Not a thing to be used—it’s a presence to be received.
Rev. Rob Zahn, LSD to Galilee
I started watching The Sopranos recently because I feel like I’m supposed to. I’ve never seen it, but I know it’s ground zero for the past 27 years of American prestige television, with some saying it’s the modern version of reading the Great American Novel. Some of you hear that notion and wince. Others, like me, take that as permission to watch TV while still getting credit for reading.
Some of us read books for the same reason Tony Soprano goes to therapy, because we feel like we’re supposed to. Not because we want to be transformed; we just want to live our preferred life with less guilt. But if Americans are reading ever more on social media and fewer books, why do we choose the dwindling books we do read? And if algorithms are engineered for our desires—thus enticing all of us to become desire engineers—are books any different?
The heart behind Lutheran mainline pastor Rev. Rob Zahn’s book LSD to Galilee is a desire to extend the hand of mercy. It took me a while to appreciate this. It doesn’t extend mercy from the Southern “bless your heart” flavor of condescension, but as a peace offering for historical misunderstandings to a subculture he sees as on the same human and divine team. The book also implicitly asks for mercy on behalf of the Church for its wrongs of “box[ing] the divine into safe categories.”1
The desire to give mercy, though, is not really why I imagine most people read these books. I think most people read books to come away with supplies. Whether for boredom, passion, pain, guidance, knowledge, or human connection, we sense a need, we search Amazon for a provider. If the publisher did their job, we may even discover a book that we didn’t know we needed, but thank goodness, is only $15 away. But for this book, whether you’re building a PowerPoint, a Christian psychedelic training program, or just your spiritual pride, there are supplies here for all sorts of projects. Maybe if you’re a hostile reader, you read this book to build a cross for the author.
I gather that Rev. Zahn isn’t in the psychedelic field, at least not much yet, but his book is nevertheless a product of its self-mythologies. Even though most of you reading this piece will never read the book, you will be familiar with some of these mythologies if you have a passing interest in psychedelia. We hear the swirling electric guitars and peace protests of the 1960s. Torch in hand, we then journey with R. Gordon Wasson, the archetypal 1950s Western businessman, and discover Maria Sabina in the hidden hills of Mexico, invited into her mushroom ceremony only to betray her trust. We put on our Indiana Jones hats and do forbidden archeology in old caves and Roman ruins for clues to our past. Yes, it sometimes launders the credibility of the more dubious mythologies, such as discredited podcast fare like the “stoned ape theory” of evolution. But at least in the psychedelic self-mythologized imaginary, we are rebels with a cause, even as the modern psychedelic Rebellion builds itself into the Empire it once hated.
Both Rev. Zahn and I think the Christian imagination could use revitalizing, and such stories provoke it. Beyond the tropes, the creative imagination of drug-infused subcultures plays in many rooms in our splintered society. Even as American cities gentrify the urban artist into an endangered species, there are still DIY comedy enclaves like Los Angeles’ Clubhouse, where we could produce a show for $50 to tell sincere stories of our religious hangups and do mediocre long-form improv over Bud Light while Maria Bamford was workshopping her new special to 30 people in the upstairs loft. The next night, you might find yourself in some guy’s backyard who had been doing standup open mics longer than he should have but had enough lawn chairs to rub hoodied shoulders with a guy who once did five minutes on Premium Blend in the 90s. These were good nights, and God was there.
If my psychedelic fascination hadn’t taken me to the self-important place we call “divinity school,” I might have been in those backyards a few years later and met Katherine McCollough. The heartbreaking story of her death became viral a couple of weeks ago, and not just because she had dated the alt-comedy star Reggie Watts, or because he seems to have gotten her addicted to ketamine, or because of the vile non-consensual sexual activity, or because Watts was generally irresponsible with pushing psychedelic usage at a time when people are generally irresponsible with pushing psychedelic usage (Watts has been onstage at the prominent MAPS conference several times). What made the story virally blood-curdling was the veneer of spiritual self-satisfaction Watts attached to her eventual suicide. People who have never watched a psychedelic webinar recognized it: something from his drug use combined with the quasi-spiritual culture around them appears to have made him numb to the grief he caused and disavow any responsibility for it. He is, as too many people know, not a singularly bad person in 21st-century psychedelia, but a microcosmic character, an emblem of spiritual bypassing that constitutionally cannot reconcile its self-image with its actions because it has all the tolerance for grandiosity and no grammar for naming evil within itself.
Too often, books pushing psychedelics ask us to litigate the awe of the historical psychedelic imagination, where to disagree is to thieve the joys of artistic expression and hidden histories to reinflict colonialism. Really, some of us just want the souls of the Katherine McColloughs to be taken as seriously as her family and friends do, to feel it in your soul, too, to not only rejoice when others rejoice but weep when others weep,2 just as Christ does whenever lashes come down on the unjust and psychological torture is inflicted on the innocent. Christians are flaky in our empathy, but Christ is always there.
So to the extent it downplays harm and vivifies psychedelic folklore for a Christian audience, LSD to Galilee is frustrating, as if the priest and Levite on the road to Jericho were too excited to talk about their 5-MeO DMT trip to stop for the people in the ditch.3
This hardly makes it unique. Many decent Gen X and young boomer men and women who are products of the Church, somewhat resent it, yet yearn to reconcile it with the rest of the world—as God himself does—have become the vanguard of a new era of psychedelic narrative craft. Because I can't review the raft of their books, Rev. Zahn is the unlucky winner to stand in as a representative sample. One should not mistake this choice as his offering being exceptionally bad, nor wholly derivative, but containing the true marks of a genre coming to fruition.
