Brian Welch was a guitarist for Korn (he is the guy on the left with dreadlocks and Korn is an alternative rock group) and after a life that left him really empty inside turned to religion. His story is similiar to Mel Gibsons in a way, he had all the trappings of success like fame, money, women, etc but felt suicidal and was a drug addict.
While I really enjoy seeing Welch find priorities, purpose and meaning in his life, this keeps reminding me of Larry Flynt and his 1 year intense conversion to Christianity and his return to a smutty life after that year. I have also heard countless stories of drug addicts becoming intensely religious, only to have that die out and end up back on the wagon, same as they were before.
Do people who turn to religion end up staying in religion, or is it just a band aid that they’ll eventually tear off in your experience? I would hate to see Welch go back to a life he hates and that gives him pain, but I just don’t think his conversion will be nearly this strong in a year or two. Its sad because he gave up hollow pleasures and now condemns what he sees as a music culture with nothing positive to it, only negatives (insults, drugs, superficilaity, hate, sexual exploitation, hell just listen to some of Korns music if you need proof of what he’s talking about) and he wants to add something positive to the music scene.
This is actually happening to some friends of mine . . . A friend (who’s in her 70s) lost her daughter a couple of years ago, who died at 50. The daughter’s son, in his early 20s, suddenly became an Orthodox Jew; married another Orthodox Jew, and they’re expecting a baby.
Now, mind you, the family was neither Jewish nor religious, so this came totally out of left field, and the grandmother (who’s being nothing but supportive, by the way) thinks this has to be a reaction to his mother’s death. We’re just worried that his sudden attack of religion will fade off, and where will that leave his marriage and his kids?
> His story is similiar to Mel Gibsons in a way, he had all the trappings of success
> like fame, money, women, etc but felt suicidal and was a drug addict.
Cite? I can’t find any evidence in the biographical material I’ve looked through that Gibson was ever a drug addict or suicidal. Gibson was brought up as Catholic. Indeed, his father is well known as being more hardcore, and apparently anti-Semitic, than he is. I don’t see any relationship here at all.
Gibson also said in the interview that he was nearly suicidal before he made his controversial film. “I got to a very desperate place. Very desperate. Kind of jump-out-of-a-window kind of desperate,
He spoke of his addictions and how he is an addictive personality yet seemed blissfully unaware that religion is his latest addiction. “Everyone’s got something,” he added. "I would get addicted to anything, anything at all. Okay? Doesn’t matter what it is … drugs, booze, anything. You name it — coffee, cigarettes, anything. Alright? I’m just one of these guys who is like that. That’s my flaw.
Still, that’s not very close. Mel Gibson was brought up Catholic and has remained so all his life so far. Indeed, he has always been the sort of Catholic who was disdainful of the post-Vatican II church. He was always the sort who apparently believes that Pope John XXIII is now burning in hell for his liberalizations of church policy (during his period of being Pope in 1958 through 1963). Gibson has always spoken this way of this disdain for the modern world and the modern Catholic church during interviews throughout his acting career. I don’t know what Gibson means by addictions and feeling desperate before making The Passion of the Christ, but what happened to him was not what happened to Brian Welch. Welch was never religious before. He was the sort of person with no beliefs who whooped it up with women, drugs, and everything else that fame allowed him to get his hands with before he became a Christian. I have no idea whether Welch will stick to his new beliefs, but they are completely new beliefs for him. On the other hand, I can’t see any difference between Gibson’s beliefs now and his beliefs early in his career. Gibson has always been a Catholic, and indeed a Catholic who has always found most other Catholic too weak in their beliefs.
Either way, I’m not really concerned with Mel Gibson as much as the transformation that some people go when they are having major problems and turn to religion. Instead of Mel Gibson John Davis can be used as an example but Davis in a way has the same situation as Gibson (he was raised christian while Welch was not).
My father had a lot of problems when he as growing up, mostly due to his mother’s severe addiction to prescription drugs. This was in the 1950s and '60s, so it was handled badly all around. He saw her frequent overdoses at a young age and ended up in foster care for a couple of years. By the time he was getting out of high school, he was miserable, depressed, and eventually suicidal. Then one day in 1972, the heyday of the Jesus freak movement, he claims Jesus came to him in a vision and told him he was a Prophet of the End Times. Suddenly he wasn’t a sad, lonely athiest; he as a prophet! An important person who could show up at fundamentalist churches and claim to be authoritative and impress all the other 20-year-old Jesus freaks!
He never got over it. He’s a sad, paranoid, middle-aged guy working in software support rather than prophecy and Antichrist battlin’. He’s more mellow about it now than he was when I was young. He’s still quite delusional and unable to relate to the real world, but he was near-psychotic back then; we actually stored grain in our house for the “coming famine” and I was brought up to believe that because our family was so special we would almost certainly be martyred when the Antichrist came to power. He doesn’t believe in the concept of the rapture, so he also gets to feel superior to all those fundamentalists who believe Jesus will rescue them from all that Left Behind hooey.
So yeah, some people get deeply into religious fanatacism and never find their way back. Why should he? I’m sure it’s really great being someone who gets directives straight from God. Not so great to be that person’s kid, but that’s another issue altogether.
Do people with problems who become religious fanatics stay that way? I don’t know, but it would be interesting to see what would happen if W switched back…
It´s all about adictive personalities; some people just switch one adiction with another. An example would be an alcoholic going to AA and ending up a religious fanatic… yeah, I had W in mind, blame Kilvert’s Pagan, besides he agreed to being kicked.
I think that shows a certain lack of moral fiber and doesn´t adress the underlaying cause of the addictive behaviour.
