This Is Your Priest on Drugs

Many years ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University began a secret research project. They administered psilocybin, the active compound in “magic” mushrooms, to a group of clergy: priests, rabbis, ministers, and religious leaders from four major world religions. The results of the study, which were withheld for several years to protect participants’ privacy, were finally published in 2025. A New Yorker feature brought them to wider attention, and the findings are worth exploring.

When word first got out that religious leaders had agreed to participate in the Johns Hopkins psychedelic study, reactions were mixed. Now that the results are in, the picture is more remarkable than most people expected: almost universally, the clergy described their psilocybin experience as among the most spiritually significant events of their lives. Not interesting. Not useful. The most significant. The researchers used established measures of mystical experience and found that the clergy’s encounters scored comparably to or above what typically emerges in clinical trials with secular participants.

What They Said They Experienced

Several participants reported experiences that challenged their own theological frameworks in unexpected ways:

• Notably, not one of them described God as an 'old man in the sky'.
• Several described God as a kind of pure love without form or gender.
• One female minister said she experienced God as a mother.
• A Catholic priest reported that he physically transformed, during his experience, into a Hindu deity.
• Another described simply dissolving into something larger than himself, and returning with a "bone-deep certainty that everything was going to be all right."

The clergy did not report religious conversion or a shift in doctrinal belief. They didn’t come back from their sessions declaring that their tradition had been wrong. What most of them reported was a deepening of what they already believed – a sense that the mystical core of their tradition was real, confirmed by an experience they hadn’t expected.

What the Critics Say

The study has attracted skepticism from two directions. From secular researchers: psilocybin is known to be a powerful amplifier of expectation and context. Clergy going into a session expecting a spiritual experience are likely to have a spiritual experience. That doesn’t mean the experience is “real” in any metaphysical sense. From religious traditionalists: the idea that a fungus can produce the same encounter with the divine that a lifetime of prayer, fasting, and discipline is meant to cultivate seems to cheapen both.

The Open Question

The study doesn’t answer the question it raises. Whether what these clergy experienced was a genuine encounter with God, a profound neurological event, or something that can’t be cleanly placed in either category is exactly the territory that theology and neuroscience are both unprepared to settle. What the study does establish is that the connection between certain substances and spiritual experience runs straight through mainstream Western religion when given the chance. This isn’t new: archaeologists have found cannabis residue on ancient Israelite religious altars, and communities today are building entire churches around psychedelics as sacraments. The Johns Hopkins study sits in a long tradition.

If you were a religious leader, would you want to participate in a study like this? And do you think a drug-induced experience of the divine is more or less meaningful than one produced through prayer?