I’m trying to balance my focus on the psychedelics movement with writing and content that covers a far broader array of topics (AKA my interests!). But this last week, the stars aligned for there to be a strong focus on the topic of psychedelics, with my first TGC (USA) article being released as well as a podcast conversation with the fine folks at What Would Jesus Tech (WWJT). Here’s a direct link to the YouTube version of the WWJT episode. I think they did a pretty good job with the podcast episode thumbnail image:
I wish I could say the same for the TGC article. The image they chose is a little creepy! Hah, oh well.
Many thanks to the hosts of WWJT for having me on and having such good questions. I really enjoyed our conversation. They are a legit podcast with some really legit and impressive guests. If you are a Christian interested in how technology (in all its manifestations) intersects with the faith, you need to check them out.
The TGC article, called “The Psychedelic Renaissance: A Story of Hype and Hubris,” is an “explainer” kind of essay where I try to inform the reader about this large and complex topic, but with an editorial twist where I render a verdict about the psychedelic movement in general. There is certainly some overlap with the article my late-2023 article at Mere Orthodoxy, but this recent one delves more deeply into the current state of the research and especially into the increasingly visible network of activists and funders who are pulling the strings behind the scenes of the public-facing pro-psychedelics movement. Here is how I conclude the first section of the article, which deals with this:
One thing ought to be clear: It simply isn’t the case that disinterested scientists have stumbled on surprising cures for mental health problems. Rather, advocates already committed to the promise of psychedelic therapies, usually bundled with New Age spiritual beliefs, have patiently pursued a strategy to build a veneer of scientific, medical respectability for their agenda.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for the public (and regulators) to parse the data and evaluate possible legitimate medical applications of these substances. It may be many years before those assessments can be made confidently, but that won’t stop a growing number of people from trying psychedelics for themselves.
One way I’ve started thinking about how Christians ought to respond to the psychedelics movement with with a dual response: one at low-resolution and a second one at higher-resolution. (I go into this idea a bit in response to some really thoughtful questions in the WWJT episode.) Here’s what I mean: the low Christian resolution response to the pro-psychedelics movement in general should be a giant waving red flag. In the article, I try to get this across with the following sentence: “The hype of healing will not ultimately deliver on its promises, and the hubris of spiritual exploration outside of Christ will expose many to unbiblical ideas and even demonic spiritual forces.”
That’s the first and most important thing for the church to get clear on, in my humble opinion. But there is a second, higher resolution response that is also legitimate. It has to do with a more narrow discussion about possible legitimate medical uses of psychedelic compounds for the treatment of specific issues such as PTSD, some forms of addiction, etc. This is separate from all discussion of spiritual or recreational uses, which are out of bounds if one takes the Scriptures as inerrant and authoritative.
I am still thinking through some of the nuances of this more narrow question about possible valid uses of these compounds in certain medical cases. The best treatment of the question I’ve come across so far is a journal article by Thomas Carroll, a Catholic medical doctor. He argues, convincingly in my view, that the specific problem with psychedelics is the mystical experience it generates for the user. This is what makes psychedelics unlike other substances, and why they rightly exist in a class of their own. Further, he argues that since Christians have a category for legitimate mystical experiences that are given by God, and since it has never been the teaching of the church that Christians ought to try and contrive these experiences themselves, that it is therefore illicit for Christians to intentionally take these substances for the purposes of some kind of therapy where the mechanism of healing is bound up with the mystical experience itself.
However, these substances have effects other than just the mystical experience. They make one more suggestible and they interrupt some of our deeply ingrained patterns of thinking; both of these effects have the potential to be powerful aids when coupled with wise counseling. There is indeed a little-known branch of psychedelic therapy known as psycholytic therapy (PLT) and it specifically focuses on using small doses in conjunction with talk therapy to work through problems. This approach has been eclipsed in recent years by the big push for and major coverage of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT).
