The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins

Spiritual missions, hidden issues, and unexamined consequences of a psychedelic clergy study. Part one.

A spiritual experience, once ritualized, formalized, and fitted into a static establishment, tends to be manipulated by the ambitions of the believer. It then becomes self-defeating. Vision, systematized and organized for the sake of personal or institutional aims, becomes blindness.

Thomas Merton, 1967¹

A clinical trial conducted jointly by Johns Hopkins University and New York University, “The Effects of Psilocybin-Facilitated Experience on the Psychology and Effectiveness of Religious Professionals,” funded by the RiverStyx Foundation and sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices, is set to soon be published. The trial gave leaders from various religions two doses of the compound psilocybin, found in psychedelic mushrooms. The goal was to assess the “mystical” content of their experiences, the impact on their mental, physical, and spiritual health in their personal and professional lives, and “whether participants who report having had the strongest mystical-type effects during psilocybin sessions will show the largest positive changes.” In the past few years, some participants have publicly extolled the virtues of the study and its profound positive impact on their ministry. 

I became involved with part of the study’s social world during my time as a master’s student at Harvard Divinity School, where I participated in field education work for a new Christian psychedelic non-profit created by a participant inspired by his study experience.

What started out as one of the most meaningful, fulfilling times of my life became something that, over time, greatly distressed and disturbed me. I’m here to witness to part of what I have experienced and learned, because people have been hurt, and I believe more will get hurt if I don’t. I will be sharing more each day of this coming week.

I am writing to speak out because I believe the motivations of the study were obscured in its description and now the beginnings of its public presentation. Out of this, I believe an entanglement of conflicts of interest between Hopkins, RiverStyx, and some trial participants enabled unethical conduct, as well as unethical behavior during the trial.

The longer I struggled over what to do, I came to see that this behavior did not happen in a vacuum. This behavior came in a study that, in my opinion, was attempting to manufacture religious institutional consent through a long-range spiritual project to influence public opinion under the pretense of science. I have come to believe that, in my opinion, the reputation of Johns Hopkins was leveraged alongside the highly suggestible influence of psychedelic substances, with some funders and researchers demonstrating unhealthy boundaries with some participants to advance their goals. In my opinion, the result was science in name only.

Truth and Mercy

I was not in the study. I only met about half of the study’s participants, mostly just some of the Christians, and cannot speak for any of them. I really loved getting to know them, and still love them; at first, it was the professional highlight of my life. Also, I never met most of the researchers, some only briefly. And I used to share so much of their perspective. 

I’m not telling any of their stories for them. I’m telling you about the story that is beginning to be told to the public, and I’m telling you there’s much more to the story. And while I don’t know everything that happened, what I did see, learn, and wrestle over has really come to shake me. And some of what unsettles me is what I didn’t see while I was in it.

Besides whatever difficulty that comes with speaking out, I find it really odd to be in this position. Psychedelics have been part of my life for 13 years, and I once felt like psychedelics saved my spiritual life twice. In both cases, I had a strong evangelistic phase. Once, I felt they liberated me from my default, dualistic upbringing in Protestantism into a wonderful, weird world of creative, non-theistic, interfaith imagination. Six years ago, I felt they saved me from the nihilism of secular materialism, opening me up to something that felt like the truer version of myself, then back into religion. The butterfly effects that led me to those experiences probably came from the wings of the Hopkins researchers involved here, on the wind of their earlier studies. Finding myself in approximation to that world was a pinch-me dream, feeling blessed to be dropped into a moment that would be huge for the future of American Christianity.

Over the past year and a half, as more issues out of the mainstream’s eye arose in this nascent field, these feelings have turned foreboding. A sense emerged that my psychedelic spirituality was not nearly as liberating as I imagined—that I had been a follower of what the 20th century’s most famous Catholic mystic Thomas Merton called “illuminism,” the worshipping of experience.

But if there had ever been an experience worthy of being worshipped, it would be nigh impossible to find something more potent than ayahuasca ceremonies in the California desert. Those experiences pointed me to at least something like healing and reconnected me to the power of ritual, the power of religion (but like any good Californian, resisting being branded as religious). Eventually, those experiences pointed me back to Christianity. I wanted to do whatever I could to share those experiences with other people. 

Looking back, one of the things I miss most about my ayahuasca days was not the psychological fireworks, the deep-feeling insights, not even the group singing—though that is close. No, if there was anything vital, it was partaking in weekends suffused with truth and mercy. As I got to know each weekend’s fellow travelers, we so often became remarkably close remarkably quickly in baring our deepest wounds, sometimes confessing our deepest secrets to each other, to a higher power, or for the first time to ourselves. So often, this felt effortlessly oriented to seeking forgiveness for ourselves, and even more miraculously, seeking to forgive people we couldn’t imagine forgiving. Truth and mercy.

