This is my beloved Rusty

Russell Brand’s career has gone through some interesting changes over the years, and this is the latest one:

…Cosplaying John the Baptist in his daks. Brand’s high-profile Christian turn has been regarded mostly, and understandably, with suspicion; having been hit with a raft of sexual abuse allegations about a year ago, his big and extremely public adoption of Jesusness (read Matthew 6:5 lately, Russ?) looks like some sort of attempt to deflect from those or something. No one is seriously buying it, and nor should they, although I am interested to discover that it’s not actually a new interest as such; this is him talking about it in 2017:

After an intervention orchestrated by his agent, Brand embraced recovery—not just as a means of getting clean, but as a way of seeing the world. The experience radically changed him, and he’s since become an advocate for what’s known as the 12-step program, an addiction recovery method based largely on Christian principles that is centered on a reliance on a higher power, self-reflection and forgiveness.
The program transformed Brand’s life. And in the years since he discovered it, Brand began to see everything through the lens of the 12 steps. […]
Brand realized that cultivating a spiritual life could help free himself from the strongholds of addictions by treating the root causes of the pain he’d attempted to dull with drugs. And being raised in the U.K.—a traditionally Christian country—he turned to the Christianity. He began implementing spiritual practices every day.
“Because I come from a Christian culture, a lot of the language of prayer that I use is Christian,” he explains. “I say the Lord’s Prayer every day. I try to connect to what those words mean. I connect to what the Father means. I connect to what wholeness means to me. I think about the relationship between forgiveness and being forgiven and the impossibility of redemption until you are willing to forgive and let go.”

This was quite a change for someone who’d been such an advocate of Hare Krishna Consciousness and Transcendental Meditation, and I’m now inclined to think Rusty may actually be perfectly sincere in his beliefs… it’s just the aggressive flaunting of them now, and the fact that he’s only “officially” declared himself a Christian as of a few months ago (when he was baptised by Bear Grylls of all people), that’s suspicious. And the spectacle offered in the photo of him and some other dude baptising a third dude who appears to be fully dressed in what looks like a Starfleet uniform (?)… well, seeing Brand in his undergarments like that is kind of troubling by itself, but the whole thing has more than a whiff of desperation to it. He didn’t need a camera on hand to record that show. I just wonder how far this grift will extend now. Still, hopefully the people in the boat in the second picture enjoyed the performance…