Christianity Psychedelics and Religion on the Move

This is a talk I shared last year at Stanford's "Religion on the Move" conference.

Today I’m talking about psychedelic plants and Christianity.

With you, I hope to explore the ways in which a current psychedelic renaissance – one could also call it psychedelics second wave – might serve to re-story Christian hegemonic thought and systemic oppression.

What I’m curious about is not found in the pharmaceutical or medical or psychological discourse, it’s in the Christian spiritual and religious discussions. To center this inquiry some more, psychiatrist and psychonaut Stan Grof asserts that “we are the first species in history that has achieved the capacity to eradicate itself and, in the process, we have threatened the evolution of life on the planet.”1 Between all of our attempts to intervene, we have had very little success in changing this outcome. Grof suggests that we have “have failed because the strategies used to alleviate these crises are rooted in the same ideology that created it in the first place.”2 I’m reminded of feminist and activist Audre Lorde who wrote, the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. The sentiment of both Grof and Lorde surfaces a question, what worldview are Christians using to interpret experiences from psychedelic journeys that heal?  Because if it’s the same ideology that uplifted Christian hegemony in the first place, is healing even possible?

So my inquiry today is what are the masters tools in the world of Christian hegemony and psychedelics? And how might they impact the way Christians in the United States make meaning out of encounters with psychedelic plants?

I come to this conversation with a feminist and integral lens. The feminist lens points towards a political agenda that actively seeks to disrupt abuses of power. While an integral lens seeks to integrate a framework for critical theory that includes physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of coming to know.3 To date, I have sat in over 100 plant based psychedelic ceremonies. For me, knowing spirit is an essential part of my mystical practice and is deeply embedded in a drive for community health and well-being. As I reflect on this particular milestone, I find myself returning to issues of the body. Because even though I may have developed a deeper understanding of divine oneness and connection with spirit, I am still trying to make sense of embodied violence in the world. I believe we are a human and non-human family currently in a lot of distress. And the suffering is not just between human bodies, it is also the destabilization of land body, planet body, and cosmic body.

Which brings us here to today – to a graduate student conference on religion where I am talking about Christian hegemony and meaning making from psychedelic plants.

In the end this isn’t a critique on Christianity as much as it is a critique on domination.

But for the moment, I’m looking through the lens of hegemonic Christian thought and hoping to tease apart and make visible the thinking that leads to domination.

There is so much about Christianity that has been captivated by norms. When it comes to Christian hegemony, I often think about dominant forces that police the boundaries of purity, who is and is not worthy of God’s love, and the redemptive power of violence.  I think about dualisms between saved/sinner, good/evil, heaven/hell, and the monitoring of Christian moral boundaries in order to sanctify what is in and vilify what is out.4

For what it’s worth, I consider myself a cultural Christian – I grew up in the countercultural shadow of a Christian hangover. Both of my parents (one Catholic and one Lutheran) vowed to keep me and my sister from experiencing the harm they felt as a result of their religious upbringing. But nevertheless, the core myths and metaphors of Christianity informed our family habits, stories, and community relationships. Because of this, I consider myself to have grown up secular but still very much a Christian. Today I am revisiting this idea of cultural Christian and seeking to explore a relationship within the paleo Christian religious doctrine and faith of my great grandmothers and great grandfathers.

I return again to the guiding question of this talk, what does it mean to be a Christian who is seeking communion with God while in the partnership of psychedelic plants?

If domination is built into Christian ontologies, and if those Christian ontologies are pervasive enough to dominate even secular and cultural Christians, then how does one choose a worldview that seeks equality, or does not re-story inequality once again?

To begin, I’d like to share a story that might help set the context for this inquiry. After that, I’ll explore some perspectives of Christianity and psychedelics in the United States. And finally, I’ll conclude by exploring a gap in knowledge that I hope to fill with my dissertation.

