Taking Psychedelic Spiritualities (More) Seriously

The release of a long-awaited study on psychedelics and religion ought to prompt new questions, not old cliches.

1.

In the context of the polycrisis of 2025, a study of the effects of psilocybin on religious leaders is, perhaps, not of paramount importance. But in the world of psychedelics, especially that part of the field interested in the religious use of psychoactive compounds, the study’s publication is big news. And I’m going to claim that it’s even relevant to our current moment.

In 2017, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and NYU guided 29 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders on two high-dose psilocybin trips, to see what effects, if any, the experiences would have on their religious and psychological lives. The researchers were inspired by the famous-in-psychedelics-circles ‘Marsh Chapel Experiment’ in which researcher Walter Pahnke dosed ten divinity school students on Good Friday of 1962. Now, as then, the effects were remarkable. In the Hopkins/NYU study, which will formally be published next week as a peer-reviewed academic paper by Anthony Bossis and Stephen Ross entitled “Effects of psilocybin on religious and spiritual attitudes and behaviors in clergy from various major world religions,” 96% rated their first encounters with psilocybin as being among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

Ninety-six percent?! Among clergy, i.e., people whose job it is to create and curate spiritual experiences? That is a remarkable statistic, even if, as everyone acknowledges, the study’s subjects skewed toward those interested in spiritual experience and in psychedelics; this was not a randomized trial.

This week, bestselling author Michael Pollan, who singlehandedly transformed the psychedelic field with his 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, wrote an appraisal of the study and what it might mean for mental healthcare, American religion, and the meaning crisis, published in The New Yorker. Like everything Pollan writes, the article is enviably accessible, yet intelligent, and my main reaction to reading it was wishing that I could write as well as he does. It also provides an excellent introduction to psychedelics, especially their uses in religious contexts, and compelling stories of some of the key players in the Hopkins/NYU study.

And yet, this being The New Yorker, which has apparently never met a spiritual practice it didn’t seek to ridicule, there were aspects of the article’s presentation and analysis that undermined Pollan’s brilliant reporting.

To be clear, I am not an objective observer. I know and work with many of the people interviewed in the article and involved in the study: Cody Swift, Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, Rev. Jaime Clark-Soles, Rev. Hunt Priest, and Sughra Ahmed. (Pollan and I have corresponded but do not work together.) I am a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and Cody Swift’s foundation is a funder of a study I’m working on about Christian attitudes toward psychedelics. More broadly, I believe that the responsible use of psychedelics – emphasize responsible – has enormous therapeutic and religious potential. In fact, just over two months ago I co-organized a conference on the subject attended by 700 legal and religious studies scholars; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy; legal professionals; and psychonauts.

I am also not an objective observer of psychedelic spiritual experiences, because I’ve had many of them, as well as similar peak experiences occasioned by meditation retreats, hermitage in nature, trance practices, concentration techniques, and so on. Though I try not to, invariably I project some of those experiences onto the accounts I read, and since those experiences have been so generative and formative for me, I am biased.

Then again, without that firsthand experience, it’s quite difficult to evaluate the claims that religious psychedelic users make. Jimi Hendrix asked the right question. If you haven’t had the experience, I’m sure we all sound stoned, deluded, or worse. Which is how The New Yorker usually makes us out to be.

2.

Religious psychedelic use is not some recent fad. For thousands of years, as Pollan notes, cultures around the world have used psychotropic plants to gain access to the sacred, in the many different ways in which they understand it. These plants were not used to “get high” — i.e. to get intoxicated and escape — but to get in closer contact with the many layers and dimensions of reality.

In that context, you can perhaps see why it might be just a little problematic when the editors of The New Yorker entitled Pollan’s article “This is Your Priest on Drugs.” Of course, headlines are meant to generate clicks, and maybe that one does so. But it’s outlandishly disrespectful to indigenous people, to contemporary psychedelic practitioners, and to the subjects of the study itself. It suggests that ingesting psychedelics, having profound spiritual experiences, reflecting on one’s own trauma and finding some space to heal from it, is just like “getting high” at a party. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either.) Imagine if an article on Catholic communion were titled “This is Your Priest on Soda Crackers.”

