What psychedelic and Christian communities can learn from each other

Molly is a 41-year-old therapist in London. She became drawn to Christianity about seven years ago. Around the same time, she started to meditate, and got into psychedelics.

She says:

I previously thought of this as ‘drug taking’, and had quite a lot of fear towards it. But I had a friend who has a lot of knowledge about psycho-spiritual matters. He had done a lot of ayahuasca [a psychedelic brew drunk in the Amazon] and spoke highly of it. I smoked DMT with him, but got frightened afterwards. I think at the time I was quite vulnerable psychologically, opening up to a lot of new things and some deeper exploration, and didn’t yet have a means of containing the experience psychologically.

Two years ago, I felt ready to try ayahuasca, and had the most wonderful experience. It felt very psychologically healing, and spiritually revealing. I had come to see psychedelics not as drugs / chemicals (I found that frame disrespectful), but saw them instead as sacred plant medicines used in traditional healing, as sacramental in fact. Since then, I’ve also taken San Pedro, and take part in peyote fire-circle ceremonies.

Molly doesn’t see an opposition between the Anglican church she goes to and the peyote fire-circles:

I see parallels between these ceremonies and the church I go to, although the fire-circles happen in the countryside while my church is in the middle of London. I’d say the peyote ceremonies have helped me learn to pray better. There seems to me to be so much ‘stuff’ — complication and morality — around ‘religious’ prayer. 2000 years of crap. Too much noise. There’s something about the expressions of prayer I’ve heard around the fire which has helped make my conversation with God more natural and available. In ceremony, people often pray to the Great Spirit or Great Mystery. These less loaded terms help me to access what I feel ‘God’ to be. I don’t feel I go to fire ceremonies and worship a different God. It’s just one God, revealed to us in manifold ways.

Does she discuss her psychedelic activities with other Christians?

It depends. I have evangelical friends, who might think it was just devil worship. But when I was thinking about getting confirmed, I told the vicar, ‘these are some of the things I do’. He said ‘fine, it’s your path’. That reassured me, and I felt able to go ahead and get confirmed. The fire ceremonies have probably strengthened my idea of the power and importance of sacrament and ritual and in that sense have led me towards confirmation and the Eucharist.

Molly is unusual, in that she exists in the tiny overlap between two different tribes — the psychedelic community, and the Anglican church.

These two tribes very rarely meet, barely think of each other, and hardly ever discuss any commonalities they might have.

When I was at Breaking Convention, the UK’s biggest psychedelic conference, earlier this year, one could hear talks about psychedelics and shamanism, or magic, or Eastern religion, or even ancient Greek culture. But there was very little on psychedelics and Christianity. No theologians, no priests, no nuns or monks.

One exception was a talk by ‘Reverend’ Danny Nemu, a very erudite psychedelic researcher who has written on the use of psycho-active substances in the Bible (frankincense, myrrh, anointing oil and so on). But Danny tells me he finds it difficult even to set foot in a church (although he has spoken about his experiences in Santo Daime, a folk Catholic church that originated in Brazil and which uses ayahuasca as a sacrament).

If psychonauts mention Christianity at all, it’s usually to frame it as a colonial, sexually repressive and conformist institution — while psychonauts see themselves as liberating counter-cultural tricksters.

The Church, meanwhile, completely ignores the psychedelic renaissance.

There was more of an engagement in the 1950s and 1960s, after Aldous Huxley shocked the world by declaring a drug — mescaline — had given him a mystical experience. His 1953 book The Doors of Perception prompted condemnation from some theologians, but other religious or spiritual teachers followed his path — his friend Alan Watts was an Episcopalian priest before he was thrown out for adultery and became a preacher to the freaks of San Francisco. Watts’ 1962 book on psychedelics, The Joyous Cosmology, ends with an extraordinary vision of Jesus.

the courtiers become angels with wings of golden fire, and in the centre of the arena there appears a pool of dazzling flame. Looking into the pool I see, just for a moment, a face which reminds me of the Christos Pantocrator of Byzantine mosaics, and I feel that the angels are drawing back with wings over their faces in a moment of reverent dread. But the face dissolves, the pool of flame grows brighter and brighter, and I notice that the winged beings are drawing back with a gesture, not of dread, but of tenderness — for the flame knows no anger. Its warmth and radiance — ‘tongues of flame unfolded’ — are an efflorescence of love so enduring that I feel have seen the heart of all hearts.

Also in 1962, a Harvard graduate student called Walter Pahnke teamed up with the psychologist Timothy Leary to see if psilocybin (the psychoactive agent in magic mushrooms) could trigger mystical experiences in seminary students. They tried an experiment on Good Friday, in Marsh Chapel, giving psilocybin to ten trainee-priests. Sure enough, nine of them did have profound, life-changing mystical experiences, although one had a bad trip.

Back in the 60s, then, there was more overlap between Christians and psychonauts. You even had acid heads becoming ‘Jesus people’, hippies for God. The most influential was a guy called Lonnie Frisbee, who converted to Christianity while on LSD and continued to use it as a way to connect to God. Lonnie inspired the Calvary Church revival and the Vineyard church — two of the biggest contemporary church movements in the US. He was gay and died of AIDS, and consequently has been somewhat written out of the history of these movements.

On the whole, however, psychonauts followed Aldous Huxley’s path to Buddhism, which seemed to fit better with the sort of non-dualist mystical experiences many were having. In addition, spiritual tourism allowed them to avoid the church’s sexual Puritanism. The Western Buddhism that grew out of the psychedelic movement tends to be progressive in its politics and liberal in its sexual ethics.

When psychedelics were illegalized in 1970 by president Richard Nixon, American churches followed his lead, seeing them not as potentially liberating spiritual gifts but as just another addictive and demonic drug, another part of the counter-culture’s unholy assault on family values.

