I thought it was my idea–but I was wrong. It was already happening quietly in my church’s pews. People were seeking out psychedelics for healing from PTSD, depression and anxiety–or to experience spiritual growth and more intimate communication with God.
Six years ago I read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence, about the decades of research demonstrating the efficacy of psychedelic medicine in treating a wide variety of substance abuse and mental health disorders.
Every once in a while, God whispers in my ear. This time, God put me on blast. “This is what you are going to go learn about next–to help the people in your care who have tried everything and still haven’t found relief.”
I preached a zealous sermon using Pollan’s book to my congregation, taking Romans 12:2 as the text, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–Their good, pleasing and perfect will.” Not only did my church folks not clutch their pearls, some of them began coming out of the psychedelic closet to me.
It took a few years (raising teenagers, pandemic & a building campaign got in the way), but this June I completed a yearlong training to become a psychedelic chaplain through the California Institute for Integral Studies. My certificate puts me in a position to legally support people using psychedelics and related molecules before, during and after a medicine experience, once legalization comes to California. There have been several stalled attempts to legalize through the CA legislature, and now advocates are mounting a new campaign to put it on the 2025 ballot so voters can decide. Colorado and Oregon have already legalized, and even the comparatively conservative Utah has recently made it legal to prescribe in medical settings.
And tantamount to a miracle, even federal legalization has bipartisan support in Congress! With an average of 22 vets dying by suicide each day, policymakers on both sides of the aisle recognize that we need new tools to help with the worsening mental health crisis in our country.
MDMA, the medicine primarily administered along with a specific form of intensive cotherapy, was expected to be rescheduled by the FDA this August and has just met with some new resistance that may lengthen its path to legalization. But researchers in the psychedelic community still speak of legalization as an inevitability. It’s just a question of how soon. And ketamine, a potent anesthetic that has psychoactive properties and produces new neural pathways, is already legal.
Plant medicines such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca, peyote and more have been intrinsic to religious and spiritual practices in indigenous communities for thousands of years, and there’s evidence of their early use in northern Europe and the early Christian communities in Greece and Rome. Some advocates believe these molecules should remain the jurisdiction of religious and spiritual communities, and not be commodified into a for-profit medical model. Others invite the medical and therapeutic communities to embrace them–as long as people who need treatment have access regardless of ability to pay.
I recently offered a Zoom presentation to help clergy and congregations understand the current landscape of the psychedelic movement: safety, efficacy, ethics and legalization, how psychedelic-assisted therapy works, and a big question: do we really want to draw close to God?
You can watch the Zoom here, including a really wonderful Q&A at the end that may answer questions you have, such as: can you take plant medicine if you are on SSRIs? What about bad trips? And: is doing psychedelic assisted therapy a shortcut to the “real work”?
Additionally, you may want to check out Ligare, a (totally legal!) Christian psychedelic society, founded by my friend Rev. Hunt Priest, who first encountered psychedelics as a participant in the clergy psilocybin study at Johns Hopkins in 2015. Ligare holds educational webinars, sponsors spiritual direction groups and helps interested people connect in local communities.
And of course the UCC has a voice on the leading edge of this movement. Rev. Nathan Dannison, UCC pastor from Grand Rapids, MI has been gathering a group of UCC clergy, laity and community partners to craft a resolution for UCC General Synod 2025, currently entitled “Ecumenical Engagement and Faithful Support for the Decriminalization of Entheogenic and Psychedelic Medicines.” The resolution encourages action on political legislation and also calls for careful study and reflection on the safe use and decriminalization of psychedelics and entheogenic substances at a national level. If you would like to participate in the effort to bring this resolution to GS in Kansas City next year, follow this link to sign up, or email Nathan at dannison@gmail.com.
Finally, you are most welcome to reach out to me with any questions (find me at mollybaskette.com), and if I can do some “Holy Spirit traffic direction” for you to help you on your own journey, let me know!
Rev. Molly Baskette is currently co-senior minister of First Church Berkeley UCC in the NCNCUCC.