On top of that, to use a metaphor from the War on Drugs, which was the leading driver of mass incarceration, disproportionately targeting Black and Latino families and destroying entire communities? Remember, that famous “This is Your Brain on Drugs” ad from the 1980s was a lie told on false pretenses. In fact, we now know, President Nixon and his aides concocted the War on Drugs attack antiwar and black activists. Here’s what Nixon aide John Ehrlichman said about it years later:

You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.

With that tasteless reference, The New Yorker puts the reader on notice that this some weird and wacky stuff, these priests on drugs. Never mind what the clergy interviewed actually say, or that civilizations have been doing this seriously for thousand years, or that while drug abuse can be dangerous, those dangers have also been wildly exaggerated. Obviously, I get that the headline is a joke, and I’m not trying to be self-righteous or woke here. For all I know, Pollan may be as aghast at this headline as I am. But that doesn’t make it any less shitty.

Even the image accompanying the article is a cliche: a blurred, after-imaged Virgin Mary, as if glimpsed by someone drunk. In fact, psychedelics often make the world seem more clear, not more distorted. Here’s Aldous Huxley writing about gazing at a bouquet while on mescaline:

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers: a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

Not blurry, but clear. A miracle of naked existence.

I fed Huxley’s description into Midjourney

3.

Once you get past all that, Pollan’s piece is long and thorough. In his usual narrative way, he introduces us to three of the study’s subjects, Rev. Hunt Priest (Episcopal), Sughra Ahmed (Muslim), and the pseudonymous Father Gregory (Eastern Orthodox), as well as two of its primary investigators, Bill Richards and the late Roland Griffiths. Combining in-scene detail and big-picture analysis, Pollan describes the study itself and some of the questions it raises; zooms back to the history of psychedelics in American society and law, and then surveys the experiences that subjects had, some glorious, others excruciating, others seemingly meh. It’s a master class in how to write a New Yorker feature.

Pollan then capably summarizes a controversy that prevented the study from being published for almost ten years. Two years ago, a blogger and pastor, who had been part of Hunt Priest’s Christian psychedelic organization before undergoing a (conservative) religious crisis/awakening of his own, alleged that the study was “part of a strategy to integrate psychedelics into mainstream religion,” and that biased researchers inappropriately cooked the books and/or influenced subjects’ experiences. Hopkins researcher Matthew Johnson agreed, in part, writing of the danger of “scientists and clinicians imposing their personal religious or spiritual beliefs on the practice of psychedelic medicine.” Both contacted Hopkins’s Institutional Review Board, which oversees research and protects study participants.

After a yearlong audit, the IRB did not agree with the main contentions of these complaints, but it did find “serious non-compliance” with some policies: two researchers had not been IRB reviewed, funding sources were not fully disclosed, and one of the non-disclosed funders (Swift) was also a researcher. The IRB did not prohibit the study from being published, but it did require disclaimers of these issues accompany any publication of it.

Pollan reports all this capably and clearly. Yet he then seems to fall for the very conspiracy theory he’s reporting.

All the Hopkins/NYU researchers, Pollan writes, “stressed that it was never their intention to inject psychedelics into organized religion.” But then Pollan continues, “Yet some, such as Swift and Richards, have been openly supportive of that effort. (Richards has spoken at a public Ligare event.)”

That is quite a strong claim. Again, I work closely with the people who are supposedly leading “that effort,” including Ahmed, Kamenetz, and Priest, as well as with Swift. I have never known them to have an agenda of ‘injecting psychedelics into organized religion.’ What a strange way to characterize their work. Is there some hidden, anti-religious agenda that has infected the minds of Baptist ministers and Orthodox rabbis? Are we perhaps so stoned as to not understand what we are doing?

So, I asked Cody how he would describe his motivations. Here is what he told me:

When I decided to fund the study over ten years ago, my interest was entirely around documenting how individuals with deep spiritual and religious formation would give language to these potential mystical-type experiences. It’s hard for people to imagine in retrospect, but I had no agenda going into this, and knew very little about the lives and work of clergy at that time. Certainly later I saw how supportive these experiences were for the clergy and how they helped restore inspiration in the practices of their faith. I still don’t have an interest to “inject psychedelics into religion,” and am in fact concerned about the proliferation of psychedelic churches. However, I think clergy, particularly those with burnout and overwhelm related to their work may be able to gain spiritual support from these experiences when consumed in the right container, and in turn, may be able to better support their communities.

