Christians Sleepwalking Into The Occult

And: Billboard Chris Fights In An Australian Court For Free Speech​

Well, this is something. Yesterday in Nashville I was hanging with a youngish (late 30s) Evangelical friend, and we were talking about Living In Wonder. I don’t think he has read the book, because he asked me what I thought about using ayahuasca. “Spiritually very dangerous,” I told him. “All psychedelics leave you wide open to spiritual experiences that could go very, very wrong.”

He mentioned Shawn Ryan, the well-known Nashville podcaster, who was healed of extreme PTSD (from military combat) by using psychedelics, and who testifies that the psychedelic experience brought him to Christ. Well, yes, that can happen, I told my interlocutor. I mentioned how trying LSD in my freshman year of college, in 1986, banished my depression and incipient alcoholism, and moved me farther along the road to faith. I went to the campus bookstore the next day, after coming down, and bought books about Christianity.

Said I to my friend: “I’ve never talked about that publicly over the years, because I don’t want people to think that it’s okay to do that stuff. Fact is, I got lucky — very lucky. I opened the doors of perception, and God came through it. But anything could have. I talk about doing it in my book, because I wanted readers to know that I wasn’t warning them off of psychedelics from a position of ignorance.”

Then my friend said that he knows lots of church folks in Nashville and elsewhere (he travels a lot for business) who are all-in on psychedelics. He mentioned some West Coast Evangelicals he knows who go to Latin America for ayahuasca weekends all the time. He mentioned suburban Evangelical women he knows — I think he meant here in Nashville — who are all into microdosing mushrooms and other psychedelics. He’s a straight-laced guy, and is befuddled by all this.

Then he told me that the soft-occult is rampant in church circles around here. “Soft occult” is my term, not his. He said that so many Christians he knows — mostly women — are into astrology, crystals, tarot cards, things like that. The more he talked, the more I sat gape-mouthed.

This conversation was on my mind last night when I went out to far-exurban Nashville to speak to a group of small-town Republicans, all Christians, who had been instrumental in helping us launch fundraising for the LNBL movie. I brought it up with a Catholic I met, who is about the same age (late 30s, from the look of it) as my Evangelical friend from earlier. Oh yeah, he said, that stuff is definitely present in Christian circles.

Wait … what?!

Continued below.