Carroll’s article basically concludes that, since the mystical experience is the very mechanism by which psychedelic-assisted therapy functions, it should be considered illicit for Christians, but that participation in psycholytic therapy should be considered a question of personal conscience. This seems right to me, and it’s where I am landing at the moment.
A friend of mine sees this very similarly but takes a slightly different and more open position: he believes that a Christian could partake of psychedelic-assisted therapy as long as he regarded the mystical experience as a negative side-effect to be endured, a bug rather than a feature. This is very different from the general approach to psychedelic therapy, and although I’m not there myself, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable position for a Christian to take. My concern with it is how it actually plays out in practice. How do pastors counsel their church member to go through with this kind of therapy for their PTSD? How does one handle the possibility that despite going into it with the idea that I won’t place my hope in or even lend credence to this mystical experience, it ends up being so profound and powerful that I can’t help it? To me it seems to leave a door open that I think should remain shut.
That’s all for now. As always, thanks for reading and following.
Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande’s story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.
For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it’s that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I’ve ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.
There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.
The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one’s embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.
We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book ‘The Everlasting Man’.
For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.
I wrote in June that I’d done an interview with Justin Brierley for his documentary-style podcast, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. There is a book by the same name which I discussed here. Well, the podcast episode ‘dropped’ (as the cool kids say) yesterday and (okay one more) it is a ‘banger’. I can feel my kids cringing with embarrassment at my attempts to use dope slang, so I’ll stop. Here is the link to the episode:
What a privilege to be featured in this series – I honestly don’t know how it happened. Justin reached out on Twitter so I guess he saw my original article at Mere Orthodoxy and he just happened to be planning to deal with this topic. I found the episode informative and moving as it incorporated the testimony of Ashley Lande, who was formerly heavily into psychedelics. I hope you’ll check it out if you’re not already familiar with the series. The content and production quality are really top notch.
One of the themes that I touched on in my responses to Justin’s questions was the organized effort by various individuals and organizations to synthesize psychedelic use with mainstream religion, including Christianity. This evidently fell outside the scope of the episode’s focus, so all of that was edited out (which is totally fine). But it’s one of the things that most struck me and worried me as I researched the topic. On the more moderate and progressive side of mainline Protestantism and evangelicalism, I already see activists advocating for the spiritual benefits of psychedelics for Christians.
And one more comment before moving on from this topic. I do wish I had been a bit more clear and blunt in my conclusion of the dangers of psychedelics. So lest there be any confusion, I’ll do it now: Yes, some of the entities people encounter and engage with while on psychedelics are definitely demonic. And no, they don’t present themselves that way. I believe that using psychedelics puts you in great spiritual danger regardless of the other benefits that may be had. Thankfully not everyone who uses them encounters dark spiritual entities, and not everyone who encounters a demonic being while tripping finds themselves harassed and afflicted by that being subsequently, but these things most definitely happen. So, as encouraged as I am when I see a significant number of people being redeemed by Christ out of psychedelics use, I have no illusions about the scope of spiritual danger represented by widespread psychedelics use in our culture.
Staying on the theme of podcasts, I had the opportunity to join Jeremy Pryor and some other guests for a couple of Family Teams Podcast episodes. These were not about psychedelics. Rather, we discussed fatherhood, masculinity, family vision, the LGBT revolution, identity formation, Jordan Peterson, and Elon Musk. It was a good time, even though I was not able to be home in my office at recording time, so my audio quality is not great. You can find those here:
For those of you who asked, it seems the only way to secure a copy of the second edition of the Fellowship History book, A Glorious Fellowship of Churches, which was released for the annual convention in November 2023, is to call the Fellowship National offices and request one, old-school style. The cost is $30 (CAD) + shipping.
I thought I’d share a few thoughts about some of the books I’ve been reading. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to an audio version of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Some of those characters, so vividly portrayed in all their individuality, miraculously conjured up by that singular imagination, live on in my own mind: Mr. Peggotty, Mrs. Gummidge (poor, lorn creetur), Wilkins Micawber (too eloquent), Mr. Barkis (Barkis is willin’) and the loathsome, too-humble Uriah Heep. It was a long book, but the longer I listened the less I thought about the length, so immersed and invested was I in the characters and story.