This book is not only “Christian leader espouses a prophetic vision for why the church needs to embrace these ‘sacraments’ as on par with the Eucharist.” Don’t get me wrong, it is that, but there are other classic staples of the literature here: a foreword comparing coffee to psychedelics (“see, even a skeptical reader like you uses ‘drugs’”), the messianic intonations, “the Church is declining and we need to cargo-cult the counterculture to revive,” this moment being the most important time in history in which we need to act.4
The signature of a 2026 psychedelic Christian book is carrying on the legacy of Michael Pollan by asserting it’s not here to promote drugs, but in practice, doing that exact thing (I am trying to leave it up to God these days whether this is a matter of conscious disingenuity or a disease of authors who must tell ourselves a story about our motives until we believe it). This “not selling you” sales pitch seems mostly effective on readers who already want to be persuaded. We want to be told our cravings for bioengineered ecstasy are rational, pragmatic, scientific, and holy, but we don’t want to be seen, even to ourselves, as wanting them.
Where there is demand, there is supply, and this new subgenre of psychedelic apologetics has graduated from granting us a generic sense of perennial spirituality into a particular Christian flavor of holiness. Like many books of this subgenre—such as Wendi Rees’ conservative psychedelic evangelical book, which endorses a drug cocktail pioneered by a doctor who has since been arrested for manslaughter—LSD to Galilee starts from, and leverages, the truth that God works through outsiders.
Unfortunately, in the name of mercy, these books go to wild scriptural leaps to write what they want to write (and apparently what people want to read). Sometimes these arguments are as base as saying Jesus cursing a fig tree is proof he could curse iboga if he wanted. Sometimes these arguments are more sophisticated, such as comparing Philippians 2’s classic hymn on Christ obeying in humility all the way to the cross, kenosis, to a mushroom trip experience.5
In this book, Rev. Zahn invokes the popular-among-preachers-but-weird story of Balaam from Numbers 22 to prove that since God blesses outsiders, thus, God blesses psychonauts. But Scripture portrays Balaam as one of the most classic cautionary tales against the spiritual hubris of gurus. God temporarily uses Balaam, but doesn’t bless him at all, and actually opposes him to satirical levels.6 You can’t blame this on “Old Testament God,” either, as the New Testament feels the same about Balaam across three authors.7 Markedly, for all the times God works through outsiders in the Bible, God is consistently against divination, pharmakeia, and similar phenomena.8
But God does work through outsiders, often to the Church’s eventual embarrassment for our failures. I agree with Zahn on this. Consider Paul in Romans 10, who in turn quotes the prophet Isaiah:
Moses says, “I will use those who are not a nation to make you jealous; with a foolish nation I will provoke you.” Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”
Romans 10:19-20
While Zahn doesn’t mention this quote, it’s one of my favorite testimonies to the ways God shows up beyond the walls. Take the Magi who travel to Bethlehem and, unlike Bono, find what they're looking for. God even finds people who aren’t looking. In the same vein, the ancient Christian theologian Justin Martyr expressed the beautiful truth that the seeds of the divine Logos are spread throughout the world, meaning traces of Christ are present in every culture, and therefore even philosophers who were born before the first Christmas could express partial truths about Christ.
And so it is certainly true that God was at work in the psychedelia of the sixties and spread common graces through not only St. Jerry Garcia but the spiritually hungry hearts and minds that LSD to Galilee highlights. Our culture’s long embrace of sixties nostalgia is a sign of our non-stop desire for retrieval from an American epoch that was no doubt fraught but no doubt energetic, cracking a monoculture open into the wild, creative overtones of chaotic spiritual freedom, and many wonder if today’s revitalization of psychedelics means it’s happening again.
Accordingly, Zahn says it is happening again, and so he is writing a book to help the church understand psychedelic people. The direction towards Jesus implied in the title is notable: we go from LSD to Galilee. But in practice, it’s a book that mostly encourages Christians to consider going from Galilee to LSD. This encouragement does not come through the rigorous pursuit of truth, but through straining theology and history until they break.
Signs
As I was stumbling back to Christianity around a decade ago, I discovered Rob Bell’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God. I had been very Christian-dismissive for years by then, but Bell’s hallmark conversational, meet-you-where-you-are brand of scientifically considerate but poetically inspiring biblical Christianity was accessible and compelling to me. There were others I read in that time period, such as Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ, and such left-leaning but tradition-coded authors were among the most important books in moving me from complete disinterest in my old faith to grudging curiosity.9
While reading Bell, I was also getting back into taking psychedelics. I spiritually never left them even when I had put a pause on the substances. My twenties were discipled by a podcast feed of old Ram Dass lectures in between a diet of psychonaut comedians like Duncan Trussell and Pete Holmes. Like a New Age Gideon without a hotel nightstand, I would gift anyone who came to my studio apartment a copy of Be Here Now if I thought they would like it. In 2017, I began going on ayahuasca retreats and took more steps to reintegrate parts of my ancestral Christianity into my personal, custom-built spiritual panoply. Some of these experiences remain literally tattooed on me.