My funding Shefa and Ligare directly came out of requests from Zac and Hunt to support education, community, and integration within their religions, especially as I knew how isolated many of the clergy were after their journeys in the study. To say their mission is to ‘inject psychedelics into religion’ also entirely lacks nuance, where they are largely providing a space for those in their religion to have supportive conversations about these topics.

Admittedly, that explanation is a lot less interesting than a secret cabal, but sometimes the truth is boring. But what explains Pollan’s embrace of the conspiracy theory?

4.

I think there are two complementary factors at work here: a reductive view of religion, and a reductive view of what psychedelics do. And it’s not only Pollan’s fault.

First, Pollan sets up a dichotomy between psychedelics on the one hand and “organized religion” on the other. But there is no monolithic “organized religion.” There are multiple religious communities with varying degrees of organization. All religions have conservative and progressive factions. Some value altered mindstates, some value them in certain contexts but condemn them in others (e.g. charismatic Christianity), and some are deeply suspicious of them at all times (e.g. Yeshivish Judaism). But all of them have non-ordinary states of consciousness already embedded in their texts and histories, from Moses at the Burning Bush to Paul on the road to Damascus, whirling dervishes to dancing Hasidim. As Jewish psychonaut Madison Margolin has put it, “Judaism is already psychedelic.”

Few serious scholars believe that psychedelic drugs were used to attain these altered states, though some in the psychedelic community (and some bestselling books) take it as an article of faith. I’ve written at length about this question in this newsletter. But religious practitioners definitely used other tools, including music, meditation, fasting, prayer, divination, sleep deprivation, concentration techniques, mantras, breathing practices, bodily movements, group textual interpretation, alcohol, and cannabis.

In other words, the intersection of psychedelics and religion is not about injection (a metaphor with unpleasant pharmacological association) but about rediscovering and reclaiming the ecstatic, mystical, and magical aspects of Western religion that speak to the meaning crisis today. This is religious renewal, not inoculation.

Second, Pollan, who would be the first to agree that he is neither a practitioner nor a scholar of religion, seems to conflate the diverse motives of religious psychedelic users into the one motive that has gained outsize attention: a perennialist conception of the mystical core of all world religions.

Bill Richards, one of the principal researchers in the Hopkins/NYU study, told Pollan that perhaps psychedelics “can give new life to the dogma, by helping people understand where the dogma came from.” This view reflects what scholars call “perennialism”: the once-dominant view that all religions have the same common core, and that core is mystical experience. This view is developed at length in Richards’ book Sacred Knowledge and I know many spiritual practitioners who hold it.

Yet however lofty the aspirations of perennialism are, scholars have pointed out fatal flaws with it (in the psychedelic context specifically, check out the work of Christian Greer and Sharday Mosurinjohn).

‘Mysticism,’ in Frederick Barrett and Roland Griffith’s definition, refers to “those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the Ground of Being.” Now, I love unitive mysticism. I love studying it, practicing it, and writing about it. But it is far too narrow a category to describe the breadth of psychedelic spiritual experiences or mystical-type experiences in general. Across human history, most spiritual-psychedelic experiences took place in indigenous contexts, and were non-unitive, often quite challenging, and involving not the ‘Ground of Being’ but encounters with entities from nature, from other realms, and from spiritual dimensions, as those broad categories are understood in different cultures.

This is also true among contemporary practitioners. At a talk I recently gave on psychedelics and religion at Emory University, I listed two dozen motivations I’d documented in the field, none of which are about unveiling the true, psychedelic source of the dogma. These motivations include healing religious trauma, seeking an experience of closeness to the Divine, connecting to a source of love within, building community, seeking direction in one’s life, connecting to ancestors, seeking insight or beauty or wisdom, and reconnecting to their root religious traditions – and of course many more. My friend Rabbi Zac Kamenetz told Pollan that perhaps “psychedelics could help bring Jewish mysticism back” after being exiled from the Jewish mainstream by rationalism, Reform, Zionism, and the Holocaust.

In other words, unitive mysticism is but one of many motivations for psychedelic spiritual practice, and not even the dominant one.