I also got around to reading a classic in the realm of the modern psychedelics renaissance, a topic that I have been researching and writing on for some time now. The book is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. Pollan is a seasoned journalist and a good writer. The book is made up of two parts; the modern history of psychedelic use in the West and the story of his own psychedelic trips, which he undertook with the help of underground guides & counselors.
The book presents the best case for the use of psychedelics as modern healing medicine, and anyone with compassion for the suffering of others will be drawn to agree that these experiences can engender a sudden change of thinking. The brain science behind all this is all quite fascinating. The adult mind can and does get stuck into ruts of routine, patterns of narrow thought, and obsessive dark loops. The way some of these chemicals affect cognition and allow novel perspectives, the way they engender awe at the world, are all analogs of other experiences. That is why gazing at the starry sky, the ocean, or the grand canyon is so good for us. These are experiences of the transcendent and they make us feel small. They can be healing in the sense of jumping our patterns of thinking out of those ruts and seeing our relationships, our past, and our lives with fresh perspective.
But what about the spiritual aspect to all this? Pollan is a materialist. And despite his experiences that he freely describes as spiritual (the sense of being dissolved into the cosmos and a flood of love for everything in the universe), he remains atheistic. I was a bit amazed at the tenacity of his unbelief; an unbelief that was by no means the norm among the psychedelic practitioners he spent so much time around while writing this book. What was especially revelatory for me was just how deeply the academic and medical side of all this was interwoven with spiritual concepts and aspirations. The key researchers usually had some personal experience of psychedelics that set them on their particular path. Other key stakeholders in the movement were not shy about their own hopes, such as Bob Jesse, whose organization sponsored some early studies, who Pollan describes as having a mission whose focus is “not so much of medicine as of spiritual development.” Joe Welker has done some excellent writing on this particular aspect of the topic over at his Substack called Psychedelic Candor. I really appreciated his article in Christianity Today, which took a different approach to exploring the spiritual dangers of psychedelics than I did.
Pollan’s book is ideally attuned to presenting the promise of psychedelics to a secular audience, and it does this very well. I remain somewhat ambivalent about the gray areas of lower-dose therapies, or MDMA (which does not act like DMT, LSD, or Psilocybin mushrooms in transporting the user to other realms). I know those coming out of occult and New Age practices, including psychedelics for spiritual enlightenment, would oppose any and all use of these substances. Their conscience on the matter is understandably like the recovering alcoholic towards drinking alcohol – weak in the New Testament sense of being more restrictive. The more cautious side of me says why play with fire? Mark and avoid all of this as spiritually dangerous. The more compassionate side of me thinks of the soldiers tormented by PTSD, nightmares and flashbacks; those with stubborn depression that will not lift. Can these substances, in moderation, help? Unfortunately, the findings in the book seemed to show that the biggest results were tied to the most powerful trips. No Christian should be able to ignore the consistent testimony of those who have come to Christ out of heavy psychedelic use.
As for writing, I recently found out I will have a book review of Samuel James’ Digital Liturgies published in the March/April edition of Faith Today, which is probably the lead Christian periodical in Canada. I have another piece in the works, but all in all the writing has been slow these last few weeks. What can I say? It’s deep winter up here, and everything slows down.
The year of our Lord 2023 was the first full year of whatever era comes after the second Elizabethan age, what we might call the long twentieth century. As we turn upon this hinge of history, if you’ll permit me a mechanical metaphor, it feels as though the transmission long left in neutral is grinding its gears and lurching us all forward towards some foreboding edge.
In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s passing in 2022, I wrote a few words of reflection and poetry. What I tried to express in that piece was the combination of two strong impressions at work in my mind: the decline of our civilization and the hope of renewal. After reading the stimulating but pessimistic Rod Dreher, as well as the piercing but somber insights of Paul Kingsnorth, I feel as though that second element, the hope of renewal, is perhaps more of a distinctly Protestant posture than I had previously realized. Why might that be?
