What do Russell Brand, Kanye West and Justin Bieber have in common? They didn’t find Jesus at the height of their power, they found Him in the aftermath, at moments when their public personas were taking a major bruising.
It’s a familiar arc, one worthy of best dramas: scandal, then salvation.
Brand has shifted from “Shagger of The Year”, a title given to him by The Sun, to facing charges of rape and sexual assault, and now a very public conversion to Christianity. His finding of faith is in fact so public he announced his baptism on his YouTube channel in 2024, has written a book about becoming Christian, and attended a court hearing with a Bible in hand.
Brand has denied criminal wrongdoing and is due to stand trial later this year. Watching him on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where he spent an excruciating couple of minutes flicking through the Bible trying to find the exact passage he wanted to read out in court (a highlighter wouldn’t have gone amiss), it’s hard not to notice how insanely far this is from the persona he built his career on – and the one I was familiar with.
This isn’t about judging anyone’s faith – that’s personal – nor to suggest that it is anything but genuine. What’s more interesting is the timing of conversion and what it does. Because we’ve seen versions of this before. Public figures hit moments of intense scrutiny and the response isn’t just an apology, but transformation. Often, that transformation is spiritual.
Justin Bieber was first baptised in 2014 after a very public spiral of drug and alcohol use, an arrest, erratic behaviour and relentless tabloid scrutiny. Ever since he has been a devout Christian, rededicating himself to god in 2020 with another baptism. While headlining Coachella this month he put faith front and centre of his set.Kanye West embraced Christianity in 2019, after a series of public controversies, and was so devoted to it he built an entire identity around it, hosting weekly Sunday Services and releasing a gospel album, Jesus Is King, which hit the top of the charts at the time. While, in West’s case, the controversies did not stop – he has since fallen from grace again after racist and antisemitic statements – in the immediate years following his conversion to Christianity he enjoyed huge public success.
Building a new identity around religion has become a familiar language of reinvention, particularly when faiths offer forgiveness, redemption and the idea of starting again. I’m not immune to the pull of that instinct myself. I’m what you might describe a “cultural Muslim” – I grew up with Islam, it’s part of my identity, but I’m not practising – and even I find myself talking to the big guy upstairs when my life is in the sh*tter.
In public life, religion does something powerful too. It shifts the narrative from someone being judged for their actions to someone seen as changing in real time. Someone learning, growing, becoming. Someone, in other words, on a journey – and audiences love that.
We love the idea that people can change, that they’ve “seen the light” – something that Brand hinted at in the interview with US journalist Megyn Kelly last week. He said he had been “immature” and described a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old as “consensual” but “exploitative”.We love a redemption story, especially if it someone that we were once a fan of.
Showbiz has long had a complicated relationship with this kind of behaviour. Careers are paused but rarely cancelled. West has been performing to sold out arenas in the US and Wireless festival booked him for three nights before backing out, while Brand is on the US media circuit this week for his book.
Reinvention isn’t just possible, it’s literally in the playbook. So the question isn’t whether someone in the public eye can find faith. It’s why these moments of spiritual transformation so often arrive at points of crisis and why they work. Because in public life, redemption is a powerful story. Sometimes more powerful than accountability.
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