The Church Is Quietly Doing Psilocybin. Here’s What That Means for Men Who Left It.

Sascha Kuhlmann
Mar 2
4 min read

Updated: Mar 9

In the summer of 2016, a rabbi who had never smoked pot took a train to Johns Hopkins University. She received a legal dose of psilocybin.

She called it the most powerful spiritual experience of her life.

She was one of 24 clergy in a joint study by Johns Hopkins and NYU. Rabbis, a Catholic priest, Protestant ministers, a Muslim leader. The study took a decade to publish. Its lead author, Roland Griffiths, died before it came out.

When the results appeared in May 2025 in Psychedelic Medicine, they were hard to argue with:

96% rated at least one psilocybin session among the top five most spiritual experiences of their lives.

79% said the experience made them more effective in their religious role. 79% said it deepened their sense of the sacred. 42% said it was also among the most psychologically hard things they had ever done.

These were not spiritual seekers. These were professional religious leaders. People whose job is the sacred.

What Men Carry When They Leave

Most men I work with did not leave religion because they stopped believing in something greater.

They left because the container stopped working.

The church, the mosque, the synagogue — whatever it was — felt hollow. Too much performance. Not enough truth.

They walked out.

The hunger stayed.

That hunger shows up as restlessness. A sense that something is missing but they can’t name it. An openness — often reluctant — to the idea that a plant medicine ceremony might offer what the institution never did.

That instinct is not wrong. Here’s what’s interesting: the institution is starting to catch up.

Not Just the Progressive Wing

Ron Cole-Turner spent his career at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In 2025 he published Psychedelics and Christian Faith with co-author Hunt Priest. Priest is a Protestant minister who has done his own psychedelic work. Cole-Turner’s argument: psychedelics can be a real pathway to healing within the Christian tradition.

This comes from academic presses. From credentialed theologians. Not from the fringe.

And not just from the left.

A Guardian piece from December 2025 documented evangelicals, Republican governors, and veterans championing ibogaine — a powerful psychedelic from West African tradition — for addiction and trauma. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies traced psychedelic Christianity from the 1960s all the way to the Hopkins trial.

Psychedelics and faith coexisting is no longer a counterculture idea.

One Clergyman’s Dismantling

Bruce Sanguin was a United Church minister in Vancouver. His life looked fine. Then it fell apart.

His marriage ended. His career crumbled. He turned to psychedelics — not for recreation, but as medicine. What he found was not destruction. A dismantling.

His memoir, Dismantled, is one of the most honest accounts of what happens when a man’s false self gives way. Sanguin writes about childhood trauma. About the constructed identity that holds everything together until it can’t. About what opens when the scaffolding comes down.

The core insight: disassembly is not destruction. The dismantling is the work.

For men who have spent decades holding a version of themselves together — professionally, spiritually, relationally — that idea matters.

Does the Path Matter?

Spirit Tech by Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly asks a sharp question: does it matter how you arrived at a mystical experience?

A monk meditates for forty years and reaches unity consciousness. A man takes psilocybin in a ceremony and reaches something that feels the same. Are those equal? Does the path shape the destination?

Honest answer: we don’t know yet. What we do know is that the experiences — prepared for and integrated — produce real, lasting changes. In clergy. In cancer patients facing death. In men who had stopped feeling much of anything.

The method matters less than what you do with what you got.

The 10% Problem

Here is where most men get stuck.

The ceremony is not the work. Ten percent of the work, maybe less. A door opens. A layer of armor drops. A glimpse of something you had forgotten was possible.

Then you go home.

The same patterns are waiting. The same reflexes. The same stories about who you are and why you do what you do. The medicine showed you the problem. It did not solve it.

That gap — between the opening and the integration — is where men either grow or lose the whole thing.

Integration is the hard work of making an insight stick. Reflection. Somatic work. Community. A guide who has done their own work and can hold what you went through.

That is what I do with men who have had significant psychedelic experiences — ceremony, ketamine therapy, or even a spontaneous mystical experience. The experience is not the point. Who you become because of it is the point.

For Men Who Left the Church but Not the Question

If you grew up with a language for the sacred — and left because the language stopped fitting — the Hopkins study matters.

Not because it validates your choice. Because it shows that the people who gave you that language are doing the same thing you’re doing. Sitting in the same uncertainty. Asking the same questions about what the sacred actually is.

96% of them called it the most spiritual experience of their lives.

That number does not need commentary.

If you are working with what a ceremony opened in you — or preparing for one — and you want support making it permanent rather than just memorable, that is what integration coaching is for.

Book a session here.

Further reading: