The Religious Functions of Psychedelics

A dispatch from the first-ever conference on psychedelics and monotheistic traditions

In the context of immense, rapid societal transformation, it was either an act of foresight, joy, privilege, indulgence, resistance, or all of the above to bring together a diverse group of scholars of religion, psychedelic practitioners, clergy, legal scholars, and legal practitioners for a symposium on psychedelics and religion last week at Harvard Law School.

Whatever it was, that’s what we did, and by all accounts, the results were extremely positive.

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at Harvard for their work, support, input, and wisdom, and to everyone who showed up. Which is a lot of people: we had around 30 presenters, and over 700 attendees joining us in person and online.

David Zvi Kalman

has already provided an excellent writeup of the symposium on his Substack newsletter,

Jello Menorah

, but as a co-convenor (with Professor Noah Feldman) of the symposium, I wanted to offer a few notes here from my own perspective.

First, here’s a bit about what we set out to accomplish.

The symposium was called Psychedelics and Monotheistic Religions: Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition, and responded to the dramatic increase, in recent years, of psychedelic use in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. While indigenous people have been using these compounds for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and while people of all backgrounds have been exploring them for a century, it is a new phenomenon that thousands of people experience and understand their psychedelic use as part of their religious practice or identity.

And yet, all of this sincere religious practice is, technically, against the law. There is, as yet, no legal recognition of such use, which remains formally illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. Arguably, this religious use is exempt from the CSA, based on several court precedents and settlements with other psychedelic religious organizations, but there is no case that has yet tested that, and no guidance from the government. Meanwhile, the legal doctrines that govern this question are significantly limited in nature.

Against this background, the symposium set out to explore (1) the historical and theological bases for psychedelic use in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, (2) the self-understandings of contemporary psychedelic practitioners in these traditions, and (3) the match/mismatch between them and the the requirements for a religious exemption to the CSA under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

I do talk with my hands a lot.

First, scholars and theologians discussed traditional models for such practice. All scholars who presented were skeptical of the speculative claims for Biblical and other ancient Mediterranean psychedelic use, noting a paucity of evidence and significant leaps of logic between the available shreds of evidence and conclusions based upon them. I’ve written about some of these claims here, and Harvard Divinity School’s Charles Stang has written perhaps the definitive analysis of them here.

It was interesting to see how the fifty-or-so psychedelic practitioners in the room received these critiques. After all, many of them see themselves as reviving ancient practices that underlie religions around the world — some psychedelic communities have even included works like Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods in their scriptures. And, well, the air did seem a little tense at times. On paper, it made perfect sense to bring practitioners, scholars, and lawyers together, but in practice, it was simultaneously the least-academic academic conference some people had ever attended, and the most-academic conference that others had ever attended. The weirdness was fascinating.

Yet, as Christian Greer, Sharday Mosurinjohn, Charles Stang, and I all proposed at the symposium, insisting on ancient roots of a contemporary practice is a curiously fundamentalistic move. In context, it may be understood, Greer proposed, as a response to the “Pharmacological Calvinism” of religious conservatives opposed to psychedelics: the view that revelation is a matter purely of Divine Grace, that there is nothing we can do to effectuate it, that drugs are evil and hallucinations are delusory. In opposition to this view (which, upon inspection, is intensely Eurocentric and oppressive), what Greer calls the “Entheogenic View” is a maximalist assertion that, in fact, mind-altering substances are the hidden source of Biblical and Mediterranean religions, not only Meso-American ones.

For Greer, this is simply the inverse of the hostile view: both insist that only what’s ancient is legitimate, that religious cultures cannot evolve new rituals and methods of Divine communion that are as authentic as older ones. Though this flies in the face of religious history itself (in just the Jewish example, prayer replaced sacrifices as the predominant form of worship), it does resonate with the felt sense, in psychedelic experiences, that these experiences are foundational, ancient, and true. I resonate with that felt sense, but for Lockean reasons, I also am leery of making unverifiable subjective religious experiences the basis for ontological claims, let alone political ones. After all, it’s likely that a majority of such experiences are hostile to my very existence.

There is a third way, which Greer called the “Empirical View.” Intoxicating compounds are, in many religious traditions, used as a means to attain revelation, healing, power, and magic — and all such traditions come with guardrails, warnings, and prerequisites for safe use that are of enormous value to practitioners today. But not in all traditions, until recently anyway. In some, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ones, other techniques are used to cultivate Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs), including fasting, trance techniques, magical processes, contemplation, and prayer. Rather than insist on what Mosurinjohn called a “Western civilizational pedigree” for the use of psychedelic compounds specifically, perhaps it would be wiser to investigate the pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods for cultivating ASCs more generally, explore the reasons such states are religiously valuable, and develop a syncretic, non-colonial approach to incorporating new technologies learned from non-Western cultures.

Several scholars in the symposium explored how this might look.

In the first session, scholars identified a large number of models, methods, and purposes for the cultivation of ASCs in classical Jewish sources, ranging from the ecstatic rites of women ritual leaders in the Bible to magical and theurgical operations in Kabbalah and Hasidism. Muslim scholars talked about Sufi mysticism (including the possible use of hashish), the contemplation of Ibn ‘Arabi, and the contemporary embrace of psychedelics in Muslim communities which experience elevated rates of mental health crises (including suicidal ideation). And in the Christian context, Rev. Jaime Clark-Soles noted that Christianity is founded on ASCs — visions of the resurrected Christ, Paul on the road to Damascus, the Book of Revelation — and has an array of methods of how to cultivate them, including ascetic practices, sleeping in holy places, ecstatic practice, and, perhaps, the Mysterion itself.

