Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article with the eye-catching title “This Is Your Priest on Drugs.” The article reports the findings of a study in which “spiritually hungering” religious leaders from a diverse array of religious institutions were invited to take the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin to test how effective psychedelically induced “religious experiences” could be in rejuvenating participants’ sense of spiritual well-being. Unsurprisingly, the article explores with hopeful curiosity the drug’s therapeutic potential. Yet its potential is not constrained to merely enkindling a new flame in flagging spiritual lives. Rather, as one of the researchers and an avowed enthusiast of psychedelic medicine puts it, psylocibin has the broader power to inject “new life” into institutional religions suffering from waning popular interest. It has the power, the researcher implies, to make available to all and sundry those immediate experiences of God that were once the special province of mystics, unshackling common folk from the bonds of stale doctrine and placing in their hands the freedom to encounter the divine whenever they should please.