The term ‘mysticism’ is even less felicitous when it comes to religious traditions in general. Even if we use the term ‘mysticism’ to describe non-Christian religious experiences (which scholar Boaz Huss has persuasively urged us not to do) it is not everywhere the same and it often is marginal, not central, to religious traditions. Sometimes mysticism is theistic, sometimes non-theistic. Sometimes is it unitive, sometimes non-unitive. An absent some prior theological commitment, there is no reason to regard unitive “ego death” experiences as hierarchically or ontologically superior to, say, encounters with the Virgin Mary or visions of the heavenly chariot. Most importantly, religious practitioners themselves do not rank them in this way. There are as many differences as similarities among mystical traditions, and selecting the sliver of experiences that quality as unitive mysticism out of the libraries of religious text is like the old adage that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Finally, visionary and mystical experiences demonstrably play a central role in many religious traditions. Again, I have found them profound and transformative. But no Bible scholar or Catholic theologian would say that “the dogma” is fundamentally “about” mysticism, let alone psychedelic mysticism. This is a kind of fundamentalism, and once again is more of a theological claim than an analytical one. Mysticism is one ingredient among many, but it is not the essence of the recipe.

Pollan, informed by Richards and the perennialists, seems to believe that there is a single psychedelic mysticism, and that those of us enamored of it seek to inject it into organizing religion, displacing what is there already. But none of this is accurate. There is no single psychedelic mysticism, there is no mystical core common to all world religions, and there is no agenda to inject this non-existent drug-mysticism into ‘organized religion,’ which itself is not a single phenomenon.

Other than that, he got everything right.

5.

I’ve spent around twenty five years building, celebrating, and communicating a Jewishness that centers its spiritual, contemplative, ecstatic, and transformational aspects, of which psychedelic practice is but one expression. Some of these aspects have been with Judaism for thousands of years, and some are more recently part of the Jewish story. Then again, so are bagels, cantorial music, and Kantian philosophy. Judaism is in dialogue (hopefully respectful and non-exploitative) with other traditions, and my own Jewish practice owes a tremendous amount to Buddhism, indigenous traditions, earth-based lineages, and many other sources.

This is how religions change, and how they stay vital. “Organized religion” is not some monolith of patriarchal, monotheistic, anthropomorphically-theologized conservatism; that yields far too much ground to the reactionaries. At its best, it is a living form of meaning-making that constantly changes in response to human needs. To claim that we are injecting, importing, or proselytizing is to agree with reactionaries that only fundamentalist religion (which, itself, is remarkably innovative) is authentic. Which I don’t think any of us ought to do.

Today, in the shadow of authoritarianism, climate disaster, and AI-fueled economic disruption — and, for many Jews, the shadows of October 7, antisemitic violence (including this week), and the horrifying violence in Gaza — psychedelic religious leaders are making up for the frequent inability of traditional religion to address the profound alienation, anxiety, fear, trauma, and loss of meaning that is central to 21st century America. Perhaps the older tools of our traditions were once sufficient. Now they manifestly are not.

And yet, we choose to do this work in religious contexts because those contexts still have meaning. There’s a power to suffusing and integrating peak experiences with religious traditions and vocabularies — not for everyone, of course, but for many of us. I am as grateful for these old forms as for the new ones I feel privileged to explore.

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Thanks to my subscribers for your support, and for my colleagues in the psychedelics field for continuing to press these lines of inquiry.

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week, besides the Pollan article:

• Here’s a really juicy reflection on the spirituality of eros in the widest possible sense.

• At the other extreme, here’s a great takedown of our regime’s ridiculous and failed mini-war in Yemen. And here’s one about the white elephant of an airplane the president received from Qatar because no one else was stupid enough to take it.

• Meanwhile, here’s a helpful reminder from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication that a majority of American voters want the government to do more about climate change, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

• Finally, since Newark Airport is my local airport, this analysis from

  Paul Krugman
  of the causes of its meltdown is really helpful. The cause isn’t DOGE — it’s much deeper and worse.

Back on the psychedelics front, I’ll be part of three panels at the upcoming MAPS Psychedelic Science 2025 mega-conference next month in Denver, all described below. Use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration at psychedelicscience.org . Here are some nice tiles: