The Ayahuasca to Jesus Pipeline
Or, why New Age spirituality and charismatic Christianity are close cousins
The psychedelic renaissance has not inspired an abundance of great artists producing great art (music, movies, fashion etc), unlike the Sixties counter-culture or the acid house movement of the 80s/90s. Maybe it’s too dominated by affluent people over 40, the kind who prefer a gentle ‘sound bath’ to Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. But one genuinely great musician who emerged from the plant medicine scene is British folk singer Nick Mulvey. He spent many years in a Santo Daime church in the UK, and this inspired his 2017 album Wake Up Now, which is a stone-cold classic. I listened to it when I was on an Amazonian ayahuasca retreat and was astonished - he was describing my experiences! - then discovered he’d been inspired by ayahuasca as well. His song ‘Remembering’ was my most-listened-to song of 2017.
So it’s been a shock to some of his fans that this mellow proponent of psychedelic spirituality has now embraced what looks like evangelical Christianity.
The shift began, Nick has said, in 2023, when his life was ‘in pieces’: ‘Things in my life had started to fall apart, in more ways than one. I wasn’t living in alignment with who I wanted to be. Not as a partner, not as a father, not as an artist.’ He was struck by a Christian friend of his, who seemed to have the peace he craved. He yearned to surrender to the Creator of the universe - ‘what I’m aiming for is total dependency on God... I try, each morning, to give the first portion of the day to Jesus. To say, Lord replace my agenda with your agenda.’ He felt exhausted by a pick n’ mix spirituality where he was the selector: ‘what I eventually realised is that when you’re the one doing the picking, you remain in charge of the whole thing. You stay at the centre; your blind spots are built into it.’ He also had a keen sense that he was an imperfect, broken being, and felt rescued from his fuck-ups by the grace of the Lord. He didn’t reject his former nature-spirituality, but he decided it made more sense to pray to the Creator than to the created.
He now seems to be in the charismatic Christian subculture of HTB / Vineyard - the same subculture as Mumford & Sons. Charismatic Christianity can look quite similar to middle-class spirituality on the outside - the same scruffy, authentic, soulful, hipster-folksy vibe, the same beanie hats and lumberjack shirts - but the values are quite different when you get into it. No drugs, no spiritual pot pourri, no sex before marriage, a quiet disapproval of LGBTQ+, more emphasis on family values, much more emphasis on sin / imperfection / brokenness, an over-riding emphasis on surrendering to Jesus, and a focus on ‘the Enemy’ - Satan, the root of all evil. Nick hasn’t denounced ayahuasca yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does.
The pipeline from ayahuasca to evangelical Christianity
Nick’s conversion is not unique. There are a whole bunch of ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ video testimonies on Christian YouTube channels and other social media. There are far fewer videos of ‘mushrooms to Jesus’, even though magic mushrooms are much more commonly used than ayahuasca, or are there many ‘LSD to Jesus’ videos, or ‘DMT to Jesus’ videos. I’ll discuss why this might be shortly.
Claude and I did a qualitative analysis of 23 ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ testimonies on YouTube. I searched for ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ and selected the first 23 testimony or interview videos I could find on YouTube. I made sure none of them were by the same people, then turned the YouTube videos into Word transcripts, then uploaded the 23 transcripts into Claude and asked it to do a thematic qualitative analysis. I asked it to look for common themes or patterns in the conversion / salvation testimonies and to test my hypothesis - that people convert to evangelical Christianity after ayahuasca experiences because they get freaked out by either negative entities or brujeria and seek protection in Jesus Christ.
Was this hypothesis confirmed? For the majority, yes, but not all. More after the paywall. Plus - why ayahuasca leads to more evangelical conversions than other psychedelics, and why people convert to evangelical / charismatic / Pentecostal Christianity.