Well, I don’t think it’s terribly complicated. It was the Protestant church which was born in the midst of a bona fide revival as it recovered the glorious gospel which had too long been obscured. For a tiny taste of how that spiritual outpouring was experienced by normal everyday people in medieval Europe at the time of the reformation, see this short clip of pastor Mark Dever holding forth about assurance of salvation. It was the Protestant church which served as the vehicle for the Great Awakening which revitalized not only the church but affected the whole of the British empire (including the American colonies).
This heritage of revival and renewal is part and parcel of evangelical history, it shapes our imagination, and ever directs our hopes and prayers. I’m not at all sure this is true of Roman Catholic or Orthodox believers in the same way.
How fitting then that in the midst of all this talk about re-enchantment and the end of our godless era, it is a Protestant who decides to write a book called “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” Justin Brierley, the author, is ideally situated to comment on these shifts in public thought as he is perhaps the one person who has moderated the most high-level conversations between Christians and skeptics over the last decade and a half in his role as moderator and host of the UK-based radio show and podcast Unbelievable, as well as The Big Conversation and Re-Enchanting. And also another podcast by the same title as the book. The guy keeps busy.
In contrast to the more pessimistic takes on the decline of culture, which abound for understandable reasons, this book looks at the silver lining which we might characterize as the surprising appeal a number of influential public figures (and regular people like them) have been finding in the claims of Christianity. Brierley argues that this may be the first fruits of a coming harvest, the first wave of a newly rising tide of faith.
The metaphor of the tide is taken from Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach. The key lines are as follows:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Brierley opens the book with a stirring reflection on the idea that the powerful pull away from faith that characterized the two hundred years since the Enlightenment is now exhausted, the New Atheists of the 2000s being the last gasp of this spent force. I appreciated the well-researched summary of the New Atheist movement, from its confident rise to its fracturing and dissipation. Its bombastic, overheated rhetoric was matched only by the speed with which it collapsed into infighting and bloviating on Twitter. This dovetails with my own thinking and writing over the last few years, so I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly.
The term that kept coming back to me as I read the book was ‘plausibility structures,’ coined by the sociologist Peter Berger. The idea has a lot of overlap with Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ in the sense that it tries to capture the intangibles of why certain fashions of thought prevail at certain times. What Brierley describes, through profiles of recent converts like Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, and Christian-friendly thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Tom Holland, is a profound shift in our culture’s plausibility structures. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel ridiculous to posit that Christianity might be true. Rather, in an unexpected turn, it is those like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Steven Pinker, still bravely holding the line that Western moral values are self-evident from materialistic premises – despite the incoherence of this view and the rapidly accumulating counter-evidence in the accelerating moral disintegration of our societies – who now seem just a little bit ridiculous.
Time will tell whether Brierley, and I with him, are too optimistic about a turn back towards Christ. One of the interesting aspects of the “surprising rebirth of belief in God” is to note which streams of Christianity these people are being drawn to. There is certainly a draw to Orthodoxy that I never encountered until a few years ago, with the rising popularity of Jonathan Pageau and now Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw. In my own circles I certainly see many people being drawn to faith and baptized into healthy evangelical Protestant churches in a way that wasn’t typical five years ago. As Protestants firmly in the tradition of the great revivals, I think we cannot help thinking in the categories of renewal and longing for the same in our day. How could it be otherwise? The evangelical Protestant heart studies those high points of church history and says, “Lord, do it again.”
This brings me to another point which I have been pondering since Rod Dreher picked up on my psychedelics piece over at Mere Orthodoxy and wrote about it on his Substack. It’s behind a paywall, but Dreher interacted robustly and appreciatively with the claims of the piece before turning to a reflection on his own college LSD experience and the metaphysical questions it brought up for him.