Eventually, the calls from God’s house grew louder and more inconvenient; I accepted Christ as my Lord, and my journey of discipleship took me into more traditional Christian paths back into the mainline Presbyterian denomination of my upbringing. So ten years ago, I was in the target demographic for LSD to Galilee.
Regrettably, I’m still in the small target demographic for a book that focuses on something called “theosemiotics,” a neologism used by a handful of people to say “the study of where signs of God are.” True, I am now less interested in hearing about this topic through Bellian pop-poet staccato prose. But I’ve sworn to myself and God before men not to say anything more about the prose, because the biggest issue at hand is the semiotics thesis itself.
For example, the book makes a more overt statement of what’s in every psychedelic apologetics book: cultural trends show that it’s time for the Church to embrace psychedelics as sacramental. The book gets this from Matthew 16:2-3:
“When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”
Matthew 16:2-3
Per Zahn, this means “We’re going to do what Jesus hopes we do: read the signs of the times. We will read the signs of the past, the symbols of the sixties, the cultural crossovers between psychedelics and sanctuaries.”10
The problem is two-fold. The Pharisees are not scolded because they can’t see the cultural changes around them. Jesus is saying they can’t see the reality of the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy, and the “sign of Jonah” for that prophecy is his imminent crucifixion and resurrection.11 The broadest interpretation would be that they can’t see the other signs of the Messiah, which he relays to John the Baptist: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matthew 11:5) There is a category of the miraculous here tied to the Messiah that just isn’t about social spiritual trends, or even promising medical breakthroughs.
The other problem is that Jesus was still speaking, and the book never quotes the next verse: “‘An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.’” (Matthew 16:4) In other words, it’s the very people who are straining for signs that are on the wrong track. While we ought to look for those seeds of the Logos in our culture, this passage cautions us religious folks who thirst for signs, disciplining our impatience. Otherwise, you end up glorifying the coincidentally mundane, like the Holy Mother in your grilled cheese, or “people who took the drugs that make your brain chemistry mimic feelings of profundity felt something profound.”12
Rather than look for signs inside or outside the text for our proclivities, the sign Christians must hold onto is the sign of the cross, a sign of God’s self-giving, sacrificial love which reminds us to dedicate ourselves to God as living sacrifices.13 In LSD to Galilee, the cross is almost completely absent, save being listed alongside a raised fist and Instagram black squares.14
If we were to look for signs of Christ in the psychedelic movement, we should look for the cross-shaped places where people sacrificed themselves for the sake of others. We should not look for Christ in the champions of chemical “turning on” and “waking up.” No, Christ is there with the abuse victim who has been sacrificed by a community on the altar of transcendence. Christ is helping those with lasting psychological issues from psychedelic use.15 Christ is the nagging voice telling influencer gurus who enrich themselves that God has not sanctioned their actions, but reserves for them a deeply sacred “No.” Christ is weeping with those who lose everything priceless and can’t get it back while the music never stops.
In looking for scriptural evidence to justify our search for God in drugs, I think we write and read such stuff not in spite of the scant evidence, but because it flouts the entire tradition and isn’t biblically sound; of course it’s not. If it were, it would be part of the staid religion we need to rail against. Sometimes I feel insane even pretending like it’s plausible enough to have to point out why it’s implausible. It makes me want to re-embrace the cringe of 1990s youth group beaded bracelets asking, “What Would Jesus Do?” But really, what would he do if he were in the psychedelic renaissance? Would Jesus of Nazareth say, “You may need to take The Medicine again to really work on yourself some more,” or would he say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”?16
Mascots
What these books do with Scripture is also what they do to cultural history. Accordingly, half of LSD to Galilee analyzes the past 60-odd years, arguing how psychedelic culture and contemporary Christianity share more lineage than we think.17
For a certain kind of Christian, this feels intuitively true. I remember stepping out of a ceremony, looking out at the brilliant Mojave Desert stars, and feeling I was called to a long, sacred struggle that needed my help. So many misunderstandings, so much potential, and more of us were just starting to rediscover what had been hidden.
Yet the psychedelic Christian genre’s analysis suffers when it tries to inform readers of lesser-known histories through whitewashed sixties nostalgia that has infected Boomer and Gen X accounts of the 1960s my entire life (and I say that as someone who has listened to more Grateful Dead than anybody but more dedicated Deadheads). It particularly doesn’t know what to do with the Jesus People movement, a group of ex-hippies that converted to fundamentalist Christianity.
Their existence is inconvenient to the social movement when taken at face value. So rather than respecting the theological developments these ex-hippies had—which eventually turned them against psychedelic usage as a false imitation of Christ—the book argues we should take their testimony, oddly, as a reason to affirm the psychedelic usage they rejected. In short, Rev. Zahn says the fact that mass movements of Southern California hippies eventually came to Jesus after disavowing a life of dropping lots of LSD indicates that LSD deserves a lot of credit for spiritually enlivening them.
But the Jesus People repented. Against all human nature, they actually repented. It was a miracle against their desires and is a scandal for ours.
None of us seek the repentance we need. When it cuts too close to our bones, we would rather crucify repentance itself than be humbled by the miracle in another.
Unfortunately, the Jesus People are also inconvenient to born-again Christianity, because their theologies took them to other fallacious and abhorrent places, and their need for repentance continued. The more benign example is that some had an obsession with the apocalypse that never came, but some of these groups—which the book seems unaware of—even became notorious child-abuse cults.18 If LSD gets the credit for one, is it absolved of responsibility for the other? If it’s a fair question to their brand of born-again faith, it’s fair for the drugs.
