The Testimonies

One of the most influential religious scholars of the 20th century, Smith received psilocybin as a subject in the Marsh Chapel experiment. He later wrote that it gave him his first direct, experiential encounter with the sacred.

Smith had spent his life studying the mystical claims of the world's faiths from the outside. That Good Friday, he said, he finally felt them from the inside — an experience he returned to in his writing for the rest of his life.

A divinity student wrestling with doubt, Young received psilocybin in the same experiment. He has spoken candidly about both the beauty and the difficulty of the day.

Young is careful not to overclaim — he has said he isn't sure it was a “genuine” religious experience in the strict sense. Yet he credits it as one of the turning points that led him into the ministry. He often notes a striking detail: nine of the ten students who received psilocybin went on to become clergy.

An Episcopal priest, Hunt Priest was one of the religious leaders in the Johns Hopkins / NYU clergy study. He later went public and founded Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society.

He described his first session as “magical and mysterious and grand,” a journey through other worlds that turned a long-held theological belief into something he felt he had directly known. The experience moved him from private participant to public advocate — though in 2025 the Episcopal Church removed him from ordained ministry over his psychedelic work, a sign of how unsettled the church remains on the question.

A priest with decades of meditation, yoga, and seminary training behind him, Joslin came to the study already attuned to mystical states — and still found himself transformed.

Joslin described traveling “throughout the universe,” meeting not a figure he would call God but an unmistakable “divine presence.” He is candid that parts of the experience were dark and even frightening — but says it left God “much more a part of my being than ever before.”

Welker had walked away from the Christianity of his pastor father. Over years of ayahuasca ceremonies, the medicine slowly drew him back toward God — and then, once, toward Christ directly.

On what would be his last ayahuasca journey, deep in the chaos of the experience, he saw Jesus — not battling the storm by adding to it, but sitting silent in the boat with him, absorbing the chaos and turning it into “the light which no darkness could overcome.” Today he chooses to set the psychedelics down, believing that in sacrificing them their transformation in his life is finally fulfilled.

A self-described atheist, Petersen enrolled in a 2018 Johns Hopkins psilocybin trial hoping to treat her depression. She left with something she had not gone looking for.

She has called it “an ontological ass-kicking” — an experience that dismantled her certainty that nothing exists beyond the material world. It set her on a path into theological study and a serious, searching engagement with faith.

A Lutheran pastor who described his session in the plain, oceanic language that so many of these accounts reach for.

He described “a loss of self and boundaries and identifying roles” — a dissolving of the ordinary, bounded self into what he called a unitive space. The mystics of his own tradition had a name for exactly this.

Mitchell became the first ordained minister to be legally authorized as a psilocybin practitioner under Oregon’s regulated program — bridging the pulpit and the facilitation room.

Her own encounter came on a desert camping trip and reshaped the course of her ministry, leading her to help others move through these states safely and with spiritual care.

One of the lay Christians whose experiences were documented in academic research on the Ligare community — people processing psychedelic encounters within their faith.

He described a “very cathartic forgiveness moment” that left him, in his words, far more open-hearted toward the Christian tradition he had grown up in — an experience that healed rather than replaced his faith.