some alarm among more conventional parishioners – held both a Christian and a Hindu marriage service. In 2014 Vance married his Harvard sweetheart, Usha Chilukuri, in a ceremony combining Christian and Hindu elements.
And that moment is the first and last mention of his wife’s religion that you will find in Communion. After that it is of no significance. When Vance is accepted into the Catholic Church there seems to be no discussion between the couple about which faith the children will be brought up in. And Vance exhibits no curiosity about other faiths or even demonstrates the capacity to wonder whether, had he been born in India, he might have been a Hindu. No, for, as he puts it, “if you believe Jesus is the son of God and rose from the dead on the third day, you’re on the right track”. On the other hand, presumably, if you believe that everyone is reincarnated over and over until we reach perfection, as Hindus do, then you’re on the wrong one. Just born that way for some strange reason that only God knows.
Anyway, not long after publishing Hillbilly Elegy, Vance returns to his Narnia books, seeks out Christian teachers and starts to prepare for cosmic re-entry, encouraged at every step by his perfect wife Usha, who tells him that going to church seems to do him good.
