KORN's BRIAN 'HEAD' WELCH: “religion is corrupting this world; it has been for countless centuries”
03-11-2025
Brian “Head” Welch, co-founder of the nu metal band KORN who left the group in 2005 after becoming a Christian amid his struggle with drug addiction, only to rejoin KORN eight years later, took to his social media on Sunday, November 2 to share a two-minute video dubbed “Religious people will pile guilt on you, I’ve seen it countless times… But Christ is different”. In the clip, which can be seen below, Welch said: “Religion versus relationship. Religion and religious people will pile on you — loads and loads of guilt. They tower over you with their self-righteousness to make you feel that you are way beneath them in order to keep you in that spirit of control over your life. I’ve seen it countless times. It’s a cancer to spirituality and chases so many people away from even the thought of a relationship with Christ. Now, Christ, on the other hand, is a real heart-to-heart relationship. It’s your heart connected spiritually in union with Christ’s heart. He leads you to himself by kindness while acknowledging your flaws. He will definitely ask by leading you spiritually to lay down some things in order to take away the fun in your life. It’s never about taking the fun away in your life. It’s about getting the things in your life out, completely out of your life, so that you can have a healthier form of existence on this planet. It’s never about taking things away from you so that you have a more boring life. But he leads you by kindness, he leads you to acknowledge your flaws, and then he empowers you to lay those flaws down.”
Welch continued: “That’s the whole thing. We don’t have to do it in our own strength. Christ empowers us, through his spirit, to live a better life, to live a healthier life. And that’s what grace is — it’s the empowerment of God through the spirit that gives us the ability to do this.
“Religion is corrupting this world; it has been for countless centuries,” Brian added. “But there there is a lot of people waking up to the true fact of relationship, especially in the last, like, 20 years. I just see so many people latch on to the real, to the real.
“So, just my little two cents today. Hope you guys are having a good weekend.”
This past April, Welch was asked by the Stand Up Dude podcast to name one reminder that he would give men, especially young men, out there that would enable them to be the men that they’re created to be. Welch said: “I think just developing and actually spending time to develop a relationship with Christ one on one. That has been the pivotal piece of my journey. Going to church and praying before you go to bed during the week, going to church on Sunday, it’s not enough, in my opinion, for what Jesus died for. He wants to lead and guide you, and he wants you to talk to him. It is a mystery, and we’re getting guided, but we sometimes miss it. And that chasing and that trying to hear his voice or his messages, his signs, trying to see his signs and wonders of what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, is the most important thing.”
He added: “Church is supposed to be the gas station to fill us up for the rest of the week. We’re supposed to read books, listen to books, listen to messages, podcasts. There’s so much information out there to help you grow. And so develop that personal daily walk with Christ.”
Welch went on to say that opening one’s heart to receive God’s love is a transformative experience.
“What’s God’s message in the Bible? It’s love. Love. Over and over — love, love, love,” he said. “And as guys, it’s hard for us, ’cause we think, when we find a woman, we love them, we date them, we hopefully marry them and we open our heart to ’em. It’s harder for sometimes guys, for the concept to open our heart to God. But we’ve gotta remember, Jesus, he walked the earth as a man, but he’s more than that. He’s the son of God where male and female came from God. He’s other than. So we just need to open our heart to learn how to receive his love as a God and give that love back to him.
“When I came to the place where I was ready to open up my heart to God, I didn’t necessarily know as opening my heart, but I was begging for help because I was in such a dark place where I wanted my life to be over,” he continued. “I wanted to sleep and never wake up. And so I got to that place where I was, like, ‘Please, help me.’ And that opened my heart a little bit. And then once I started going to church, learning what the Bible was saying, that’s when I found out that God is love. It says God actually is love. Not that just God loves us, that he is love. So his very nature is love. And so being a tough guy or trying to portray a tough guy all the time with the heavy metal music and all that, I slowly, by the Holy Spirit’s help, started to learn to be able to open my heart. And then I wanted this love, because I did so many drugs and drank so much alcohol over the years that it was like I wanted to escape. And meeting God and learning that God is love, it started to fill that place, the empty place in me that the drugs and the alcohol were trying to fill. And so it was like — sometimes I describe it as the best high I ever felt. It was God’s love entering, when I opened my heart. And so it’s done spiritually.”
Welch left KORN in early 2005, at the same time announcing that he kicked his addictions to drugs and alcohol by becoming a born-again Christian.
Less than a month after leaving KORN, Welch — wearing a white robe and sporting a long beard — was baptized in Israel’s Jordan River, along with about 20 other members of the Valley Bible Fellowship, the Bakersfield, California, church in which he spoke two weekends earlier. At the time, Brian told MTV News that he decided to be baptized in the Jordan after receiving a divine message.
Welch officially returned to KORN in 2013, one year after joining the band onstage at the Carolina Rebellion festival in Rockingham, North Carolina to perform “Blind”.
Since his conversion to Christ 20 years ago, Welch has been very open about how God changed his lifestyle and restored his relationship with his daughter.
In recent years, Brian has been preaching that people don’t have to wait until they die to see if having an encounter with the presence of God is real.
Both Welch and KORN bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu have had highly public, though separate, conversion experiences, ones that have been greeted with a certain amount of skepticism.
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