Thank you for this timely article. As an Anglican priest (The Episcopal Church), the executive director of Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, and a participant in the Hopkins/NYU religious, I am happy to report that there is growing interest in the intersection of psychedelics and Christian ritual and practice. Sadly, many American Protestants and evangelicals aren’t aware of and often disdainful of Christian ritual and spiritual practice. I believe that healing liturgies, rites of reconciliation, prayer and meditation, lectio divina, chanting, retreats can and should be part of psychedelic experiences for Christians. On retreat, holy Eucharist could begin and end a 3 day retreat. We don’t need to appropriate rituals and practices from other traditions. We have our own, used for millennia, to hold and facilitate experiences of God.
The NAC got its start in part when RLDS prophet Fred M. Smith became a user and advocate of peyote in the early 1900s, at one point as early as 1914 advocating its use from the pulpit. Smith was on friendly terms with native peyote users who initiated him into its use, and some of whom converted to the RLDS faith and later left for reasons having less to do with ‘Christian colonialism’ (whatever that undefined term means), and more about the Mormon prohibition against tobacco. Dig deeper and you’ll find the Christian connection to psychedelics has historical roots in Mormonism that precede the Good Friday experiment by decades to more than a century.
I enjoyed your article however, please revise your inaccurate and sadly misleading phrase: “Huxley and his mescaline dealer, psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond…”
Thank you for this timely article. As an Anglican priest (The Episcopal Church), the executive director of Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, and a participant in the Hopkins/NYU religious, I am happy to report that there is growing interest in the intersection of psychedelics and Christian ritual and practice. Sadly, many American Protestants and evangelicals aren’t aware of and often disdainful of Christian ritual and spiritual practice. I believe that healing liturgies, rites of reconciliation, prayer and meditation, lectio divina, chanting, retreats can and should be part of psychedelic experiences for Christians. On retreat, holy Eucharist could begin and end a 3 day retreat. We don’t need to appropriate rituals and practices from other traditions. We have our own, used for millennia, to hold and facilitate experiences of God.
The NAC got its start in part when RLDS prophet Fred M. Smith became a user and advocate of peyote in the early 1900s, at one point as early as 1914 advocating its use from the pulpit. Smith was on friendly terms with native peyote users who initiated him into its use, and some of whom converted to the RLDS faith and later left for reasons having less to do with ‘Christian colonialism’ (whatever that undefined term means), and more about the Mormon prohibition against tobacco. Dig deeper and you’ll find the Christian connection to psychedelics has historical roots in Mormonism that precede the Good Friday experiment by decades to more than a century.
I enjoyed your article however, please revise your inaccurate and sadly misleading phrase: “Huxley and his mescaline dealer, psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond…”