In psychedelic historical revisions like this one, the Jesus People’s repentance of the drugs becomes a mascot against their witness rather than a more complex discussion offered by the primary source material.19 The book furnishes another mascot for psychedelic Christianity, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It gives enamored treatment to this mirror image of the Jesus People, a hippie drug trafficking ring (or, per Rev. Zahn, a “holy smuggling syndicate”) that believed they were on a spiritual mission in spreading LSD. They were such a notorious group that even hardcore psychonauts thought they were a bit much.
On the one hand, the book does try to at least name some of the issues with the Brotherhood. Like others in the genre, Zahn does make surface acknowledgment that there were, actually, harmful outcomes from psychedelic usage. But where breathless attention is given to the glories and the highs of the Brotherhood culture, the treatment of harms is brief and excused:
“They broke laws. They broke taboos. And yes, they broke some lives. ‘The price we paid was far more than any of us expected,’ Rick Bevan later admitted. But they never stopped believing that what they were doing had meaning.”20
The moral confusion we are then led to drink from is that the Brotherhood wasn’t fundamentally wrong. We don’t need to forgive them, because forgiveness has been precluded; unlike the Jesus People—per the book’s logic—the Brotherhood’s holy mission was at least right about drugs. So in trying to be affirming of their longing for God, the book repeatedly downplays things like armed robbery as if it’s just the mischief of sacred jesters. It justifies the “ambulances that followed after the ecstasy” as the “risk” of “righteous acid,” and has little curiosity, much less meditation, about long-term mental health consequences for those involved, because LSD was their source of spiritual salvation (I truly don’t believe I’m strawmanning his position here, and if anything, I am underselling it).21 Even The Sopranos meditates with more moral complexity on the harms of drug trafficking, and with more religious seriousness.
Sadly, the book misses the opportunity to discuss where psychedelic subcultures really had, and have, Christ-shaped workers in them. For instance, the Diggers were a prominent anarchist collective in the Haight that sometimes collaborated with a local Episcopal church to share bread. They ran free food programs, free clothing stores, free medical clinics, and offered temporary housing to those who needed it. They didn’t make millions of dollars off drugs like the Brotherhood did, and had sharp criticisms of the counterculture’s treatment of women, minors, and drug infatuations (Joan Didion cataloged the Diggers in her seminal Slouching Towards Bethlehem).
More groups like the Diggers existed, but they aren’t in this book and rarely garner enough interest for this genre. Whereas psychedelic Christians inevitably want you to baptize their favorite drugs and fund their holy vision, these groups didn’t focus on the drugs at all, but on material aid to their communities in self-giving love. When psychedelic Christians do witness harm from their idolized drugs, harms transform into evidence for the gravity of “this work,” making it all the more evidence that psychedelics are holy and meaningful because they must be approached with “respect.”
Just as Balaam had angels and donkeys obstructing him, offering him a chance to turn around, the harms ought to be a hint here. But the market for justifying the stuff we would rather die than repent of is enormous. We would rather owe each other nothing.
The Eucharist
The endgame of psychedelic Christianity has been, is, and will be the Lord’s Supper, aka the Eucharist. Here’s one place of how that looks on the page:
“A sacrament is not just a memorial or symbol; it is a technology—an interface between the human nervous system and the divine, designed to open channels that are otherwise closed. The materials may shift—mushroom, wine, bread, brew—but the operating system underneath remains startlingly consistent: ingest, transform, awaken.”22
These rhetorics deform the primary Christian sacrament—a means of Christ’s grace, one of the places Christ explicitly invites us into forgiveness—into a technology, debased as just another experience to engineer.
And if we want it to be a modern technology, we need the Lord’s Supper to be an ancient technology, and to get there, we have to rely on a ton of fallacious history.23 A few of the most screamingly obvious ones here: the discussion of an alleged mushroom painting in a rural French chapel which was discredited almost the minute it was proposed,24 the uncritical promotion of John Marco Allegro’s infamously poor scholarship,25 and a breathless re-broadcast of Brian Muraresku’s Immortality Key in seeming ignorance of how even psychedelic-sympathetic scholars have discredited it as pseudo-history, not to mention those cited in the book.
These pseudo-histories rely on chains of “what ifs,” each link with only a marginal chance of being accurate.26 They all head in the same direction, to fuse psychedelics with the sacraments, diminishing the Holy Spirit’s action in sacramental history to something pharmacological and materialistic.27
The reduction of the Eucharist to a technology is convenient for us because it doesn’t ask sin to be involved. In these waters, even the New Testament word used for repentance, metanoia, gets repurposed for branding. It’s now the name of a new psychedelic Christian consulting firm, Metanoia Consultants (disclosure: I have some history here).28 As the website tells its visitors, “Metanoia is a Greek word that means to change one’s mind. In Christianity, it is often used to describe a spiritual transformation or a similar turning point in one’s life.” But intrinsic to Christian metanoia is also admitting and confessing that we are sinners in need of grace. The shorter word for that is “repentance,” but as the costliest free thing available to humanity, it’s a tougher sell, because it means admitting that we are wrong in the ways we most want to be righteous.
