Minister Makes News By Mixing Faith With Psychedelic Drugs
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(OPINION) It’s not every day somebody from Mt. Sterling, the small town I’ve lived in more than 50 years, is featured in the New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker is arguably the swankiest periodical in the country.
So when Mt. Sterling native Hunt Priest, who pastored Episcopal congregations for 15 years, showed up there recently, I told my wife Liz, “I’ve got to talk to this guy.” I’d never met him. Liz contacted Hunt’s mom, Becky, a prominent and popular local resident, and Becky made it happen.
Hunt, 61, currently lives in in Savannah, Georgia, but he passed through Mt. Sterling to celebrate a family birthday. The four of us — Hunt, Becky, Liz and I — got together for a delightful Sunday afternoon conversation at a coffee shop. I followed up with Hunt via an email interview.
He’s a nice guy. Candid. Friendly. Animated.
I was intrigued by the article in which he’d been featured, “This Is Your Priest on Drugs.” It was written by Michael Pollan, author of such bestsellers as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.”
There’s been much academic and journalistic attention paid in recent years to the documentable benefits of treating a host of mental disorders with psychedelics.
“This Is Your Priest on Drugs” looks at a published study in which researchers administered psilocybin to clergy from various religious traditions. The goal was to see if the psychedelic compound, which is found in certain mushrooms, would lead to spiritual breakthroughs.
Priest saw an ad for the clergy study in 2015 in The Christian Century magazine. He was then serving an Episcopal congregation in Washington state, and he felt burned out.
The study was to be conducted at respected universities, was closely monitored and was legal.
Why not? he thought.
After a thorough screening process, in 2016 he traveled for two sessions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he was given psilocybin.
About 30 religious leaders had enrolled in the study, including a Catholic priest, a Baptist biblical scholar, several rabbis, an Islamic leader and a Zen Buddhist. Priest was one of four Episcopalians.
The peer-reviewed academic paper that resulted was published recently in Psychedelic Medicine. The methodology and sample size of the study have been criticized.
Still, 79% of those who took part in both of the sessions “reported that the experiences had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life,” Pollan reported. “Ninety-six percent rated their first encounter with psilocybin among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.”
Priest found his own experiences life-changing. The immediate effects on him, as recounted in the magazine article, are too lengthy to detail.
But here’s an example I — a Pentecostal preacher — find interesting.
A powerful electrical sensation moved up his left leg, to his throat. Then, “it blew out the top of my head, and then I started making these sounds that felt religious and spiritual and sacred,” Priest told the New Yorker’s Pollan. “I realized I was speaking in tongues, which I have never done before. Speaking in tongues is not an Episcopal sort of thing.”
He emerged from the psychedelic experiences completely different. “I was like a new creation.”
The relationship between religion — specifically Christianity — and mind-altering drugs has always been prickly. In the New Testament, the Greek word translated into English as the sin of sorcery is “pharmakeia,” which implies using drugs for divination.
The New Yorker says that after the Spanish arrived in the New World, the Roman Catholic Church banned the use of mushrooms in Aztec rituals. And so on.
However, Priest doesn’t necessarily agree with those prohibitions. To him, safety lies in using careful checks and balances.
“I don’t think there’s any inherent danger to bringing psychedelics and Christianity together, although anyone working with psychedelics should have a spiritual maturity,” he said.
“These are powerful substances and should be engaged with lots of discernment, spiritual and psychological support.”
Meanwhile, the benefits for the institutional church could be important:
“First, in helping people with mental health issues,” he said. “The medical research is clear that these substances, when administered in safe settings, can heal untreatable or difficult to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma. Why would we not be curious and supportive? The church’s ministry of healing is directly connected to Jesus’ healing ministry.”
The second benefit, he said, is that psychedelics can help mainstream Christians encounter God’s presence directly.
“In my case, in those two sessions at Hopkins, I experienced the Holy Spirit as an energy force moving through my body but also connecting me with others and with the God of the Trinity. The body truly is a temple of the Holy Spirit. For far too long, mainline protestant Christianity and the Roman Catholics have been suspicious of movements of the Spirit, leaving those experiences and insights to Pentecostal Christians.”
He’s become such a believer in the efficacy of psychedelics that he left the parish he was serving in Savannah to start an organization called Ligare, which in Latin means to join or link the human and the divine. It’s a root word of religion.
Ligare’s website describes it as “a Christian psychedelic society discerning how our faith and traditions may support the ethical and spiritually grounded use of psychedelics for the purpose of healing and renewal.”
I’m of two minds. I sympathize with Priest’s central point — we need something that helps folks connect with God in fresh, powerful ways. Yet I also worry about all those warnings against using psychedelic drugs to encounter God. I fear psychedelics might be a substitute for the real thing rather than a means toward it.
I asked: How does someone distinguish genuine revelations from drug-induced hallucinations?
“The experiences people report after psychedelic sessions are real,” Priest said. “What happened in my body and how I made meaning about it was not an hallucination. So much of scripture is about non-ordinary states of consciousness.
“For example, the whole book of Revelation, dreams remembered in scripture, the resurrection appearances of Jesus in John, Moses and the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, the magi following a star. Why do we imagine that God is not still working through our visions, dreams, and strange experiences of God?”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.