In the late 80s and 1990s, in the UK, acid house was a similar messy spiritual awakening to the Sixties summer of love. Again, the Church of England pretty much completely ignored it (with the exception of the ill-fated Nine O’Clock Service, also known as the ‘rave church’). But I know at least one Christian who tells me (secretly) that his 90s rave + MDMA experiences were a crucial part of his journey to God.

Today, the shrinking Church of England is becoming more and more evangelical, inward-looking, and old (the average age of a church attendee is 61). It has no interest in or awareness of the psychedelic renaissance.

The ‘psychedelic renaissance’, for any Christians reading this, refers mainly to a revival of research into psychedelics after a 40-year hiatus. The revival began in 2006, when a team at Johns Hopkins Medical College published a paper arguing that one dose of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) led, under the proper conditions, to ‘mystical-like experiences’ which people rated as the most powerful spiritual experience of their life.

This ‘mystical experience’, later research found, helped to liberate people from addiction, from depression, even from the fear of dying. It opened people up to the idea of a soul and a divine home for that soul. Paradoxically, a material substance seemed to liberate some people from materialism.

Today, there is more and more research into the healing power of psychedelics. Magic mushrooms have been decriminalized in Chicago, Santa Cruz and Denver and I think it’s likely they will be decriminalized or legalized — whether for therapeutic, religious or recreational use — in many western countries over the next decade.

This will be a huge shift — we will go from the Puritan-inspired horror of nature which one found in the War on Drugs (Cannabis? Satanic!) to an appreciation of psychoactive plants as healers, allies, and potentially sacred vehicles to God. And we will also have a lot of people, a lot of ordinary people, having mystical experiences.

Is this not potentially a huge opportunity for the church….the spores of a possible revival?

Aldous Huxley wrote:

That famous ‘revival of religion’, about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.

And yet these two tribes don’t talk to each other at all. This seems to me a great pity. They have more in common than they might realize. They are both surrounded by a culture that (in the UK at least) is extremely materialist, secular, and not very interested in ego-transcendence (well-being and mental health, yes, but nothing that requires one to rearrange the furniture too much).

By contrast, these two tribes — Christians and psychonauts — both take mystical experiences seriously and think (on the whole) such experiences point to a deeper spiritual dimension.

Both could teach the other something. Mark Juhan, a lay chaplain and psychonaut — rare hybrid — suggests that psychedelics can rescue Christians from an over-heavy dependence on Scripturalism at the cost of a personal encounter with the Divine. They can also teach Christians a greater reverence for God’s creation in nature, which could include such extraordinary plants. I also think the psychedelic community is admirably tolerant of difference.

Psychonauts, on the other hand, could learn from Christians how to turn altered states into altered traits (as the theologian Huston Smith put it). They could learn how to ground ecstatic experiences in community, and in charitable work. They could also learn from Christian mysticism how to practice discernment of spirits, how to avoid ego-inflation, how to practice a theology deeper than simply saying ‘well that was far out’. And they could learn, perhaps, to overcome a fetishization of substances and experiences (Leary’s ‘religion of LSD’) and a more mature confrontation with the givens of suffering and death.

Check out Mark’s excellent talk from Breaking Convention:

Is this conversation likely? There are a few promising signs. There are bridge-builders like Jordan Peterson, whose YouTube sermons riff on Christian myths and who thinks psychedelics can lead to encounters with God. Thanks to Peterson, many young spiritual seekers are taking Christian myths seriously again — his YouTube series on the Bible has 15 million views.

Jonathan Haidt, another psychologist who is popular among right-leaning Christians, recently came out and said one can learn more about equanimity and other moral virtues from one dose of LSD than a year of lectures. That’s likely to appeal to religious conservatives — psychedelic rituals as virtue-enhancers.



There have been one or two articles by Christians — one in The American Conservative — suggesting that the psychedelic renaissance is interesting and worth not condemning instantly.

It will be harder for the church to ignore or dismiss psychedelics as the evidence builds up for their power to heal depression or trauma. I suspect the church would have no problem at all if it was like Prozac — a purely materialist medicine. Then there could be a clear (although fallacious) demarcation of responsibility — the physical is the realm of secular medicine, the spiritual is our realm.

It’s the fact that psychedelics are both material and spiritual (ie chemicals that induce mystical experiences) that is perhaps troubling for Christians. But Huxley would say that just because a chemical triggers a mystical experience doesn’t mean mystical experience is nothing but a chemical reaction. We need to get over our Cartesian dualism. There is no clear demarcation between the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul.

Ancient religious traditions think of the psyche as the total organism. Certain practices — fasting, pilgrimage, retreat into silence, sexual abstinence, immersion in natural beauty, poetry and music, the play of light and dark, or certain extreme physical events like childbirth or injuries — affect the psyche in ways that can alter consciousness and take us beyond the usual ego-chatter into deeper states of awareness.

There is nothing mechanical or predictable about this (that is a Cartesian way of thinking). The effect of a practice (including ingesting a plant) depends on the mind-set of the person and the ritual around it. One person could have a bit of a giggle, another could have a profound connection to God — just as one person might find Mozart’s Requiem a sacred event, another simply a nice tune.

I suspect psychedelics will be legalized in some form, and many more people will start to have mystical-type experiences. I also suspect many of them will be surprised to find Christian myths and archetypes coming up from their subconscious. Or they will feel themselves drawn to Jesus and the gospels as a way of making sense of their experiences.

Like Molly, they may end up with a syncretistic blend of Christian church and psychedelic ceremony, and see them not as conflicting, but as part of the same practice, in worship of the same God.