Classic: From Faith to Scepticism, From Pop Star to Priest: The Search For Meaning Richard Coles and Derren Brown

Unbelievable?

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Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

Illusionist and writer Derren Brown joins broadcaster and Anglican priest Rev. Richard Coles for a searching conversation on The Big Conversation stage of Unbelievable?. Both men tell strikingly different life stories: Brown, once a youthful Christian, gradually left faith behind as his fascination with the mind, psychology, and scepticism grew. Coles, meanwhile, rose to fame in the 1980s pop group The Communards before an unexpected conversion led him into Christian ministry. In this dialogue they share candid reflections on happiness, suffering, transcendence and the role of stories in shaping our lives. Can Stoic philosophy provide enough meaning without belief in God? Does Christianity uniquely transform suffering into hope? And how do we face death in a culture that has lost its guiding narratives? This classic edition invites listeners to weigh whether life’s deepest questions find their fullest answer with—or without—God. For Derren Brown: http://derrenbrown.co.uk For Richard Coles: http://www.richardcoles.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to The Big Conversation here on Unbelievable. It's good to have you both here for this
0:04.1	conversation, which I'm not sure either of you have really had in this kind of environment talking
0:08.9	about faith and your different worldviews and the search for meaning. And in a way, it was really
0:15.9	great that you were both available because you've got stories that in some ways are the mirror of each other.
0:21.9	Perhaps we could start with you, Darren, and just to remind us of the fact that you were actually at one time a Christian.
0:28.4	Yes.
0:28.8	When you were a young man, a young girl, I should say.
0:32.7	A young girl, I thought you're about to say that, yeah, a young girl.
0:36.1	What kind of drew you towards Christianity to begin with?
0:39.6	I was six, I think, and I had a teacher at school that I really like called Mrs. Whitaker,
0:45.1	and she asked me if I wanted to come to her Crusader's classes.
0:49.8	And I didn't have any religious friends.
0:52.2	My family weren't at all religious.
1:12.3	But I was six, and I liked the teacher, and liked the teacher. So I just presumably everybody does that. Everybody goes to crusader classes. So I went. And by the time I was old enough to realize, oh no, this is a sort of a belief now that I have. This is a thing that's not everybody has. It was a bit too sort of late.
1:16.3	It was, well, I say late, but it was, you know, I believed it and that was that.
1:20.0	And it was certainly too late to rethink it from any kind of other viewpoints.
1:23.1	So I just sort of found myself in it.
1:28.4	And then I went to various churches, still didn't really have any Christian friends particularly,
1:31.7	and then at university, so sometime later,
1:34.9	I got into hypnosis and close-up magic and the sort of career that I'm now in,
1:36.7	and it started to drive a bit of a wedge
1:38.3	between me and the Christians that I knew.
	...

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