I don’t have all the truth. I live in need of mercy. But someone asked me what was my “thesis” here. Above all, it is truth and mercy. 

The Light

Before we go further into the details of the psychedelic religious professionals study, I want to start with where we are.

This past June, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) hosted the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, drawing over 10,000 attendees for the largest psychedelic conference in history. On June 22, the penultimate day, Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, of Johns Hopkins, Anthony P. Bossis, PhD, of NYU, and T. Cody Swift, MFT, of RiverStyx debuted the religious professional study’s high-level findings. In addition to his roles as interviewer and qualitative analyst for the study, Swift also funded the study through his role as co-director of the RiverStyx Foundation.

It is an understatement to say the study was highly anticipated among psychedelicists. Best-selling author Michael Pollan and MAPS’ founder Rick Doblin—the man single most responsible for the cultural resurgence of psychedelics—have reportedly described it as the most important study in the career of Dr. Griffiths, who has been arguably the most important psychedelic scientist of the last 25 years. It was also the culmination of three decades of strategic planning from Bob Jesse, a funder and advisor to Hopkins’ psychedelic research since the early 2000s. 

But the study’s influence goes back much further, at least 60 years, to the 1962 Marsh Chapel Experiment run by Harvard Divinity School PhD student Walter Pahnke. That study gave seminary students psychedelic mushrooms while listening to a Good Friday service presided by Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, leading to what was found in a follow-up to be among the most important experiences of their lives. It has inspired generations of psychonauts with the conviction that psychedelics could provide core, so-named “mystical” insights that were the true heart of religion. It has long provided hope that the two estranged cultural enemies—New Agers and the devoutly religious—could be reconciled against all odds.

I was not at the conference, but I listened to crackly bootlegged audio of the presentation. I want to start here because I want to start with the good that seems to have come out of this study, sharing some snippets of the participants telling their stories. There was a lot of real light. 

In follow-ups on the study’s impact in the year after their participation, the presenters described glowing positive impacts on their professional lives. According to the presenters, many participants described their trial experience as bringing them fulfillment, joy, connection, and feeling relationally closer to God. For many burned-out clergy in a religiously-declining country, this type of gift must have been nothing short of miraculous—manna from heaven, water from a rock.

As an attendee noted, the atmosphere of the study’s presentation was emotional and triumphant. Dr. Griffiths, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, came immediately from a teary standing ovation after a speech he gave to the whole conference plenary of 10,000.

According to Swift, participants reported greater trust, flexibility, and freedom from striving in their work. Of the quotes shared, among the most touching to me was hearing a Unitarian Universalist pastor say in the following year, they left room in their sermons for the Spirit to move; a Baptist describing an experience of unconditional love and connection, that “there’s something bigger than you at work, you’re not God and nobody is asking you to be, so just rest”; a Pentecostal saying “I know God less but I love her, love him, love the divine more.”  An attendee in the crowd said, “I would go back to church if I knew my priest had done this.”

More participant stories are shared in Don Lattin’s book God on Psychedelics, describing in rich depth the personal aspect of these journeys. I won’t reproduce them here, but in addition to their religious content, they are moving stories of self-reexamination, family ties, loss, reality reorientation, and sometimes crisis.

As I listened to the presentation, I knew there was so much more being left out. Yes, Dr. Griffiths spent a significant chunk of his time talking in vague but serious terms about psychedelic risks (which have been scarcely studied). But there was so much more that the presenters weren’t being transparent about, weren’t hinting at, if not outright concealing. The overall emotional, inspiring message was clear: a kind of marriage had been consummated, or as Michael Pollan reportedly said that evening to the whole conference, “the virus of psychedelics” has been put “into the bloodstream of religions.”

As Lattin says, “Much of today’s research into psychedelic-assisted therapy remains a social movement in the guise of a scientific experiment…the crusade to introduce psychedelics into the religious mainstream has been underway for sixty years.”²

Later this week, Dr. Griffiths is scheduled to present the study’s findings again at the Parliament of World Religions, this time with a study participant, another participant from the 1962 Good Friday experiment, and perhaps the most well-known living Catholic mystic, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.

The Dark

Despite the light above, my experience of the presentation was not so light. From my perspective, a culture of deception and an aura of manipulation has long seeped through the psychedelic milieu in which the study is situated.