I sat with someone I’ll call Natalia. It was during her first few times drinking ayahuasca that we met.5 We sat together two days in a row. She shared with me that her first night was a beautiful experience. The second night was horror. She saw her mom in a vision and was reminded of her mom’s recent, unexpected, and violent death. It brought her to consider the fragility of her life which led her down a spiral until at one point, she was sure she was dying right then and there.

The truth is she was physically fine. But she was struggling with intense fright.  At one point, she was underground, buried alive. Next, she was surrounded and then swallowed by a great serpent. For the next few weeks after ceremony, she struggled to make sense of what she saw. Months later as she walked casually through one of Oaklands scariest haunted Halloween houses she declared, “It’s still not as scary as ayahuasca.”

Outside of that particular ceremony, Natalia is a practicing Catholic. She goes to mass most every Sunday. Her story got me thinking, how does someone like Natalia make sense of visions and experiences during psychedelic ceremonies?  For Catholics, the serpent in the context of Adam and Eve can be a symbol of sin and the devil. As a point of contrast, for the Shipibo, an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon whose culture and livelihood are built around ayahuasca, the anaconda is a great serpent that is often known as a healer who meanders the rivers and reflects the patterns and movements of life.6 In other words, depending on one’s cosmological worldview, the same mystical experience can generate vastly different meanings.

When I think about Natalia, I consider an ethical dilemma. Was she set up to have an intensely fearful experience because of her Catholic worldview? Maybe it’s not a Catholic religion that is to blame for Natalia’s experience, but instead the colonial echoes of domination deeply embedded in popular interpretation of Christian myths and metaphors.

To this day, I wonder if Christianity’s role in domination is the thing that caused grief for Natalia that night – grief that extends to this very day.  The interpretation of a snake as sinful is not only a reminder of a dualistic binary between sinner and saved but also a reminder of a Christian universal truth – that which is opposite of the Christian, is also opposite God, and that which is opposite God, is irredeemably dangerous. For Natalia, it’s possible that the mythology around Catholic sin and the serpent, set the stage for an internal cosmic battle between good and evil.

If you can, hold onto Natalia’s story while I shift to take a look at Christianity and hegemony in the United States. A little bit later we’ll revisit her story and I’ll attempt to braid meaning throughout the rest of the talk.

Paul Kivel defines “Christian hegemony as the everyday, systematic set of Christian values, individuals and institutions that dominate all aspects of US society.”7 He writes, “nothing is unaffected.”8 Kivel is writing about the epistemic dominance of Christianity in the United States. He writes about Christian ideological concepts like one true God, original sin, and manifest destiny and how they end up shaping the way people think.  Kivel’s discourse around Christianity and hegemony is presented such that Christianity in the United States is not just a foundational formula but a dominant force as well. According to Kivel, Christianity’s reach is so vast and so networked, that it can be challenging to describe its impact, and even harder for Christians and non-Christians alike to explain.

Despite the difficulty in demonstrating Christianity’s reach, feminist liberatory theologians nonetheless continue to deconstruct Christian ontological and epistemological narratives of domination.9 But, as Kivel argues, the curious thing about a history of western Christian ontology is that it often represents a deontology that reinforces duty and obligation to a Christian universal truth – to the one true God. This worldview tends to silence other ways of knowing, while at the same time, deliberately not focus on itself.10 This way of thinking happens to also be a distinct feature of whiteness. Sarah Ahmed writes of “whiteness, as a category of experience that disappears as a category through experience” and “how whiteness is lived as a background to experience.”11 In other words, both Christian hegemony and whiteness have the intended impact of imparting a way of thinking as though it were the only way to know, while at the same time denying its particular way of knowing.

Kivel hopes to uncover some of the hidden aspects of Christian hegemony by highlighting a war metaphor which he calls the Christian cosmic battle.12 Underpinning the frame of a cosmic battle is the idea of a universal truth – a model for thinking that is ripe for conflict when the definition of truth comes into question.