In the introduction, Zahn wrote: “Let me be clear: this book does not promote psychedelics.” Later, the book equates the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper with psychedelic rituals in ebullient terms:
“Psilocybin, like Communion, is not a thing to be used—it’s a presence to be received. A sacrament that doesn’t just alter consciousness but re-members what was fractured. It stitches story to soul. Earth to spirit. Us to each other.”29
“One cup lifted by a hierophant in a hall outside Athens. Another by a rabbi in occupied Judea. … whether you call it kykeon or chalice, the question under both is the same: Can you taste everlasting life before you die?”30
“Mainstream historians will tell you there’s no direct evidence that the earliest Christian Eucharist contained psychoactive substances. And they’re right…[but] ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ From a theosemiotic angle, what matters is the recurring sign: the divine offered in a form you take into your body—and in taking it in, you are changed.”31
“The question isn’t whether Jesus served mushrooms at the Last Supper. The question is whether the sacrament he gave—whatever its chemistry—belongs to that deeper human lineage of embodied encounter. If it does, then maybe the hard wall we’ve built between “sacred” sacraments and “profane” psychedelics says more about us than it does about God.”32
The issues here run far beyond doctrinal debates. A pastor teaching this leads people into serious mental and spiritual danger. It does, actually, profane the sacrament, and takes the Church into outrageously harmful terrain.
Riffing off the Eucharist thesis, the book uses extra question marks in asking, “Is there anywhere God is not, or anything that is not divine? Anything?? Anything at all???”33
But amidst God’s presence all around us, there is simultaneously an absence all around us which twists our desire to do good things, and indeed twists good things themselves. That absence-of-good is a term Christians call “sin,” a word that isn’t meditated on in LSD to Galilee and almost never in the psychedelic Christian literature. Its reality means we must exercise constant discernment and self-scrutiny. It is, itself, an expression of sin to use the good truth of God’s incarnation in the world as a license to assert that for the body of Christ, partaking the primary Christian sacrament is spiritually just the same as tripping.
The Eucharist doesn’t chemically cause a certain percentage of people to have adverse reactions, some of which ruin their lives. It doesn’t use your biology to elicit a feeling that can conflate your experience of the world with God. What makes it a Christian sacrament is that Jesus Christ instituted it for his followers, who carried forth the tradition of the table to invite everyone—especially outcasts and outsiders—to reconciliation with him and each other. We are invited to set down our false communions with illusions of divinity that harm ourselves and others so that we may enter into a relationship with the living God in humility, service, and love. Christ thus greets all of us at the table, but he saves us through the cross.
It is an inane idea that the earliest Eucharist instituted by Jesus of Nazareth, an extremely devout Jew who called for greater fidelity to the covenant, was secretly drug-based. While believing in a psychedelic Eucharist is something many psychedelic-promoting Christian clergy privately hold, it’s a “sign of the times” that one would just openly proclaim their conflation without a hint of trepidation. When the bill comes due and is paid by someone else’s life, will it be worth it?
A Miracle
We don’t come to a book to learn what we need to repent of. We most want what we won’t repent of, and the market for our attention adjusts accordingly. This is as true in social media feeds as it is in our books.
The target audience for a book of actually-true things about psychedelics, then, is necessarily smaller than the market of things-we-wish-were-true. What makes a book in this genre successful is whether it offers enough scaffolding to satisfy the part of ourselves that sees us as reasonable, rational, skeptical, sensible, not-fooled creatures. We want to be these things. Repenting of the strongest sources of our pride is one thing no reader—that is to say, no human—wants.
The closest counterfeits of repentance we want are the pre-approved, partial repentances that serve as tribal signals, the taxes of belonging to our social group. We want these pseudo-repentances so that we will not be abandoned by those we love. They do not actually cost anything like true repentance. Reading for true repentance is so rare a grace that we only do it once all else has failed and we are picking up the pieces of our transgressions.
We practice reading for repentance in our Christian tradition if we’re doing it right, because we are implicated on every page of the Bible. We are all closer to Balaam, whom God might occasionally use while he’s otherwise blocking. We are the Pharisees who thirst for signs and thirst even more to be affirmed in our sign-thirsting, or in my case, desire to score righteousness points by pointing out how mind-numbing all these psychedelic theologies are. If we are born again, we may have even made repentance the rock of our self-righteousness, a license to hate anybody who hasn’t found God. If we keep reading, though, we will find a better story of redemption than the one we prefer.
What do readers of this Substack want when you come to read it? Those of you who generally agree with me may come to be supplied for our shared projects in the Church and culture, concerned with what Tower is being built here. I imagine some read this stack for the shared pride more than the substance, like how hot dogs are just an excuse to eat ketchup. I imagine, too, that some hate-read me like I hate-read these books, to look for flaws in my arguments and character so you don’t have to take me seriously. I also picked up this book for nails, to attach the author to wooden beams of error.
In his book, Rev. Zahn indicts the Church for policing the sacred through fear. It would be hard to refute this broad charge, and harder for the Church to repent where it’s true. But discernment isn’t policing, and strawmanning discernment as fearmongering robs both the listener and the speaker. Mutual respect and honest discernment do not deny each other's sins, but bring them to God together. In that spirit, it is worth considering whether dismissing all concerns as being about “control” may be an allergic response to close contact with one’s sin.
