LAMB OF GOD’s RANDY BLYTHE On Religion: ‘I Definitely Believe In A Higher Power’

In an interview on “The New Man” podcast with Tripp Lanier, LAMB OF GOD vocalist Randy Blythe shared his views on religion.

“I had some negative experiences with religion, organized religion, growing up. There were some negative experiences within the church when I was a child,” Randy said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “When I was a child, I was raised in the church; I was raised in the Southern Baptist church. And I was always taught that God loves everyone and we shouldn’t judge everyone and we shouldn’t judge anyone and that we’re all equal under the eyes of God.

“And then, around seven or eight years old, I began to notice rank hypocrisy within church-going people on how they treated other people, how they viewed other people, what they would say on the side. And I was, like, ‘Okay, this is all bulls**t.’ So I was kind of done with the whole God thing. I was not an atheist. I’ve never been an atheist, but I was — I don’t know. I just kind of loosely, I guess, gave lip service to the idea of a God, some sort of spirit, some sort of higher power. And it wasn’t until I was really brutalized by alcohol to the point where I had to ask something outside of myself for help, ’cause nothing else was there — just me. ‘Please help me. Something.’ And so I definitely believe in a higher power. I don’t know if it is a cognizant, rational, thinking deity. I don’t know if it is simply a reality itself. I don’t know if it is an underlying energy that runs through everything, but I think there is at least a sense of order to the universe.

“I’ve heard that the God uses an acronym for ‘good orderly direction’,” he continued. “If there wasn’t any sort of direction, even within chaos, even within the chaos of our universe, I think everything would just cease to exist.

“So, do I believe in a God, for lack of a better term? Yes. Do I attempt to have a conscious contact with that quote-unquote God? Yes, on a daily basis. Really, the main point of it is, do I know what that God is? Absolutely not. No clue. It doesn’t f**king matter.

“It seems illogical to me. I don’t think we can comprehend, specifically, with our limited senses… Like, if you think about a dog, a dog can hear things that we can’t hear. I think we are not attuned to the frequencies of the divine. Not yet. So, it doesn’t make sense for me for there to be a specific sort of monolithic, one particular god that ‘this is it.’ Because if there was, despite what cult leaders and televangelists and charlatans throughout the ages have tried to tell you, if someone had the f**king answer, then it would be self-evident when they presented it to you. But it’s not. So I think with a lot of religions, at least the historically based ones, I think they have some, perhaps, divine aspect to this stuff. And maybe it’s the divine expressing itself through a particular person so that that culture in that moment, in that time can understand it.

“That is one of my problems with dogmatic, fundamentalist religious people of any stripe. They’re, like, ‘My God is the only God. And if you don’t follow this, you’re gonna go to hell’ or whatever. Let’s just say Buddha, who wasn’t even a God. He is a human being who supposedly attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree. Buddha, who appeared however many thousand years ago in India — he made sense when he appeared there. Would he make sense to the Celtic tribes in Ireland at the same time, who were running around and committing warfare with the blue paint on their face or whatever, the Highlands of Scotland and Ireland, the Celts? No. He would not be culturally appropriate. So I think there may be culturally appropriate expressions of the divine throughout history in each corner of the world. So who am I to tell you my conception of the divine is the correct one when it wouldn’t even make sense to you?”

Blythe‘s second book, Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head, will be published on February 18, 2025 by Grand Central Publishing (GCP).