He goes on to clarify what he does and doesn’t mean:
Let me be clear: we are NOT animistic! We do not believe that material things are God. There is an ontological gulf between Creator and Created. Yet we also believe that the divine energies (as distinct from the divine essence) fills all things. It’s like when the sun warms a meadow in the summer, we believe that the energies of the sun penetrate the meadow, and in some sense become part of the meadow’s existence. The lesson for us in this newsletter’s context is that the barrier between matter and spirit is far more porous than most of us moderns think. This is how the cosmos is truly constructed. This was far easier for pre-modern people to perceive; the use of psychedelics is a way to temporarily recover some of that pre-modern perception.
I find this all extremely interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the idea of modern and pre-modern metaphysics. Canadian Baptist theologian Craig Carter, author of the highly regarded ‘Great Tradition’ books, has written very helpfully on his Substack about these different approaches to metaphysics. Here is what he writes in a post called ‘Can Theology Do Without Metaphysics?‘:
The classical metaphysics of premodern Western culture sought to articulate what C. S. Lewis called “the Dao,” that is, the natural law that many cultures have recognized as built in to the fabric of reality. This natural law or wisdom has functioned as the foundation of cultures from Egypt to China to Israel. Positive law is an elaboration of it. Religion reinforces it. Political arrangements are judged by it. Morals are based on it.
After explaining how Plato made the foundational contribution to this project, he argues that “[d]uring the first five centuries of church history, the Platonic tradition was integrated with biblical revelation and the result was the Christian Platonism of Augustine.” He goes on to claim that the medieval synthesis of Aquinas was a high water mark for metaphysics, the undoing of which gave us modernity. After discussing how modernity manifests in three different modern approaches to theology (liberal, fundamentalist, and Barthian), he writes the following conclusion, which I will quote at length:
What can we take away from all of this? It seems to me that three points stand out as most important:
Christian theology is not merely a narrative we tell each other to express our experience of God. Rather, it is a metaphysical description of reality, that is, of God and all things in relation to God. It deals with objective truth, not merely subjective opinion.
Since metaphysical realism is a deduction from biblical revelation and necessary for an adequate statement of Christian orthodoxy, we must go back before the Enlightenment to the period of Protestant scholastic orthodoxy to pick up the thread of the Great Tradition and build further on the foundations of the tradition handed down to us from the church fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant reformers.
Evangelicalism, as the heir of fundamentalism, has failed us and so we need a revival of historic Protestantism. We need “Evangelical Protestantism” not merely “Evangelicalism.”
Theological liberalism, reactionary fundamentalism, and neo-orthodox Barthianism involve various degrees of compromise with modernity. But we should read the signs of the times and conclude that modernity has run its course and is now in the process of self-destruction. Those who marry the spirit of the age will soon find themselves widowed.
We are entering into a period of Ressourcement in which premodern exegesis, doctrine, and metaphysics are being recovered and used to reinvigorate twenty-first [century] theology. The recovery of Christian metaphysics is a massive task that will require the efforts of many historical and systematic theologians in the decades ahead. But it will be worthwhile because ultimately a theology without classical metaphysics can never be classical orthodoxy.
What’s the point of all this? In sum, that there is a core agreement between Dreher, an Orthodox believer and astute observer of culture, and Carter, a Canadian evangelical Protestant like myself, that modern metaphysics is a dead end, and that the future involves a ressourcement or a return to classical (pre-modern) metaphysics, which includes a more enchanted view of the world.
The second thing I find fascinating about the quote above from Dreher is the talk of a porous barrier between matter and spirit:
The lesson for us in this newsletter’s context is that the barrier between matter and spirit is far more porous than most of us moderns think. This is how the cosmos is truly constructed. This was far easier for pre-modern people to perceive; the use of psychedelics is a way to temporarily recover some of that pre-modern perception.
