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May 20, 2024 - Conspirituality
05:14
Bonus Sample: Russell Brand Is Christian Now?

Russell Brand has accepted Jesus into his heart and been baptized in the spirit. But does his conversion to Christianity make sense along the New Age rebel to right-wing, conspiracy-theorist radicalization pipeline? Is Brand seeking absolution for his sins, or recognizing that most of his audience are Christians “oppressed” by authoritarian libs?  Julian explores how the “enlightened outsider” uses pseudoscience to justify spiritual beliefs that are actually connective tissue between conspiracism, New Age metaphysics, and faux Christian victimhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This Sunday, I'm taking the plunge.
I'm getting baptized.
An opportunity to leave the past behind and be reborn in Christ's name like it says in Galatians.
I know a lot of people are sort of cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God, but to me it's obvious.
As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure We've all known all of our lives within us and around us.
For me, it's very exciting.
So there you have it.
Russell Brand has accepted Jesus into his heart.
He's been baptized in the Spirit.
How shall we make sense of Russell Brand's arc from foul-mouthed comedian to addict-in-recovery yogi and purveyor of New Age spirituality to becoming a wild conspiracy theorist trending further and further right-wing and now converting to Christianity?
That's what we'll discuss today.
How do we know what's true?
I'm asking because one thing conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs have in common, it seems to me, is that they answer that question by ignoring or distorting Evidence.
Bear with me on that.
So on that premise we could say it's no mistake, perhaps, that we find Russell Brand, whose descent into outlandish tabloid conspiracism we have covered here in depth, you can just search that if you're interested, deciding at the age of 48 that Christian baptism is the next logical step in his very public spiritual life.
Still, we may wonder how the ladder of rebellious hedonism to outsider spirituality to florid conspiracism leads, in his case, to being baptized as a Christian.
Now, of course, we can't overlook the proximity of his public conversion to a string of rape and abuse allegations catalogued in a Channel 4 documentary and accompanying investigative news articles last year.
There's also this reality that as Brand has transitioned into being a full-time conspiracy theory content creator, his political sympathies have trended to the right.
Now, evidence of this includes that he's created media with Tucker Carlson And Alex Jones.
Extensive, long-form media.
And both of these guys came to his defense when the scandal broke, saying that he was of course being targeted because he's telling the truths that the liberal media want to keep hidden.
The right-leaning conspiracy crowd consuming Brand's content tend to be culturally Christian in stark contrast to Russell's eclectic modern hippie new age seeker archetype that we had grown familiar with.
How thrilling it must be for them that now his left-to-right conversion includes going from being a pagan or a heathen To being a Christian.
For Brand, I imagine there's also some kind of calculation that has to have happened along the way.
Like, how did he measure Alex Jones' history of appalling Sandy Hook conspiracy mongering, for which he's now been legally Punished, uh, in financially exorbitant ways.
As well as Tucker Carlson's fetish, not only for Trump but also for Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin.
How did he measure that against the new audience that he saw himself being exposed to by forming those alliances?
Only he can know how he did that calculation.
In any event, right-wing pundits were well pleased by Russell's baptism.
As an example, here's The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles.
You know, he's the guy who told CPAC last year that we need to eradicate transgenderism.
Michael Knowles also believes that gay marriage undermines society and the nuclear family.
And he's even called the medieval Christian crusades, and then the later European colonization of the Global South, justified and noble.
Russell Brand just put out a video just a few hours ago, I think.
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