/ These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms
Worshippers are leaving the Church of Latter-day Saints in record numbers, and some are finding solace with an apostate band of psilocybin-loving spiritual explorers looking for God — one trip at a time
"On a Sunday afternoon in March, a group of 30 strangers huddle under a park pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah, sipping hot cocoa and shaking hands shyly as snow clots the cottonwoods. A clean-cut gang of mostly white professionals, they are united by their interest in the Divine Assembly, a two-year old church with 3,000 members that considers psilocybin its holy sacrament.
The church’s co-founders, husband and wife Steve and Sara Urquhart, mingle quietly with the psychedelic-curious, many of whom are either new to tripping or considering their maiden voyage. Steve sticks to the sidelines, every so often reaching to smooth a conical white beard that, combined with his blue eyes and bearlike frame, make him look like a punk Santa Claus. The long beard is the only outer marker of his new identity: Before pivoting to mushroom churches, Urquhart was one of the most powerful Republicans in the Utah State Legislature, serving from 2001 to 2016, with a stint as majority whip in the House before eventually moving over to the Senate.
Former colleagues and friends recall his small-government brand of Republicanism as “rock-ribbed.” He was also, like more than 60 percent of Utah and approximately 86 percent of the Legislature in 2021, deeply, devoutly Mormon.
“We were all the way in,” Urqhuart says of the proudly peculiar American religion with about 6.7 million adherents in the U.S. and about 16.6 million globally. Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 during the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as church authorities requested it be called in 2018, though many Latter-day Saints, or Saints for short, still use the term “Mormon”) bases its teachings on the revelations of Smith, whom they consider a prophet. According to Smith, who claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from a pair of gold plates inscribed with “reformed Egyptian,” Latter-day Saints are God’s chosen people destined to restore the original Christian gospel — a gospel that included, they professed up until 1890, polygamy. . .Although the LDS Church swore off the polygamy Joseph Smith preached in exchange for Utah’s admittance to the Union in 1896, thousands of fundamentalists still practice it in places like Colorado City, Arizona. By Krakauer’s account, LDS men typically become fundamentalist when they receive a “direct revelation” that they should take another wife. LDS women, he contends, can be uniquely vulnerable to offshoot cults because they’re raised to trust their husbands to accurately interpret God’s word, and to obey.
. . . In all likelihood, Urquhart and others believe now, Smith lifted those handshakes and many other ceremonial elements from the Freemasons, the then-popular secret society that counted Smith as a member. Urquhart also believes, 100 percent seriously, that the LDS Church (the mainstream one he and Mitt Romney are from, not the fundamentalist offshoots depicted in Under the Banner of Heaven) is a cult. Specifically, he says, alluding to the church’s polygamist history and fact that some bishops still ask teens if they are masturbating, “a sex cult with really bad sex.”
Church or cult, Urquhart crashed out of it around 2008. In the park that Sunday, he is in good company. Although the Divine Assembly is not limited to former LDS members, or “post-Mormons” as they refer to themselves, the majority of the crowd by default is, and they’re aching for a new kind of spirituality to fill the void. . .
While charges of sexism and racism have long dogged the Latter-day Saints (women are still not allowed to receive the priesthood, and Black men were only permitted to do so in 1978, whereas all white males over 12 receive it virtually automatically), many post-Mormons cited 2015 as the year their frayed faith finally broke. That’s the year the LDS Church classified members in same-sex marriages as “apostates.”
The policy (since marginally backpedaled), combined with a disturbing number of gay teen suicides in Utah (highlighted by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds in the 2018 documentary Believer), woke a lot of people up, multiple post-Mormons tell me. Although, as Sara Urquhart is quick to point out, “It took a bunch of white men dying for some people to notice there might be a problem.”
. . .In 2021, the LDS Church stopped publishing official membership numbers, breaking with decades of tradition. But according to Jim Bennett, a current Saint who met me in the basement of the Salt Lake Tabernacle before choir practice, the LDS Church “is barely treading water in the United States, and imploding everywhere else,” with the exception of Africa and South America, where it continues to grow. . .