This is very important. I think you will find that many people in our society today are intuiting this porousness in a new way. Not everyone, of course, but there is a sizeable shift. For instance, many have noted that the events of the last three years have awakened them to the reality of evil, even of supernatural evil – Naomi Wolf would be one example of this. We see also the long-ridiculed and suppressed testimonies of those who have had some kind of contact with entities (extra-terrestrial or otherwise) finding unprecedented coverage and attention. We see a fascination with lost ancient civilizations and alternative narratives to the standard historical model teasing at lost high technologies and abilities. We see, as I’ve written about, a renaissance of interest in psychedelics and other ways to achieve altered states of consciousness. In other words, lots of weird stuff.
I recently got my hands on a book of essays by the philosopher Charles Taylor, in which I found the following quote in an essay titled “Disenchantment-Reenchantment”:
But the big change [brought about by disenchantment], which would be hard to undo, is that which has replaced the porous selves of yore with what I would describe as “buffered” selves. Let’s look again at the enchanted world, the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, and spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans (grosso modo, with apologies to possible Martians or extraterrestrials); and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, and so forth are situated “within” them.
I agree with Taylor that, circa 2011, when this book was released, there seemed to be no chink in the armor of the buffered self. New Atheism was at its height and materialism had the glossy shine of triumphant explanatory power. But today we seem to be entering a different moment, the plausibility structures have shifted, and many today experience a porousness that I think Taylor may find positively medieval, or even pagan.
This is the theme of professor (of religious studies) Diana Pasulka’s recent book, Encounters, which traces the stories of a number of people who experience encounters with… beings, or entities, beyond normal classification. Scratch beneath the surface of people into these fringe topics, and what you find is precisely the opposite of what Taylor asserts about the modern mind: the “only locus of thoughts, feelings, and spiritual élan,” “bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, and so forth are situated ‘within’ them.” Rather, you find people whose experience is that there are others who can reach into our lives, our homes, and our very minds seemingly at will.
The last thing Dreher turned to is the way in which Orthodoxy, in his view, is uniquely positioned to meet this porous reality:
I believe that Orthodoxy — which is a Way of Life attached to a religious institution — is the best and most complete way to prepare oneself for that encounter [with God]. This is something hard to express to a Western Christian, whose idea of Christianity typically has more to do with propositional thought — with thinking about God, as opposed to experiencing Him.
I’m not sure how to respond to this as a Protestant. In fact, it’s a question I’d like to pose to Mr. Brierley and other evangelicals who are attuned to this whole discussion: How does evangelical Protestantism address this desire for the supernatural to infuse our everyday reality? How can those who are searching for some touch of the transcendent through psychedelics or other pursuits find their true heart’s desire in the form of faith our churches teach?
I think Protestantism can and does meet those desires through, in part, its stream of warm-hearted pietism – the intimacy of a close walk with Christ – but I’m also open to the idea that we have something to learn from the Orthodox in this regard. What would you say?
Whatever the case, we certainly live in interesting days, and my hope and prayer is that by the Father’s good will we might see a glorious outpouring of the Spirit causing a glorious ingathering of souls into the divine enchantment of Christ. Lord, do it again.
That was the proposed title for my newest article, but I can understand why the editor opted to go with something a little more accessible: The Coming Psychedelic Moment. You can find it over at Mere Orthodoxy, an online and print publication that regularly features very thoughtful engagement with the culture from a broadly Protestant perspective. It’s my first piece there, and I’m thankful for the editor, Jake Meador, showing interest in my work and giving me an opportunity to contribute to the intelligent conversation which takes place in their pages.
The idea for this piece came to me one random morning while driving to work. I remember dictating some scattered thoughts and big ideas to my phone and texting it to myself. I saw in a moment of clarity that there was a collision coming our way as two speeding trains were heading for one another.
The first was the downward spiral of worsening mental health among young people. Too complex in its variegated causes to be parsed by me, it could still be presented as a fact. And a fact that meant a growing market demand for answers and solutions.
The second speeding train was the fast-growing level of interest in psychedelics for its medical, therapeutic, and spiritual benefits. With unprecedented institutional support, medical research, and breathless endorsements from celebrities, this train has been gaining steam for quite some time now.
