Screenshot from X / @rustyrockets
Newly baptized actor and podcaster Russell Brand posted a video Friday (May 17) about taking holy communion for the first time. In it, the 48-year-old discussed rituals in a society based on rationalism and quoted late theologian Timothy Keller.
“I took my first holy communion. That means I drank the blood of Christ and ate the body of Christ,” Brand began his video, which had almost 100,000 views by midday. In the caption, he wrote, “(Oh yeah that stuff round my gob ain’t Our Lord’s blood. Just protein shake!!!).”
“How do you make sense of participation in a ritual like that, when you are familiar only with rationalism and materialism and logic?” Brand asked viewers. “How do you deal with the intersection of the supernatural and the material and the rational? How do you deal with the idea that there is a spiritual dimension that we can interact with and indeed commune with?”
I did my FIRST HOLY COMMUNION AND… (Oh yeah that stuff round my gob ain’t Our Lord’s blood. Just protein shake!!!) pic.twitter.com/hCg3efPzV4
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) May 17, 2024
Russell Brand References Timothy Keller on Faith
Russell Brand, who got baptized last month in the River Thames, explored the contrasts between spirituality and secularism. Believing in an “ever-present” Christ figure these days seems “almost ludicrous and ridiculous,” he said, “particularly when there are countermeasures continually in place to tell you that only the rational and material world makes sense.”
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When a society based on rationalism “precludes a belief in the supernatural and [favors] the political over the religious,” Brand said, we end up excluding “so many things that are actually, I believe, impossible to live without.”
Then the actor referenced Keller’s mention of a joke about a drunk man searching for his car keys under a streetlamp. When a passerby asked, “Is that where you dropped them?” the man replied, “No, I dropped them over there, by them bushes, but the light’s much better here.”
“Timothy Keller points out that using the modes of the sense and the modalities of the sciences, we cannot search that which is ethereal, by its very nature,” Brand explained. “The idea that the material world can answer all of our questions seems increasingly preposterous, just on a practical level as the world falls apart.”
Jesus Was a ‘Great Rebel,’ Says Russell Brand
For him, Russell Brand said, becoming a Christian is a political act but isn’t about joining a conservative institution where you leave things as they are. “I have become a Christian because I have surrendered to a figure that was a great radical and a great rebel,” he said. “[Who] believed that God’s kingdom would come to earth—that indeed it did come to earth—in his figure.”
Becoming a Christian has provided a “glorious new education,” Brand concluded. And despite his “enthusiasm,” he’s approaching the faith journey “with great trepidation and vulnerability because it is very, very new to me. But a new power has come to me. A new glory seems accessible to me.”