In light of what they knew to be highly-suggestible drugs, some Hopkins researchers involved in the study fostered relationships that, in my opinion, leveraged the power dynamics they cultivated with some participants during and after the trial to further some researchers’ beliefs about psychedelics. I am concerned that, as part of a long-term goal to incorporate psychedelics into mainstream religion, some members of the Hopkins team may have inappropriately transmitted their own beliefs about psychedelically-induced “mystical experiences” to some participants, reinforced through social ties, financial ties, and a growing media climate of hype. These ties continued despite some Hopkins researchers having knowledge of irresponsible, illegal, and unhealthy behavior. And in at least one instance, according to a participant’s testimony, a guide allegedly committed a boundary violation according to one Hopkins psychedelic professor’s standards.

Beyond these and other public health concerns, this is a case study that leaves significant lingering considerations for stronger and longer-term ethical guidelines for future psychedelic research. The study also raises important critical questions for religious studies, theology, and psychedelic religious communities in a time of increased psychedelic religious and spiritual use.

I believe more people will be harmed in psychedelic research and in their engagement in psychedelic subcultures if I do not speak out. I believe the trial was predicated on an unethical premise and that the scientific value of its findings is questionable, yet it may have an outsized and unhealthy influence on culture, leading to public health miseducation and profound abuse. Because of its potential to influence religious institutions and public opinion with an incomplete and misleading picture, I cannot stay silent without doing violence to my conscience.

Seeking Blessing

For many years, I wanted to do anything to help integrate psychedelics with religion. My ayahuasca experiences made me want to return to religion as a pastor, so I quickly found a home in Unitarian Univeralism, whose compatibility with DIY spirituality totally worked with my psychedelic views. But I held those views very close to the vest—it was 2018, and not quite enough people had read Michael Pollan yet to feel comfortable being “out.” I applied to seminary to be a UU minister, but was not honest at all about wanting to integrate psychedelics into my seminary experience. When I reconverted to Christianity the summer of my arrival at divinity school, I remained very, very careful about what I revealed of my psychedelic beliefs.

I was like Jacob in the Book of Genesis, pretending to be his hairier older brother Esau in pursuit of his spiritual security: a blessing. I wandered through mainstream religion, cloaking myself with the goatskin of a twin who sounded more religious than the real me to the institutions I sought credibility from. As Danielle Giffort has described professional psychonauts, I “performed sobriety.” We just wanted a blessing.

And that’s how you had to do things as a psychonaut in mainstream spaces—you couldn’t be fully honest, you couldn’t fully disclose, you had to perform an unattainable image. I think those habits are still deeply ingrained in the culture when it interfaces with the mainstream, and maybe even when it interfaces with itself. 

But when I was riding the wave of the hype, it was amazing. I was high on being at the edge of science, the edge of religion, and the feeling of “I’ve got this secret that I wish everyone could know, if only they were ready for it.” It really felt like I found a new but old gospel that had been obscured by suffocating, dying religion. They obviously didn’t have the spiritual vitality that we knew.

After years of being estranged from my religious upbringing, Christianity finally seemed insane in the right way: a countercultural love system, not insane in all its well-known wrong ways. Many of us went to ayahuasca ceremonies to heal our religious wounds, to escape Christianity’s dogmatic weaponry and crushing cultural weight. So it was at first amazing to find Christians who also shared the secret, and who had a mission to “educate” our tradition, like loving parents bestowing our wisdom unto our ignorant children. 

Well, I don’t believe all that anymore. But even though I have grown greatly concerned about many issues around psychedelic usage and its risks (including spiritual risks), I still believe in religious freedom, and I believe in religious freedom for psychedelic users. I believe many of the problems here arose from perverse incentives of trying to obtain those legal protections. I used to work for legal protections for non-Christian psychedelic groups, and I still want them to have those rights, but I also want people to have information they can trust. I also believe in drug policy reform, but I do not know what combination of policies makes sense.

The Wheat and the Weeds

I think most people in the general public still don’t really understand the degree to which lives have been harmed, traumatized, and ended as a result of professional psychedelic evangelism and abuse, often enabled by the same people who are still leading it. I think the general public needs to understand the flip side to the hopeful narratives that more and more politicians regurgitate, having successfully been persuaded by an amorphous science they don’t really know anything about. This is not to dash anyone’s hope, but to say any hope in human endeavors always needs complicating. And of course, it is complicated.

There is a parable in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus compares the world to a field in which an abundance of good seed has been sown into life-giving wheat. Meanwhile, something evil planted weeds, risking choking the life out of the good wheat. In the story, the people working the field want to just rip out the weeds, right from the root. The wise gardener says no, let them grow—they’re entwined together, and you might rip out the good wheat. When the day is over, the gardener will separate them.

