When Jesus Shows Up on a Psychedelic Trip
A conversation with Elizabeth Oldfield on the psychedelic renaissance, why New Atheism is dead, and the limitations of seeking peak experiences, including in the church.
For the past several months, I’ve been getting Instagram ads for mushroom micro-dosing. Maybe you have too. We’re living in what’s been called a psychedelic renaissance, no doubt due to compelling findings in recent decades that various psychedelics — most commonly psilocybin, the psychedelic found in mushrooms — are shown to be powerfully effective in treating PTSD, eating disorders, and various other mental and spiritual maladies.
On the whole, this is not your Boomer parents’ “tune in, turn on, drop out” vibe remixed for the TikTok generation. While hallucinogenic drugs will always attract reckless and dangerous use, today’s psychedelic renaissance is on the whole more intentional, framed as self-care, personal growth, and a quest for God.
I hadn’t given much thought to psychedelics until 2019, after reading the book we perhaps have most to thank for mainstreaming the conversation. Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind is a fascinating and pretty wild read, given that Pollan tries several of the drugs and reports back from his trips. It left me a bit bewildered by what to think of it all — especially given how profoundly spiritual some users say their experiences are, and that occasionally, they lead people to Jesus.
That’s why I wanted to speak with
, a UK-based author and podcaster, who tweeted this recently: “Several people have made their way to our micro-monastery wanting to explore Christianity as a direct result of using psychedelics.” For reasons she shared with me below, she also isn’t compelled to try them.Elizabeth, also the author of a wonderful forthcoming Brazos Press book called Fully Alive, spoke with me about what people are seeking when they come to her intentional community, whether psychedelic experiences are true encounters with Divine Love or something more insidious, and how important it is for Christians to assume a posture of curiosity rather than judgment.
You recently spoke with the psychologist
, who touched on his use of psychedelics in the 1990s. You shared that you’re friends with other male scholars who have also taken psychedelics, and that their experience has weakened a materialistic worldview. Why is that?The ones who come and talk to me are mainly men and have often traveled a familiar path, from a [Richard] Dawkins-esque or Dawkins-lite rite of passage for teen boys, and then men in their 20s whose self-identity involves being intelligent or interested in ideas, and then they have long gone looking for different places for wisdom.
In more recent years, psychedelics form a really big part of the men in my generation’s search for meaning and wisdom. I often use this phrase “spiritual core strength,” they probably wouldn’t use it, but that’s what I think they’re looking for: some sort of steadying in a world that certainly feels unstable. They’ll often talk about having been an atheist and having experimented with psychedelics and having encountered something that makes it hard to believe that the world is purely material or there is no spiritual reality. I find that whole phenomenon very intriguing.
I assume this use of psychedelics is not happening in a party setting. It is a controlled setting, there’s an intentionality and maybe a ritualizing around it to say, “I’m doing something serious and earnest, with this good faith effort to whatever the universe wants to show me,” to use the parlance.
Yes, psychedelics was just one of the classes of recreational drugs that people were taking in my 20s and early 30s. I have never done any of them, I am startlingly innocent, I’ve never felt the need, but lots of my friends have taken many different substances, and this was just one of them.
In the last five to ten years, there’s been this shift, even outside highly controlled medical settings — which is also been a big part of the psychedelic renaissance, that as the data set proving that controlled use of psychedelics has strong efficacy for PTSD, for eating disorders, for treatment-resistant depression — as that medical usage grew in legitimacy, around it you had more of what we were seeing in the 1960s, as part of a search for healing or enlightenment or spiritual experiences. People go into these experiences with the hope they might help with something about their human condition. That has become hugely mainstreamed in the last few years, and is changing the spiritual landscape in quite radical ways.
I was telling an acquaintance recently that the New Atheists seem outdated or even dorky now — that a hardened materialist, virulently anti-religious worldview seems increasingly untenable and prejudiced. What’s going on in the cultural waters of the West that’s drawing people to psychedelics?