The true Church, only fully known to God, isn’t selling anything, not Bibles wrapped in a flag nor “drugs plus Jesus.” It preaches Christ crucified and declares that is sufficient to live by grace. This gives us true freedom to live in discernment, because it means we can easily put down things we may technically have the freedom to do, but not when they harm our community. The discernment expressed in 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14 tell us that whatever freedom we may think we have—in this case to do drugs—must be freely surrendered by a member of the body of Christ who is acting in love when they know it causes anyone else to stumble. It’s not the drugs themselves that we’re repenting of, but our participation in each other’s harm, and if our use and advertisement of them causes any others to stumble, no matter how responsible we think we’re being, then we give them up freely. If we can’t give up our evangelism of drugs freely, then we aren’t really free.
But this doesn’t mean drug subcultures are devoid of the seeds of the Logos. When we read psychedelic culture through the stories of Jesus as they are, and as Christ is, we do find the true goods in the midst without glorifying the counterfeits. There are stories to be told in them.
While working on this review, I forgot this book originated with Rev. Zahn’s absent father. He never knew him until they connected later in life. I remember reading this in the preface, before I had grown cynical about this book, and finding it interesting, and thought it was too bad we weren’t going to hear more.
When I read it back now, I am startled to rediscover why the book exists. The hand of mercy wasn’t just to an abstract subculture. As he says, the book exists because his father who wasn’t there was in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love:
What I found was an international drug smuggler. A man who lived more lives than most of us could imagine. Who held the initial letter I sent him for years before contacting me, only when he was dying of cancer. Who told me stories—or let others tell them—of Afghan prisons, LSD with rock stars, hashish caravans, and paranoia that maybe wasn’t paranoia at all. This book begins there. This book isn’t about that. But it does start there.
Because here’s the thing: my frustration with the church runs as deep as my questions about my father. The church has sanitized God, boxed the divine into safe categories, and reinforced the illusion that there’s a line between sacred and secular. That line—is bullshit. BULLSHIT.34
The most grace I’ve seen in The Sopranos is in the tenth episode of season two, when a drunk Tony tells his daughter Meadow late at night in the family kitchen that he loves her and his mob life was all for her. She says, “I know you love me.” But you can feel her teenage annoyance at her morally adolescent father. He attempts to defend his life without owning it: “I know you think I’m a hypocrite—” She interrupts: “I’m going to bed.” But before she goes, she turns back: “Sometimes, we’re all hypocrites.”
When we read, like when we do anything, we bring our hypocritical wanting with us. Repentance comes as a grace despite ourselves. It only ever comes as a grace. It, like our faith, is never our doing, so that anyone who has repented may not boast. Repentance is a miracle and scandal against our desires that brings us back to life.
Christ calls us to forgive each other. In offering each other mercy, we often sacrifice the idea of repentance. But the story of the cross is different. God’s mercy is always offered, but we can only receive it in confessing and renouncing our sin, and can only live it by faith. God’s mercy transforms us when we accept it as part of a new way of life.
If our reading and writing can’t escape being mangled by desires, Christ circumvents them. He can transform them, and us, despite what we want, into something more cross-shaped.
When I think about Rev. Zahn and his father, I know I have to get more curious about the other people writing these books. They are signs of the times that propaganda works, but they are also signs of our longings. The cross is foolishness next to both. But to those who know this sign, it is the power of God.
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Romans 12:15
Luke 10:25-37
I think this is always true of the present moment, as the present moment is the only one in which we can act.
This exchange happens in a YouTube interview discussing the ideas in her forthcoming book, Psychedelics and Soul Care: What Christians Need to Know, where theology professor Rev. Dr. Jaime Clark-Soles of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University sits down with another participant in the Hopkins clergy study.
Stephen Bauman: I was blown away by the experience of having my ego completely disintegrated, which was a profoundly big deal for me, and a—into a space of great freedom and empowerment in a brand new, fresh way. And so I didn’t learn something radically different from what I had always known, but the experience of having your ego blown away cannot be unlearned. That has stayed with me ever since. And I return to that because it’s such a liberating experience, which is ironic sounding.
Clark-Soles: Yes, it is. It sounds awful, right? It sounds like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the worst possible thing. The ego is who I am, and I’ve spent a lot of years getting it to where it is.” so threatening, and yeah, it sounds, I think, one way that is actually really, really different from the experience itself. Although it’s very Philippians 2:6, right? What Paul talks about, the hymn of kenosis, right? The whole self-emptying.
I’m going to table the notion that psychedelics give you ego dissolution, when many have contested the claim to the point where it’s a punchline that an ego is self-impressed with having killed itself, when it maybe just “dissolved” enough for the ego to now include the vast expanse of the universe, which would explain psychedelic narcissists. I just want to look at what Philippians 2 tells us:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.Phil 2:5-8
What it describes is Christ divesting himself of his divinity to be with humanity. Christians look to it as a model of discipleship, what pastor Eugene Peterson would call “a long obedience in the same direction.” Even if psychedelics did “dissolve the ego,” a trope that has outlived its truthfulness and usefulness, it isn’t the same as a constant, sober, painful surrender of one’s own power to serve others.
Since we’re going long on this footnote anyway, in this same interview, Rev. Dr. Clark-Soles also equates psychedelics with “induction techniques”:
There are times we have tools: we fast—why are we fasting?—we pray. It's not a vending machine; it doesn't mean God's going to show up in a big way. But we are creating the environment where we're making it more likely that we will be able to actually turn off some of these things and actually hear and be a little more connected to God. So the scripture shows spontaneous ones, but it also shows people—and we ourselves in our lived experience—do things intentionally to make ourselves more connected to God. So it's not not real just because you're trying to—people are like, "Are you trying to manufacture an experience of God?" No, I'm trying to create the conditions where I can actually connect to God in a less distracted way.