Joseph Campbell, a professor of comparative mythology and religion, dedicated much of his work to understanding universal archetypes. Campbell’s effort leveraged the work of Carl Jung and helped many westerners make sense of the more challenging and ineffable aspects of spiritual experiences. At the same time, Campbell also contributed to the idea that Western viewpoints are universal truths. Campbell’s universal archetypes might serve as a reflection of Christian hegemony and how seamlessly universal truths can be created from within a western paradigmatic lens. 

Psychiatrist and psychonaut Stanislav Grof, pushed Campbell’s universal archetype theories further and dedicated much of his life’s work to the ineffable aspects of psychology and psychiatry -- two fields often steeped in scientific materialism and rationalism. While Grof’s groundbreaking work was with psychedelics and breathwork, he too contributed to universalizing epistemic frameworks through his theories on the perinatal and natal birth process as the location for causing and curing psychological ills.13 Up to this point, I have yet to witness Grof reflect on the potential flaws of his own universalizing framework. He did, however, observe that misrepresentation of universal archetypes throughout time have led to conflict, war, and bloodshed.14 Grof noted a particular kind of struggle rooted in a universalizing Christian truth, and the Christian domination of pagans and repeated attempts to kill midwifes, healers, and witches. Grof also noted that the Christian demand for universal truth was not just between world religions but could also be found inside the complex category of Christianity itself – noting differences in tenets between Catholics and Protestants have generated even more wars and even more bloodshed.

It is interesting that both Grof and Campbell took time to point out issues with universalizing frameworks yet failed to reflect upon their own contribution to the same universalizing framework. I suspect this reflects the slipperiness of Christian hegemony and whiteness and how the desire for universal truth also limits one’s capacity for reflection upon one’s own subjectivity. Perhaps this is why both Grof and Campbell have been able to on the one hand, write about conflicts and bloodshed related to universalizing truths, while on the other, fail to notice their own contribution to the same universalizing frameworks.

If universalizing is a concept built into many western ontologies, then one might ask, how can westerners de-universalize? Nobels et al. argue in a text meant to explore Pan-African philosophies and mythologies, that cultural knowing must be understood from within the frame of the culture it came from.15 In other words, a frame that is central to an African episteme. Doing otherwise could end up as yet another westernized attempt at determining culture through an outsider lens.

But, it’s not just Grof and Campbell that struggled to notice the problematic aspects of universalizing frameworks, many in the western academy have made similar mistakes when it comes to interpreting and determining culture. Often the interpretations result in generating unnecessary political and social struggle.  Edward Said detailed in his sentinel book, Orientalism, how colonial endeavors led European thinkers to make incorrect assumptions16 about people in the Middle East by defining them as “other” to the British Christian. Said argued that a Western interpretation was rooted in domination.  

Similarly, Polly Walker, a Cherokee/European becoming-researcher, writes about a “struggle with the entanglements of Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in which the imposition of Western epistemologies have damaged the fabric of Indigenous worldviews.”17 Walker argues that a western frame for coming to know has often sought to undermine and destroy alternative ways of making meaning.

Nobels et al., Walker, and Said highlight limitations in western sense-making by identifying and describing their own struggle to make sense of the world in ways that differ from a western approach. All three of them point to an aspect of western knowing that highlights ideological tools of domination which reinforce Christian hegemony. A practice that has led many Christians and non-Christians alike to re-story ontological and epistemic inaccuracies.18

So, let’s go back to Natalia and the night she encountered the serpent. As I mentioned, the serpent is a common sighting for Indigenous Peruvians who sit in ayahuasca ceremonies. Cosmologically speaking, the Shipibo believe that the serpent comes to heal. But Natalia misunderstood it, and it ended up shaping her entire evening around sin, shame, death, and guilt. For Catholics, the thing that makes the serpent evil is in part, a reflection of a historical attempt to suppress a European pagan cosmology. Natalia could have had an incredible spiritual moment, but it’s possible she was unable to because of a history of Catholic dominance that has led to a form of active ignorance and epistemic injustice intended to suppress alternative ways of making meaning. 