Psychedelic practitioners offered a wide range of self-understandings of their religious psychedelic practice. While some saw themselves as reviving ancient traditions of psychedelic use, most emphasized that their psychedelic use was motivated by present-day spiritual and psychological factors, including healing ancestral trauma, experiencing love in relationship to one another and to God, seeking a mystical experience with the Divine — even, in Jessica Felix-Romero’s phrasing, enabling God to connect with us.

Meanwhile, there were important criticisms of all this work. Ron Cole-Turner noted how love (and enduring bonds of love, rather than brief experiences of it) is absent from many analyses of psychedelic experience yet central to Christian mysticism. Ayize Jama-Everett highlighted the racialized ways in which some religious traditions are foregrounded and others marginalized, and proposed that the underground may actually be a safer and more equitable way to encounter psychedelics than some partially-legalized, partially-medicalized ‘above ground’ pathway. Laura Appleman gave a hilarious, terrifying presentation on psychedelics and eugenics that I’ll have much more to say about in a future newsletter.

And several participants sounded cautionary notes about the intense hostility that some religious conservatives have not merely to “drugs” specifically, but to any non-canonical way of accessing emotional, affective spiritual experience. Many believe it to be (like liberalism, of course) an act of the devil.

Finally, legal scholars noted the strengths and weaknesses of a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim case for an exemption to the Controlled Substances Act. On the one hand, courts recognize these traditions as, obviously, religions, unlike some claims of novel psychedelic spiritual communities. These practitioners are sincere, and not motivated by financial gain. On the other hand, existing jurisprudential categories such as ‘sacrament’ may not apply to the compounds used by religious psychonauts, and while some potential claimants may understand psychedelic use as central to their religious practice, it cannot be claimed that it is central to these religions as such.

And of course, there are significant cultural and ideological barriers in play. The DEA has never, not once, issued a religious exemption without being forced by a court, despite setting up a process to supposedly do so. And it is unclear whether the expansion of religious liberty jurisprudence under the Roberts Court would be applied to religiously liberal claimants as to religiously conservative ones. As I wrote about in ARC magazine two weeks ago, the Court will soon have the opportunity to apply that jurisprudence to liberal churches seeking to shelter undocumented immigrants — we’ll see if that happens.

Despite these challenges, it is still possible to conceive of legal doctrine catching up with this remarkable religious reality, and I look forward to digging deeper into this question in the months and years to come. For now, I will close with a personal reflection on what it felt like to dream in this way in the context of our shared national nightmare.

First, as was discussed at the symposium, many psychonauts don’t see the Trump regime as a nightmare at all: they are excited about the possibilities of innovation less fettered by small-minded regulations and restrictions, and hold views which Appleman aptly described as psychedelic eugenicist. (I’ll talk more about this in a future newsletter, too). Psychedelics are, as Stanislav Grof put it, a “non-specific amplifier,” and they do not generate a particular political point of view. Psychedelic messianism is undercut by psychedelic realism.

At the same time, the increasingly non-partisan nature of psychedelics offers at least some space for common ground, at least between the libertarian wing of the Trump regime, the civil-liberties wing of the opposition, and the diagonalist-whatever wing of conspirituality and horseshoe politics. I have no illusions that this one issue will generate a new era of non-partisanship. But it’s interesting to see it as, perhaps, one site for it. Elevating the experiences of people in ‘traditional’ religious contexts from a wide range of political, religious, and social locations, might also usefully complicate the Drug-War-era assumptions about the kinds of people who ‘do’ psychedelics, and spiritual practice in general. This, too, seems like a good thing.

Second, whatever future (or lack thereof) awaits our nation and our species, it is my experience that psychedelics, in both therapeutic and spiritual contexts (and in the many that blend the two), offer ways to relate to both beauty and terror that can be profoundly empowering and healing. I do not believe, as many of my fellow ‘spiritual teachers’ do, that our role as pastors is to help the human race navigate civilizational hospice. But we might be headed to, at the very least, a civilizational ER. Certainly, the exponential growth in AI threatens how people understand ourselves and our value in the world. The Trump regime’s suicidal climate denial will accelerate chaos and, according to mainstream scientific data, cause millions of deaths in the not-too-distant future. And so on, and so on, and so on.

In that context, perhaps psychedelics, like other remedies for the crisis of meaning, will play a small role in human beings’ evolution into less selfish, cruel, and ethnocentric creatures; certainly, between Trump, Vance, and Musk, the ethnocentric instincts in the human mind are predominant at present, and one might see the mainstreaming of psychedelics as one form of resistance to them. Working in the psychedelics space often feels like a civilizational Hail-Mary pass, and, to mix sports metaphors, I think it’s worth taking that shot.

But even if psychedelics have no impact on increasing human empathy, they still may have an impact on human resilience, wonder, consciousness, and perspective – all of which have their own value and merit. There are ways of being that lie beyond the fences, malls, fears, panderings, and algorithmic enragements of our now-dominant culture. And, to paraphrase an overquoted Rumi poem, I’ll meet you there. For ‘when the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.’

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Here’s some great stuff I’ve read on this platform this week:

• Garbage Day
  offered a great read of UFC as the ‘beating heart of Trumpism.’

• Nate Silver
  offered typically granular data on how unpopular Trump is.

• Popular Information
  continues to talk about terrible things no one else is talking about, including one of the most loathsome characters in Trumpland I’ve ever encountered, which is saying a lot.

• Jules Evans
  took a deep, dark dive into Peter Thiel. Must read, if you can stomach it.

• And

  Chris Geidner
  has been indefatigably tracking Trump’s authoritarian attacks on the rule of law.