Reinforced by increasing church attendance among postwar Americans, this burgeoning religious zeal appeared to converge directly with cold war politics and the United States ever-growing geopolitical influence. In foreign affairs, might continued to make right, a condition legitimated domestically in efforts to essentially nationalize Christianity. A period of intense religious ferment, postwar America experienced both a revitalized Christianity that sought a return to tradition and routine, as well as a transformative rejection of monotheistic religion and its connection to modern society. It is not that organized Christianity disappears, of course—far from it—but rather that social cohesion under the broad rubric of Christendom no longer holds in the same ways during and after World War II. For many, the atrocities of the war suggested the death of Abraham’s God, illustrating how there would be no easy return to normalcy, and that moral solutions would now be found outside the traditional framework and principles associated with Christianity. Unable to make sense of God’s apparent exodus from the world, postwar Americans actively sought out alternative means to restore foundational truths, often finding that the path to reigniting a shared moral world arose by escaping the confines associated with modern understanding and western monotheism. Like any spiritual innovation, a new vision would begin with a rejection of dominant spiritual norms and established religious institutions. In psychedelics and non-Abrahamic traditions, the figures in this manuscript (including, among others, Alan Watts and Buddhism, Timothy Leary and Daoism, Ram Dass and Hinduism, and Carlos Castaneda and shamanism) believed they found the means to produce this escape and cement this rejection. However, they also recognized that without the proper tools and frames, the insights and experiences associated with psychedelic consciousness remained inexpressible, beyond understanding, and, as a consequence, beyond value. Eastern religions and Indigenous American traditions (defined as non-Abrahamic western traditions of North and South America) presented the necessary tools to interpret and actualize this value, resulting in the construction of a new religiosity defined not by humanity’s relationship to an all-powerful God, but rather by human’s mutual relationship to one another and with nature.
Engaging the mystical cause and religious affect of psychedelic experimentation both overcomes the limits imposed by scholarly accounts that position psychedelics as historical relics of another time, as well as intervenes in religious discourses that reject categorically the connection between psychedelics and religious insight. More distinctly, Beyond Abraham highlights the role of alternative traditions in American religious history generally, and religion as a destabilizing force in postwar America more specifically. By exploring how psychedelics in postwar America offered an alternative path for re-discovering the religious life in the here and now, Beyond Abraham argues that, in the midst of evangelical revivals and counter-claims regarding the end of religion, the turn to countercultural and alternative religious traditions unsettled the ruling order by offering an alternative space from which to challenge the legitimacy of the majority culture by the very process of existing within it. While often maligned by America’s established religious culture as disruptive or inauthentic, the figures and religious movements within this manuscript united psychedelic experimentation with non-Abrahamic religious traditions in order to deconstruct social conformity and religious rigidity, offering us, most importantly perhaps, a lesson in actualizing the promise of religious pluralism. As the United States continues to struggle with issues of intolerance and violence predicated on religious truths, such a focus might help change how all Americans see their place in a multi-cultural and pluralistic society.