Re: a denial of “manufacturing God,” let’s table again whether that is actually happening when we equate a drug experience with creating the conditions for hearing God talk to you, and whether there might be important differences between that and (for example) sober, corporate, liturgical worship.
It’s a strawman of Thomas Merton's objection to psychedelics. He argued that associating the presence of God with a causal practice was impinging on the freedom of grace. Merton, as an ascetic monk, was quite familiar with ascetic practices like these “induction techniques,” but prayer and fasting are time-honored disciplines of renunciation. The traditions that develop these practices in the monasteries, informed by people like St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, cautioned against these intense experiences around them because of the exact reasons that psychedelic Christians display in idolizing the experience. Mystical experiences were side effects of disciplines, not states to procure.
Here’s how Balaam is invoked in LSD to Galilee to serve a pro-psychedelic message:
But Balaam? He’s a sorcerer, a diviner. His entire vocation is what Torah explicitly forbids: “Do not practice divination . . .” By every definition, Balaam is unrighteous, unholy, disqualified. By every religious measure, he should be silenced. And yet—it is Balaam who hears God’s voice. It is Balaam who enters into dialogue with the Holy One…. God doesn’t just speak to Balaam; God speaks through his donkey. In the middle of a narrow road, the animal sees what Balaam cannot. … God’s presence surfacing where it should not be—out in the wilderness, in the life of an unrighteous man, even in the mouth of a donkey. So why should it shock us if that same pattern erupted again in the “wilderness” of the twentieth century—hippies, psychedelics, even a barefoot kid named Lonnie Frisbee dancing on the cliffs of Laguna Beach? (p.209)
But Balaam is not an example of “everyone is invited to God’s table.” The story is a satirical tale of God’s patience with the buffoonery of an enemy who ultimately remains a dangerous “outsider.” In this episode, God actively opposes Balaam, whose name means “Devourer of People” and who has been hired by a king to curse Israel. For a spiritual guy, Balaam is portrayed as comically blind to God. But God gives him a chance to repent, first by sending an angel who calls him perverse, and Balaam doesn’t listen. So God even uses a donkey to rebuke him.
Balaam does end up speaking God’s prophecy despite what he was hired to do; on the text’s terms, God does even use those who curse him towards God’s goodness. But Balaam’s time as God’s oracle is short-lived, as his stubborn wickedness has him seducing Israel back to idolatry. Balaam is not a prophet on the outside whom religion just can’t get, man. He is a guy with powerful abilities who is given every chance to change, temporarily acts in service to God, but ultimately deceives people into their destruction and his.
2 Peter 2:15, Jude 1:11, and Revelation 2:14
Besides Balaam, we have the witch of Endor, Simon Magus, and numerous references to sorcerers and diviners cast in a negative light by the biblical prophets and the Torah, plus several negative New Testament references. One underdiscussed example is from Acts 13, where a Jewish man in Cyprus named Bar-Jesus, aka Elymus, seemingly blended Judaism with sorcery. To him, Paul says: “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?” (Acts 13:8)
Bell since left the church and stopped being a pastor, but WWTAWWTAG was written while he was still a pastor.
LSD to Galilee, p.18
Just as Jonah spends three days “dead” in the belly of the whale before God puts him back on the shore to complete his prophetic mission, Jesus will spend three days in death before doing the same. The “signs of the times” are that the Messiah is here. In LSD to Galilee, it’s three covers of TIME in the 1960s.
The earliest Christian communities were similarly cautioned not to read too heavily into “signs” of God, nor expect them:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
1 Corinthians 1:22-25
To make this legible—Paul is a Jew, so “Jews” here is Paul’s shorthand for “our religious kin,” like the people in my congregation who stretch back generations of Christians, “my tribe.” “Greeks” here map well onto “the secular world outside the church.” We both miss Jesus when he doesn’t accord with our preconceptions.
Romans 12:1
p.24. It is also mentioned when talking about “death of God” theology on p.29, in a passing reference about Eleusis on p.183, and listed beside the American flag with lament on p.223.
1 Corinthians 12:9
At one point, the book turns to attribute everything in Contemporary Christian Music as being in debt to psychedelics: “Fifty million people wake up and are inspired by music first birthed out of LSD.” Even Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith’s successes are credited to LSD because they liked music by people who (used to) like (and now disavow) drugs.
In a list of “iconic expressions” of psychedelic Christians from the era, two of those named (the Children of God and Tony Alamo) went on to be involved with rampant sexual abuse of children. (p.44)
Larry Eskridge’s God’s Forever Family is a fair, thorough treatment of the era.
