This week on Snarky Faith, Stuart sits down with Rob Zahn, Lutheran pastor and author of LSD to Galilee: Incarnation in the Psychedelic Subculture (https://amzn.to/4hsFyEI), for a conversation about faith, counterculture, psychedelics, and the strange roads that led from acid trips to altar calls.
Rob’s story begins in an unexpected place. He is a pastor, but his father was an international drug smuggler connected to the world of psychedelic counterculture. That family history became the doorway into a much larger question: what if the church has been too quick to decide where God can and cannot show up?
The conversation explores Rob’s idea of “theosemiotics,” or learning to read the signs of divine presence in culture, memory, music, symbols, and experience. From the “God is Dead” moment of the 1960s to the rise of psychedelic spirituality, Rob looks at a period when traditional religion was losing credibility while people were still desperately searching for transcendence.
Stuart and Rob dig into the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group that treated LSD not merely as recreation but as a kind of sacramental doorway. That does not make the story clean, safe, or easy. It does make it hard to dismiss. For many in the counterculture, psychedelics became a way to name experiences they understood as divine, even if the church had no category for them beyond panic.
The episode also looks at how the spiritual hunger of the 1960s helped shape the Jesus Movement and eventually Contemporary Christian Music. The church once feared the music, the people, and the questions coming from the margins. Then, as churches tend to do, it eventually borrowed the sound, cleaned up the weird parts, and called it renewal.
This is not an episode about endorsing psychedelics or baptizing every altered experience as holy. It is a conversation about attention. What was the church missing then? What is it missing now? And why does organized religion so often recognize spiritual hunger only after it has been domesticated enough to sell at the merch table?
From acid trips to altar calls, this episode asks where God might be found when people stop looking only in the places religion has already approved.
Learn more about Rob Zahn and LSD to Galilee:
Rob Zahn’s website: https://www.robzahn.com/
Get LSD to Galilee: Incarnation in the Psychedelic Subculture: https://amzn.to/4hsFyEI
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