The New Atheism was able to be very respectable at a time when it looked like Enlightenment values had triumphed, that democracy had rolled out around the globe, that we had moved from the mists of superstition into the lands of human reason and ingenuity. The combination of geopolitical meltdown, climate catastrophe, potential technological self-obliteration — it’s a really hard story to tell now. Steven Pinker is trying his best to tell the story that all is well and we continue to progress in this Whiggish vision of history. But for my generation and those younger than me, that just looks like nonsense, like hubris, like burying your head in the sand and complete dissociation from the suffering of millions of people around the globe.
The story that human reasoning and ingenuity unshackled from the quagmire of superstition will save us no longer feels like a story that many people can locate themselves in.
is influential in his understanding of the “meaning crisis,” that if you’re not part of a big story or a metanarrative, if you’re not part of a community and not really part of a nation, if you’re not sure what your purpose is, where do you find meaning and wisdom? That seems to be driving a lot of people into psychedelics and mysticism of all different kinds and, in some cases, Christianity.The social stigma of admitting to those metaphysical yearnings for meaning and belonging and a place to steady your soul has just gone. It’s easier to say, “I feel the meaning crisis, and it’s horrible.”
You recently tweeted that you live in a micro-monastery — in the States we might call it an intentional Christian community — and people are coming to it as a result of a psychedelic experience. What are they looking for?
Some of them are just very explicitly looking for Jesus. As a Christian, how do I respond from my tradition, which has felt to me a good way of holding together awe and transcendence and ecstatic experience and encounters with divine love, with rigor and communal practice? Which is one thing that’s missing from the psychedelic renaissance: long-term care for people who are having these spiritual awakenings.
But often when people come who are more explicitly spiritually searching, psychedelics have been part of their story, and they’re often looking for someone to talk to about it, who isn’t going to shame them for wondering what the Divine might have to do with it. In many cases they have had some sort of encounter with Jesus on a trip. They want to talk to someone who enjoys talking about Jesus.
Some of the people coming to your community would say they’ve had some kind of encounter with Jesus on a trip.
Yes. Some in our case, and I hear from friends who are more embedded in the psychedelic renaissance that it’s a really common experience.
So we should probably talk about that. What’s going on? What do you make of those accounts?
I’m not sure what’s going on. My friend
, who has been writing a lot about these dynamics in the psychedelic renaissance for a long time, his feeling is that Christianity is just deep in the subconscious of most people in the West, so when you start unleashing the subconscious, out pops Jesus.My honest gut instinct is that when people are honestly seeking love and wisdom and in need of it, they are met with love and wisdom. “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you shall find” (Matt. 7:7). But maybe it’s a mixture of both of those. It’s messy and complex and outside our watertight scientific and doctrinal stories. At this stage, what I’m keen on is that we as a church listen and don’t knee-jerk to think we know what’s happening, and seek to discern what the Spirit is up to in this moment.
And there are people who think this is deeply dangerous, that you’re opening yourself up to principalities and powers, that you are messing with the occult. And I’m someone who believes that the Scripture teaches there is an Enemy of some kind, so it’s not that I would dismiss any of that. And also I think some people are having their very first or a renewed encounter of the love of God in Christ, and it’s part of their movement towards him.
You say you’ve never been compelled to try plant-based medicine. Why?
What drives a lot of people to them is more than idle curiosity, it’s a sense of need. And I don’t have a sense of need. And there’s no real way of saying this without sounding insufferably smug, I feel like I want to check my spiritual privilege, but I’m extremely grateful to be massively existentially satisfied. I experience the love of God and I’m a charismatic Christian — this is gonna make me cry — I have experiences in my life of encounters with a Love that is beyond me, that is overwhelming and transcendent and satisfies the hunger that’s probably driving these experiences.
And the more I walk with people and learn about this world, particularly as you see the huge growth in this sector as the profit potential of it becomes more obvious, the more aware I am of the potential for harm. This is powerful stuff, and it can be powerfully helpful, and powerfully dangerous. The stories of people who have had lastingly negative experiences are more and more numerous.