Without some unforeseen intervention, I cannot see what would prevent the popularity of psychedelics from continuing to rise as a primary vehicle for meeting the demands of the mental sufferers that our nihilistic and digitally-addicted age produces. But what will be the result of this collision?
The article is my attempt to answer that question, and to frame all this as part of the broader re-enchantment overtaking the West in our time. The tide of atheism is receding, and the fringes are washing in towards the center again. The world will get weirder and weirder as our overdue payments to reality, which is endlessly weird, come due after deferring them under the pleasant illusions of materialistic naturalism.
This was one of those articles that took a few months to write, bit by bit. I find these the most demanding and most rewarding. I hope you’ll click over and give it a read and share it with someone who might be helped by it. You know, “like and subscribe” and all that self-serving nonsense that is part and parcel of the digital content-creation game.
One of the joys of writing and reading online is stumbling upon hidden gems, and that happened to me shortly after the article above went live. It was linked and suggested to a certain Ashley Lande, who it turns out is one of these New-Age-to-Jesus converts and the author of a fantastic essay, The Self Destroyed, about that journey. It was published at Ekstasis Magazine, an artistic offshoot of Christianity Today. It is a beautifully-written account of her journey through psychedelics and New Age practices (read: endless wheel of religious works) to Christ. You can find it here: Link.
One of the aspects of her story which struck me was how the experience of having a baby helped to deconstruct her false belief system. This was uncannily similar to the testimony of the brilliant and contrarian writer Mary Harrington, whose book I reviewed here a while ago. It has often been remarked that the idealism and ideologies of youth do not always survive the transition to family life, and perhaps these are two more examples of that. But for women there seems to be something particularly powerful about the process of growing a life, a soul, inside one’s body, and then getting to hold and behold that little person in one’s arms.
Is there anything more undeniably real and powerful than this miraculous experience? How can it not slip a few shafts of light through whatever umbrella of protective beliefs we have collected around ourselves? And I think there is another level of meaning here, for in the Christian story the salvation of the world is wrapped up in this very thing: the birth of a baby. We glimpse the first echoes of this in Genesis 3, when we read that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the offspring of the serpent. And you might have heard of this thing called Christmas, or the Incarnation.
The experiences of our lives connect us to these biggest-of-all themes in ways that our modern, truncated, and flattened mindset cannot easily grasp. But at a deeper level—on the mythic, symbolic level where most humans have lived throughout history—these experiences have purchase and weight enough to move the unseen things.
One of the great joys of the Christian life is making those connections at this deeper level; to recognize that we all participate in the patterns that govern all of reality, and that these patterns exist and extend fractally from the heavenly host around the throne to the church gathered in worship to the children sitting around my table – He upholds “all things by the word of his power.”
Just a quick little post to say that my article got published on Rav Arora’s Substack, Noble Truths: Click here to read it. And I hope you will. I consider it a notable act of hospitality on his part to invite me to publicly disagree with him on this important topic and to offer my perspective.
In the process of writing and editing the piece, Rav and I have had two phone conversations as well. He asks a lot of really good and challenging questions, and forces me to think more carefully about my own positions. I appreciate that. The plan is to record a podcast where we revisit these themes and questions together.
I really didn’t plan to think and write so much about psychedelics, and I’m an unlikely candidate for the job, but here we are.
As I mentioned in a recent update post, I’m at T4G this week. We just finished the first day. It’s quite a production, let me tell you. But it’s been tremendous: encouraging, edifying, enjoyable. And the highlights are the random breakfast conversations in the hotel and reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in 10 years as much as the main sessions – which have been excellent. And I haven’t mentioned the singing or the books. Well, I can see why it’s been popular.
There’s been lots of discussion in the panels about the meaning of the current ‘moment’ in reformed evangelicalism, the conference’s role in that, and what comes next. I’ll surely have more thoughts, but for now I’m enjoying taking it all in.
Phil's Scribblings 