Converts traces how psychedelic drugs moved from psychiatric research into evangelical Christian practice and became tools for healing, revelation, and contested spiritual change

Psychedelic drugs moved from mid-20th-century laboratories and countercultural scenes into evangelical Christian settings, where seekers, pastors, and ministries treated altered states as pathways to healing, revelation, and conversion. The subject centers on how chemical experiences became entangled with testimony, spiritual authority, and competing ideas about what counts as authentic encounter with God. Luke Dittrich follows that migration through American religious history, connecting psychiatric experimentation, the collapse and revival of psychedelic legitimacy, and contemporary Christian communities that use substances in explicitly spiritual frameworks. The account highlights tension between prohibition and sacrament, skepticism and faith, and personal transformation versus institutional control. The broader significance lies in how psychedelics can reshape religious practice and blur the boundary between medicine, mysticism, and moral panic. Evangelical engagement with these substances reveals a neglected strand of psychedelic history in which conversion, healing, and spiritual warfare become part of the same chemical narrative.