Pathways, September 2025

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.

Over the past few years, psychedelics—especially psilocybin (from “magic” mushrooms) and ayahuasca (an Amazonian brew of vine and shrub)—have been cast as a salve for secularization. The ferment around this topic has been building for some time: from the ayahuasca trip of Aaron Rodgers (now quarterback of my Pittsburgh Steelers) to Rogan podcastdom, but also to more mainstream venues like the New York Times (See, for example, Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat’s conversation from earlier this year, at around the 1:07 mark). Increasingly, the subject is even reflected in serious scientific research.

In May, an extraordinary study titled “Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions” was published. It reports that participants who had received psilocybin showed “significantly greater positive changes in their religious practices, attitudes about their religion, and effectiveness as a religious leader, as well as in their non-religious attitudes, moods, and behavior.” The question: could psychedelics be organized religion’s answer to disaffiliation and disaffection—a way to revive attendance and engagement, and, as some have put it, “awaken a new consciousness of the Holy Spirit in a spiritually moribund church”?

Maybe, but maybe not.

Defenses of psychedelics-as-spiritual-renewal range widely. Some point to their therapeutic potential, including clergy who argue that religious institutions should begin taking these experiences seriously. Others lean into the language of “Ego death” and the supposedly democratizing effects of psychedelics: spiritual experience becomes more widely “available” and accessible, the clergy as “middleman” is cut out, and spiritual seekers are relieved of the demands of sustained ascetic discipline. 

Still, other defenders—Michael Pollan among them—make the point that “The cross-pollination of religion and psychedelics has a long history:” psychedelics appear to have been part of ancient Greek rites and continue to play significant roles in many Indigenous religious traditions today. But such insights are diminished by more apocryphal genealogies, like the one found in Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key. As Travis Kitchens put it in Reason earlier this year,

The Immortality Key begins with a message for today. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is in the grip of a cataclysmic “spiritual crisis” that can only be remedied through a “popular outbreak of mysticism,” the result of retrieving the Eucharist's ancient, and until now secret, pharmacological roots.

And what are those roots? According to Muraresku, Christianity evolved from pagan mystery cults whose most sacred ritual involved the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and this sacrament, the kykeon, eventually became the Holy Eucharist.

This genealogy of the Eucharist-as-fungus strikes me as a curious retooling of the Grail Legend—but you be the judge. 

Detractors of the psychedelics-as-spiritual-renewal narrative tell a different story. Ashley Lande—once a psychedelics user—notes that psychedelics did not produce the intended “ego-death” effect, but instead “carried me farther away from authentic relationship,” with both other people and the divine. And a psychological study published this month found that 1) participants “who used psychedelics were less likely to have grown up in a religion or belong to a religion as an adult,” and 2) over the two months following a psychedelic experience, participants reported no increase in either religious or spiritual feelings. 

Celebrity endorsement scores another point for the skeptics. When figures like Miley Cyrus, Will Smith, and Aaron Rodgers flock to a practice, it’s hard not to see it as the newest luxury fad. And the psychedelic craze might just be the latest wave of colonial extractivism, as this moving mini-documentary about the Amazonian Kichwa suggests. In this light, the recent turn to psychedelics seems to be less a salve for secularization than a symptom of it.