Bennett is descended from six generations of LDS elites and wants to see the church reform so the institution his ancestors built does not cease to be relevant for his children. He’s also known the Urquharts since they lived on neighboring cul-de-sacs in St. George. While Bennett doesn’t think the Divine Assembly will absorb a majority of disaffected Saints, he acknowledges that “it’s already happened” for some. “I think we’re in the infancy of where this is going to go,” he says.
. . .The LDS Church is far from the only organized religion in decline. As of 2020, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1937, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Nevertheless, according to another recent survey from Pew Research, 90 percent of Americans still say they believe in a higher power, with 56 percent placing their faith in a theistic god, and 33 percent acknowledging a more abstract spiritual force. All told, it appears God is not, after all, dead; neither science nor technology have sated man’s need for meaning.
Now, as psychedelics such as psilocybin are reentering the mainstream for their promise in treating some aspects of the mental-health crisis — a crisis Utah leads the nation in by some counts, with more residents depressed and suicidal than those in almost any other state — a second question is emerging, perhaps intertwined with the first: Can psychedelics help heal us and restore our connection to the divine?
[ ] The state, for its part, is considering its options. Desperate, as many governments are, for creative solutions to the mental-health crisis, in March, Utah lawmakers passed a bill that created a task force to study the medical benefits of psychedelics. “If this is a tool we can use,” said Rep. Brady Brammer, the sponsor of the bill and an LDS Republican, “then it needs to be in our toolbox and we need to do it the right way.”
. . .How is it possible that some Latter-day Saints seem open to psychedelics when many won’t touch coffee? According to Lindsay Rider, a wellness coach who provides information about microdosing to LDS mothers struggling with postpartum depression, there is a narrow opening in the Word of Wisdom, the Book of Mormon that prohibits “hot drinks” and tobacco but also encourages “good herbs” and a low-meat diet. “My grandparents always had jars and jars of dried herbs in their house,” Rider recalled, citing the pioneer value of self-sufficiency that’s also behind the massive essential-oil industry in Utah.
> . . .On my last Sunday in town, I put on my longest skirt to attend General Conference, a biannual LDS super-gathering that takes place in the conference center on Temple Square. Broadcast live in more than 70 languages, General Conference is an opportunity for the globe’s 16.6 million Saints to hear directly from the 17th president and prophet of their church: 97-year old former surgeon Russell M. Nelson.
Thanks to Steve Hunter, an active bishop in the church when I met him, I have a ticket — and a guide. . .Hunter, who once ran Republican Mia Love’s successful bid for Congress, waffles between criticism of the LDS church as a modern institution and great affection for his fellow Saints — a delicate position that seems to cause him great wincing pain at times, and none at all at others. Religion “creates this security, but the security is also a prison,” he reflects. “It’s not intentional, but it’s hard for people to see the bars around them.”
As we make our way to the third tier of the Conference Center, I take in the surroundings. It’s like Madison Square Garden if Madison Square Garden were filled with oil paintings of oxcarts and the Lord; and with 21,000 seats, it is equally large. As we wait for the program to get started, two Jumbotrons play scenes of what is clearly intended to be God’s creation: golden fields of wheat shimmering, a family walking hand-in-hand on the beach, a tomato ripening on the vine.
. . .On stage at the conference, President Nelson — prophet, seer, and relevator — is finally speaking. “Discover the joy of daily repentance!” he enjoins, and the Saints write it down on their iPhones. Hunter provides more unofficial commentary to the sermon. “Did you know the Greek word for repentance is ‘metanoia’?” he asks. According to Hunter, and the Greek Orthodox Church, metanoia means to change one’s mind; to expand it in such a way as to have a new perspective on the world or one’s self. “Sounds pretty psychedelic,” I whisper back.
As President Nelson shuffles off stage, numerous choir members look like they’re touching their foreheads. “What are they doing?” I ask, squinting. “You guys don’t make the sign of the cross, do you?”“No,” says Hunter, “they’re crying. Wouldn’t you, if you had just heard God speak?”
He is right; the Saints below are not touching their foreheads, but rather dabbing tears away. “Is that genuine?” I ask. “Of course,” he says, eyeing me curiously. “God still exists in a straightjacket.”
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