p.73
p. 63-64
p.193
Besides those already mentioned, consider what Lisa Bieberman had to say about the Timothy Leary era at Harvard, a man who the book treats with cheery whimsy. Rev. Zahn name-checks the fact that Leary was fired in part for sleeping with students and coercing them into more psychedelic use, while still managing to paint him as persecuted: “Exiled—not for heresy exactly, but for breaking the unspoken rule that the gate between the sacred and the secular must stay locked…their expulsion wasn’t an ending. It was an ordination.” (p.170)
Zahn opens chapter seven by discussing an Adam and Eve painting in Plaincourault, France:
“Two human figures stand on either side—one clearly male, the other clearly female. But the “tree” between them? Not a tree at all. It’s a towering, human-sized mushroom. The medieval title calls it simply: Temptation in the Garden of Eden. So let’s replay it. The temptation is: eat from the tree, your eyes will be opened, and you’ll know good from evil. But here, the “tree” is a mushroom. And what do we hear over and over about certain mushrooms and other psychedelics? That they open the eyes or open the mind.” (p.178)
Later, “We’ve already mentioned the chapel at Plaincourault, the “tree” in Eden which is clearly a mushroom and possibly an Amanita muscaria.” (p.191)
The issue is that he’s describing a painting that was debunked almost immediately after R. Gordon Wasson proposed it. Normally, I would never cite noted pro-psychedelic alternative historian Graham Hancock as a source for anything. But even Hancock admitted (in citing the psychedelic historian Thomas Hatsis) that this theory was utter rubbish four years ago. Almost nobody holds to this theory anymore. What is it doing in a 2026 book?
For outsiders to the field, it would be hard to understate the level of discrediting of Allegro even by psychedelic-sympathetic academics. The charitable version is said by Matthew James Goff in a 2025 paper abstract:
“People promoting Sacred Mushroom and its unorthodox proposals stress that Allegro is a respected scholar with great philological acumen by appealing to status as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Allegro’s contribution to the field is much more mixed than is often acknowledged by proponents of Sacred Mushroom. Allegro was also one of the first to promote the corrosive conspiracy theory that the rest of the editorial team was being controlled by the Vatican. Recognizing that Allegro’s scholarship is infused with a kind of conspiratorial ideation helps understand his method and approach in Sacred Mushroom—that the evidence that Christianity began as a sacred mushroom cult was intentionally obscured by New Testament authors….The renewed popularity for Allegro’s work, which is out of sync with his reputation among Qumran scholars, can be understood as one example of the broader phenomenon of the popularity of conspiratorial theories in contemporary culture.”
There was a recent audio interview about the upcoming book What Are Drugs For?: An Exploration of Stolen Fire by Episcopal deacon Rev. Timothy McMahon King (disclosure: Rev. King was a communications strategist for Ligare, one of the entities I blew the whistle on, while I was an intern there). Rev. King gives a novel thesis: given that we know early Christian initiates used a full-body immersion as part of baptism that included anointing oils, what if the chrism anointing oil of Exodus 30 was “a primary pharmacological technology”? What if Saul’s ecstatic frenzy and eventual paranoia were evidence of him using and abusing the anointing oil, and he eventually enlisted the women who held the oil and banished the women he couldn’t control? What if Israel expected the Messiah, in pouring out the Spirit, to be pouring out the oil on everyone? What if Simon Magus’ condemnation in Acts 8 was because he wanted to buy the psychoactive oil? And what if, once the later church lost the immersion rite, “Well, now you need psychological manipulation. You’ve got fear and control as your ways of trying to get people in the fold”?
The likelihood that this chain of “what ifs” is entirely correct is low. But in fairness to the argument, he says that while the hypothesis “establishes the possibility of pharmacological rites that would have been used to achieve altered states of consciousness that was called a prophetic state and that there is a role for that in our tradition,” he brings this to a caution: “And if that’s true, then there’s a deep warning about the ways that this can go wrong when one pursues this ego inflation and one is using these substances to increase your control around the people around you,” and on the latter point we would converge.
But Rev. King does bring this back to a place of hypothesizing about early Christian sacramentology, arguing not for a psychedelic Eucharist, but a psychedelic baptism:
“The commodification of a gift that had once been reserved for the few in the temple, but Jesus said, ‘I’m going to make this available to all. No barrier: Jew, slave, Greek, doesn’t matter, male or female. Come one and all for this life-changing—you’re going to have to leave your old life behind. You’re going to have to die with me in baptism and then be raised again and filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And this anointing, we learn in the—the Epistles, is now your teacher. You can trust it. So when you hear about these different indigenous populations that call these plants their teachers It’s right in our tradition, too. It’s right there in the Epistles.”
He does say he’s stopped using psychedelics, may never again, and thinks nobody needs them.
In the book’s sole paragraph mentioning pharmakeia, even Revelation’s condemnation of it is treated as pro-psychedelic evidence: “Suddenly you’re in the contested space where healing, intoxication, and spiritual encounter blur together. That ambiguity leaves room to imagine that what later generations condemned as dangerous magic may once have been understood as sacramental chemistry—an entheogenic Eucharist persisting in Christian practice far longer than anyone assumes.” (p.192)
Metanoia Consultants was co-founded by two participants in the fraught Johns Hopkins clergy study, Rev. Dr. Jaime Clark-Soles and Hunt Priest. Priest was deposed from the Episcopal Church in a Title IV hearing after he sent defamatory legal threats to my presbytery, a former professor, and Substack. The Diocese of Georgia concluded that he irresponsibly promoted psychedelics, engaged in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” and violated his suspension during the investigation, during which, per Religion News Service, he was also found to have been further dishonest with the diocese. Rather than (a) face trial or (b) quit working in psychedelics while completing other undisclosed discipline from the diocese, he chose to accept deposition through resignation.
Their consulting firm presently advertises an invite-only psychedelic retreat on one page while claiming it doesn’t do psychedelic retreats on another page.
p.148
p.188
p.194. Also, if “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” what do we call using that truism as its own form of evidence?
p.194
p.178
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