So I’m back once again to the question of this particular talk. How do Christians make meaning from psychedelic experiences that heal when the frame for knowing is rooted in hegemony and domination?

Interestingly, when it comes to a Christian worldview and the consumption of psychedelics, there is surprisingly little research on the colonial reverberations that inform Christian interpretation today.

And while there are many frames from which psychedelic experiences can be understood, we are here looking with an eye towards religion, and I have narrowed the scope to look at the confluence of Christianity and psychedelics. I intentionally choose to lead with feminist questions that might help us explore our ideas around power. Driving closer to the heart of my bias, I hope to decolonize religion and attend to epistemic justice. I hope to understand the specific kind of transformation that produces tangible and material change to Christian religious thought, rituals, and myths in ways that serve to repair ontological and epistemological divisions. In the end, I believe it’s possible for all of us to make healthy, liberatory meaning from our psychedelic journeys, but I suspect that liberation will take work, and I believe that work might begin with deconstructing a paradigmatic framework of domination.

When I first started exploring this dissertation topic, I wondered if I was setting out to write a cautionary tale of what not to do – one that reflects a moral at the end of the story. But to follow a cautionary tale might imply a kind of moral absolutism – that there are universal principles by which the story of psychedelics, Christianity, and the United States can be judged.

Uncomfortably shifting myself yet again from a paradigm of universality, these questions have become a daily reflective practice between action and thought. And they offer a direction on how together we might tend to a path of reparation, equity, reciprocity, and community. For now, I suspect that in order to search for new meaning, religious and spiritual seekers must be willing to unveil a history of Christian religious exclusion and welcome a multiplicity of world doctrines, faiths, and religions. I believe as humans seeking new or old meaning, we must be open to multiple world views and be willing to witness a collective history from which we are attempting to heal.

Thank you.

1. Stanislav Grof. The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys. Volume Two. (Santa Cruz: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2019), Chapter 12.

2. Grof, The Way of the Psychonaut, Chapter 12.

3. Bahman A.K. Shirazi, “Integral Education: Founding Vision and Principles,” Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Research, & Praxis 7, no. 1, 2011, 4.

4. Paul Kivel. Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony. (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2013) 3-9.

5. The details like name, date, and location for this story have been altered for privacy.

6. Alaka J. Wali, Claire Odland, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Nancy Gardner Feldman, Daniel Morales Chocano, Ana Mujica-Baquerizo, and Ronald L. Weber. “The Shipibo-Conibo: Culture and Collections in Context.” Fieldiana Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2016): 63. https://doi.org/10.3158/0071-4739-45.1.1.

7. Paul Kivel. Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2013. 3.

8. Kivel, Living in the Shadow of the Cross, 3.

9. Melanie L. Harris. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017), 13-58; Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic Sex & Politics. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982). 1-14; Carol P. Christ. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. (New York: Routledge, 1997) 1-30.; Pamela R. Lightsey. Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology. (Eugene: Pickwick, 2015) 1-14.; Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz. Mujerista Theology: A theology for the twenty-first century. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996) 59-85.; Kwok Pui-lan. Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology. (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2005) 7-20.

10. Kivel, Living in the Shadow of the Cross, 4.

11. Sara Ahmed. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 150. https://doi-org.ciis.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/1464700107078139.

12. Kivel, Living in the Shadow of the Cross, 45.

13. Stanislav Grof. The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys. Volume one. (Santa Cruz: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2019), 128-169.

14. Grof, The Way of the Psychonaut, Chapter 11.

15. Nobels et al. “Pan African Humanness and Sakhu Djaer as Praxis for Indigenous Knowledge Systems,” Alternation 18, (2016): 39.

16. Edward W. Said. Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3-4.

17. Polly Walker. “Research in Relationship with Humans, the Spirit World, and the Natural World,” in Indigenous Pathways into Social Research: Voices of a New Generation, ed. by Donna M. Mertens, et al, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, 313.

18. José Medina. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27-55.