And I don’t buy that peak experiences are what the spiritual life is all about. The risk with seeking your whole spirituality in peak experiences, either in more conventionally Christian settings or in psychedelic trips — those experiences are supposed to keep us going along the narrow way, but they are not the narrow way.
I value my ecstatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but they feel safe because I have a set of Scriptures in which they are framed and make sense, and if what I’m experiencing in those ecstatic moments is radically at odds with what I’m seeing in Scripture, that can give me pause. And I’m part of a community where I can talk to other people about their experience and have some sort of common language and be on a path where we are not just seeking peak experiences but seeking to take those moments of Divine Love and use them to serve each other. These gifts are for each other and for the world, not solely for our own growth and healing. But are a body, a collective, a community.
And there’s no getting around the intensely personal nature of these experiences. What happened to you happened to just you, and there’s an interesting parallel between that and charismatic consumerism, where the posture is looking for a spiritual high just between me and God. I think it’s right to always be thinking about how ecstatic experiences can foster greater care for each other and the world.
My Christian tradition holds together beautiful and profound experiences of encounter with the love of God with very direct commands to feed the hungry, and act for justice, and seek humility, and love my neighbor — basically calls out so much of the bullshit that is not automatically cured by a peak experience.
You can still be insufferable after a peak experience.
That’s where my caution comes in. You asked me earlier what people are looking for when they come to our community, and my answer is: community. They’re looking for other people. We have a rule of life, a time when we always pray compline and a time when we always pray morning prayer. Dinners happen. Our spirituality unfolds slowly in a monastic rhythm. Every so often I have an ecstatic experience, but then I go back to the long, slow work of formation.
There is a conversation going on between Thomas Merton and Aldous Huxley in the 1960s on this question: Is it that, through hours of prayer and meditation of the Scripture or charismatic worship songs, that what happens in psychedelics is basically a sped-up version of that? Or is it a simulacrum? I think about it as like someone who’s done loads of bodybuilding versus someone whose muscles have been stimulated by an electric current.
That’s really an open question for me, because I’m interested in the work of Iain McGilchrist on brain hemispheres, and the way different hemispheres pay attention, and this hunch that contemplative practices of prayer and meditation are right-hemispheric forms of attention. And can psychedelics speed up people’s ability to pay attention in right-hemispheric ways, to see the ways that things are interconnected, to see the whole and not just the parts, to see the living world, not just inanimate objects? In which case, I think Christians should cautiously welcome careful usage, because I believe there is something objectively real beyond us that we encounter in the love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.
I think now of when it says in Scripture that they hardened their hearts. I wonder if left-hemispheric forms of attention are hardening the hearts of people to be able to encounter divine love, and that maybe psychedelics soften people’s hearts. But they also might be doing something much less than that or worse than that.
As that unfolds, Christians need to have a curious and open posture, and that’s what I’m trying to hold. Listen deeply to where people actually are without judgment, with curiosity and empathy, and then if we are wanted, walk with them and offer what we have experienced from our tradition and our life. And for a lot of people, what happens after a psychedelic experience is that they do become more curious and they are seeking community and rhythms and rituals, and a different set and setting. And there’s a huge opportunity here. But not jumping to judgment about whether this is a vast movement of the Holy Spirit, or something harmful — it feels like we should just pause and listen with curiosity. —KB
P.S. - The Beaty Beat will be on hiatus for the next couple weeks while I do a big national parks trip out West (Sequoia, Zion, and the Grand Canyon!). I’ll have much more bandwidth to write consistently this summer, so if there are particular topics you’d like me to tackle, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. Thanks as always for reading.
Wow. This was a fascinating read for me. My eldest child (now late-20s) is all over the map, spiritually--like a sample pack of belief systems from around the globe. Psychedelics have definitely played a role in this spiritual quest, and the drive seems to be a desire for community, belonging, and fulfillment. From my fairly conservative Christian upbringing, I have struggled with how to process and approach conversations on this topic, but this post gives me a framework to start. Thanks for putting the time into this.
Walk well, be safe, KB. Know angels walk beside you.