Pub Theology 5/27/25 -- High on faith
Some seven years back, researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins University launched a study in which they enlisted some two dozen religious leaders from a variety of traditions -- priests, pastors, rabbis, Zen Buddhist monks, Islamic prayer leaders -- to take part in a research project exploring psychedelics and sacred experience. The experiment was intended to assess whether a transcendental experience makes the leaders more effective and confident in their work and how it alters their religious thinking. You can read about the setup of the study in this article from The Guardian.
It turns out that the study produced some really interesting results. A story published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker tells the tale. Unfortunately that article is locked behind a paywall, but the author, Michael Pollan (who has written extensively about the use of psychedelics and their effects), however, summarized some of what the study found in this interview. Pollan writes that the participants described their regarded their mushroom-induced trips as authentic mystical experiences, not just a drug experience. For some, the experience was truly transformative.
One of the surprising findings that Pollan remarked upon was that "their experiences were not always consistent with the imagery or symbolism of their own faiths. One Christian theologian said God was like a Jewish mother. In fact, most of the people I interviewed felt that the divine they encountered was feminine. That blew their minds; and it blew mine, too. ... Just about everybody had an encounter with the divine, and for the most part it was a feminine, nurturing, sweet presence. We have such a patriarchal understanding of religion, and most stereotypes of God are gendered masculine. So I think it’s ironic, and somewhat humorous, that under the influence of psychedelics God turns out to be more female than male."
Nearly all of the participants rated their first experience with psilocybin as among the top five most spiritually significant events of their lives. Among participants who had two sessions, the researchers found that a striking number—seventy-nine per cent—reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life. It turns out that there is a long history of people trying to trace a connection between the early Christian church's eucharistic practice and psychedelic substances, though scholars have their doubts. This article from The Christian Century goes into some of that fascinating story.
For our conversation this evening, we're going to talk about psychedelics and spirituality. Do you have experience with this? If so, what was your experience like? If not, would you try it? Do you feel that a spiritual experience augmented by substances is more or less valid than other spiritual experiences? The discussion starts at 7pm tonight, May 27, at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
