Fearlessly speaking the truth. Arena crowds hanging on your every word. Healing the oppressed spirits of your followers. What better preparation for a career in comedy than an adolescence spent as an evangelical Christian? Katy Brand had just such teenage years, and is now taking to the comedy stage (where else?) to tell her story. It’s not just one of the most eye-catching shows of the upcoming Edinburgh fringe, but a creative rebirth for a performer who’d lost her comedy mojo (“I’d decided I wouldn’t do it any more,” she says) after the 2010 demise of her ITV2 sketch hit Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show.

You're doing thrilling stuff. Church summer camp was like a festival – without the sex

I Was a Teenage Christian gives Brand’s account of being in the thrall of what her show now calls “a happy-clappy, charismatic, evangelical church” in her native Buckinghamshire. It’s not a fate she can lay at her parents’ door: they were irreligious, and bemused by their daughter’s born-again zeal. Brand converted aged 13, after a week’s holiday in St Ives with Christian family friends. “And I didn’t look back, for seven years,” she says. “I went three or four times a week, every week, to one church event or another. It became my whole life.



The young Katy.

“I got involved in the tea-making, I got involved in painting homeless shelters. I was completely in love with the worship bandleader, who was interchangeable in my head with Jesus.” She set up a stall in the local shopping centre, soapbox preaching, converting the heathen. “I was such a dick!”, she blushes. But at the time, who knew that it wasn’t cool? “It doesn’t feel like you’re some mad religious nut, because there’s loads of teenagers around and you’re doing thrilling stuff.” Such as? “Well, church summer camp felt like a festival. Loads of people your age, hanging out, camping – albeit definitely not having sex.”



This was the 1990s, when controversy surrounding Sheffield’s alternative youth church group – aka “sex cult” - the Nine O’Clock Service inspired a moral panic about revivalist Christianity.

But to Brand, the attraction of zealous churchgoing isn’t hard to fathom. “It makes you feel important,” she says. “Writing this show, I’ve found loads of people who had a religious period as a teenager. And it’s because you’re given loads of responsibility – you’re praying demons out of people, for God’s sake, at 15. You have a youth worker that devotes all their time to listening to you. You feel like you’ve got some significance in the world. And who doesn’t like to feel important?”



The religion that got me wasn't one that required I go round killing people. Maybe if I'd been 13 during the Crusades…

It’s an argument, Brand is fully aware, with topical resonance. “People seem to be amazed that young people are being radicalised at the moment, but I can see exactly why it’s happening. I’m just glad that the religion that got me wasn’t one that required I go around killing people. Maybe if I’d been 13 during the Crusades, it would have been different…”



In due course, Brand grew out of her fundamentalism. Her church’s ban on the Harry Potter books was a turning point (“I just started to think, this is silly”); so too, a moment of lucidity at a faith-healing session, when Brand had to lay hands on a woman to exorcise malevolent spirits. “I remember looking around at all of these people, crying or laughing hysterically, lying on the floor or shaking their heads wildly. And just thinking, ‘how is this my new normal?’” It annoyed her, too, that church disapproved of her studying theology at university. “I started to feel not very respectful of adults who refused to have a conversation about things that were less comfortable for them.”



But, nearly 20 years on – Brand is 37 – she hasn’t rejected Christianity wholesale: “I still find religion fascinating.” And she blames herself, more than the church, for her seven devout years. “I’m definitely an all-or-nothing person. Prior to my fixation with Christianity, I was really obsessed with Michael Jackson.”



More recently, Brand experienced a crisis of faith in her chosen profession, growing frustrated with sketch comedy after three gruelling series of Big Ass Show (for which she won best female newcomer at the 2008 British comedy awards) and a 2010 tour. “I started to find it restrictive and frustrating,” she says. “I lost sight of what I originally found joyful and exciting and fun.”



So she went away and wrote a novel – 2014’s Brenda Monk is Funny – which she describes as “my most exciting and satisfying creative experience”. Only when she took the book on tour was her love of live performance rekindled. “Suddenly I was performing as me – standing on stage, talking; not in a costume, not being someone else.” Doing something resembling standup comedy, in effect – an art form Brand always considered “very intimidating”. But now, with her new show, she’s giving it a go. “I’m being myself, and people seem to enjoy it, and I enjoy it. So it’s all suddenly come to life again for me.”

Would you call it a resurrection? “It is, a little bit. I feel like I’m shedding a skin.”