Our bad sides are not just entwined with what’s good, they’re often in some way caused by the same goodness—like the wheat with the weeds, our vices seem wrapped up in our virtues. And it’s really not fair that in this process, I’m not showing most of my weeds. And I’m likely not showing enough of the wheat here. And sometimes, it's really hard to see the difference between the wheat and the weeds—in a culture, or within ourselves. No person can be reduced to all wheat, no weeds, all weeds, no wheat.

And yet, the story of the wheat and the weeds does not tell us to be passive in the face of seeing something wrong. It tells us to be precise in our observations, to be the workers in the field, saying, “Something is really, really wrong here.”

Something’s Not Right. And despite what people pretend the story of the 1960s was, that it was all Richard Nixon’s fault, when you read thicker histories and memory-holed accounts of psychonauts from that time, you find that even some psychedelic leaders in the sixties also found some similar, deeply disturbing patterns in their social milieu.

And yet, I have to have mercy for the souls in the field. The soul that lives beyond our mind’s self-conception, the soul that lives under heavy bags of self-delusion, the soul that is in the image of God. The souls that were trying their best to serve the Ultimate, yet living in denial of the harm they were part of, and denied being a part of. As Robert L. Moore said, “If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down.”³ As Fr. Rohr described in his book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, we cannot escape our participation in evil. But living in denial of the radical extent of evil often means we are its unwitting agent, and quite often we are its justifier. So the Wheat and the Weeds is not about avoiding pointing out what’s wrong. It’s to avoid passing ultimate, cosmic condemnation on the fundamental goodness of the souls caught up in evil, for it is us all. 

The flip side of this is that one dangerous part of the Wheat and the Weeds is that people often weaponize the idea of “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” as a dismissal for all criticisms, all calls for accountability, all calls for change. I don’t know if they realize that when they make that analogy, they are often equating their utopian vision as the baby, and actual harmed human beings as the bathwater.

Moore also said that when you’ve had a God complex around something, whether it’s a utopia, a hero on a pedestal, or a fascinating new experience that you’ve made into an idol, it’s very easy to flip it into something demonic. Inevitably, your illusory messianic ideas will deeply disappoint you. You find out it’s not gonna be a utopia, your hero’s been a villain, the idol will be knocked off the pedestal. When this happens, it’s very easy to make your God complex into a Lucifer complex. I really, really want to avoid a Lucifer complex here, because it’s something I've struggled with before.

It’s very easy and very tempting to go from being Jacob one day, willing to deceive in order to receive your blessing, to being the dumbfounded Esau, furious at having been deceived. It sometimes takes a tremendous amount of energy, and dissipation of energy, to avoid each of these grandiosities. We cannot do it by ourselves. We all need help, especially in relationships.

Sometimes, we create systems that are less than the sum of our parts, for whatever reason, especially when everybody is telling us that we’re on the right side of a historical narrative in which we’ve painted ourselves as the hero. When there’s a toxic culture, the culture of the weeds has wrapped itself around the souls of the wheat.

I can never condemn anybody on that deep, cosmic level. But I need to share a part of what I experienced and witnessed and learned in the past two years as I’ve tried to figure out how to sort the wheat from the weeds.

Going Forward

Each day this week, I’ll be sharing some things I learned from my involvement between 2020 and 2022, and some things I learned after I got out and started going back through psychedelic history and contemporary research papers. I’ll go over the well-documented spiritual beliefs of researchers, the suggestible nature of psychedelics, and some of the complicated entanglements here. Some details have been redacted to protect the identity of sources, and many stories have been excluded entirely that were informative to my decision to speak. I learned through this process that for many whistleblowers, things are often far worse than they are able to depict for many different reasons. And it’s hard to convey the felt gravity. Like some people did before me, I hope some of this helps others come forward in their own contexts, who also feel like there’s something wrong and they feel unable to speak.

To understand how we arrived at the study’s June 2023 presentation, we have to go back to before the study began. It officially began in 2015, but we need to at least go back to the mid-1990s. To understand this study, you have to look at the study team’s public, long-held beliefs about psychedelics and their ideas for integrating them into Western religion. That will be covered in the next piece.

You can read part two here.

1. Thomas Merton, “War and Vision: The Autobiography of a Crow Indian” in Ishi Means Man: Essays on Native Americans.

2. Don Lattin, God on Psychedelics, Kindle Edition, Loc. 420 of 2592

3. Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon, p.30.