Mainstream cannabis acceptance is at an all-time high. 60 percent of the nation is in favor of full legalization, per latest Gallup polls. Most people are warming up to the idea of legal marijuana, including some of its biggest objectors historically, Christians. Smoking weed in search for the holy spirit is beginning to peak its head into religious practice.
Cannabis And Christianity?
On April 20th of this year, The International Church of Cannabis A.K.A. Elevation Ministries opened their doors to the Denver public, The New York Times reports. The church opened on 4/20, which is the globally agreed upon day to celebrate everything cannabis. The church welcomes anyone whose life has been benefited spiritually from cannabis use, and follows no specific dogma, Elevation Ministries Media Relations Director Steve Berke explained to The New York Times.
Another reason the churched opened was to protest religious persecution. Dan Pabon, a Democratic Rep. of the House of Representatives believes Elevation Ministries is taking advantage of the recreational marijuana laws and proposed a bill to ban marijuana use in churches.
“I think it offends both religious beliefs everywhere, as well as the voters’ intent on allowing legalization of marijuana in Colorado,” Pabon said.
Elevation Ministries finds this claim ridiculous because weed is legal in Colorado and they can smoke anywhere they want. Starting a church wasn’t necessary to smoke in public. Some of Pabon’s co-workers also disagree with his stance. Regulating a church’s form of worship isn’t something the state should regulate, Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar told The New York Times.
Denver wasn’t the first city to challenge religious norms with cannabis use. Bill Levine founded The First Church of Cannabis in Indianapolis in direct protest of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA.) Then Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed the RFRA into law, The Chicago Tribune reports. The RFRA allows businesses to cite religious freedom as a legal defense, CNN reports. As it turns out, this may be the loophole needed for Levine and his congregation.
Levine and the cannatarians (members of The First Church of Cannabis,) are citing the RFRA to allow marijuana as the official sacrament for The First Church of Cannabis. Jon Sturgill is a lawyer representing Levine and the cannatarians, he argues they deserve the same protections as church-goers who drink wine for religious ceremony, The Huffington Post reports.
Some scholars believe cannabis use has been linked to Christianity and other religions ceremony from the beginning. In fact, using cannabis for spiritual purposes goes back thousands of years and was used by many different religions, including: Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, Leafly reports. How each religion used cannabis varies, from smoking or ingesting to fumigating entire congregations.
Scholars and religious users alike have found references in texts that support their findings, as well as alleged visual representations of cannabis in artwork. In the episode “God on High” of Viceland’s Weediquette, members of The Healing Church (THC,) located in Providence Rhode Island, believe they’ve found representations of cannabis leaves and stoned Christians in the stained-glass window of a Providence church.
Sula Bennet was a Polish anthropologist who studied Judaic traditions before she died in 1982. Bennet claims Jesus was using cannabis smoke to treat people suffering from glaucoma A.K.A. “healing the blind,” according to Wikipedia. Bennet was the first to find evidence of cannabis use in the Bible. “Kaneh,” in Ezekiel. 27:19; Isaiah. 43:24; Song of Songs. 4:14), “kaneh ha-tob” (Jeremiah. 6:20), and “kaneh-bosem” (Exodus. 30:23,) Bennet believes that “Kaneh” was mistranslated into “calamus,” which is a reed or “sweet cane,” because the greek root “kan” can mean reed or hemp. “Kaneh-bosem” was an ingredient used in the holy anointing oil which god told Moses to make, per Wikipedia. Cannabis use gives pharmacological explanations to mystical stories like Jesus performing miracles and Moses speaking with a “burning bush.”
“It’s simply cannabis. There is no doubt about it,” Carl Ruck said.
Carl Ruck is a professor at Boston University. He specializes in the rituals of the god Dionysus and studies the role of entheogens in the evolution of human consciousness and religions. Enthenogen, a term Ruck created, means ingesting a plant or plant medicine to induce a state of altered consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes.
Ruck backs up Bennet’s claims, explaining how the holy anointing oil, a large amount of it, was to be placed on the priest and all the holy instruments within the temple. A graduate student of Ruck’s made up a batch according to the original recipe (cannabis is legal in Massachusetts,) and assured Ruck it works.
Other rituals included priests taking an incense burner with “kaneh-bosem” into in the inner sanctum of the temple to bath in the smoke to have mystical experiences. This tradition was allowed for priests alone during Yom Kippur (Jewish New Year,) Ruck explained.
“In the small space, the fumes of burning cannabis would create in common culture, what they call hot boxing.”
While splinter groups of Christians are celebrating in ways that many scholars think have been an underlying pillar of Christianity since the beginning, how likely is it that Christianity can evolve with cannabis culture?
We don’t have to look hard to find a religion that gained global acceptance in a short amount of time. Mormonism. Mormonism was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, and was not accepted into mainstream practice for over 100 years. Now it has 15 million members strong and is widely viewed as an acceptable religious system, per Wikipedia. Ruck points out that religions have similar origins dealing with the conformation of a deity, then spreading said conformation to followers and hoping it gets passed down to future generations. After that, the rest is history. If a religion that used to condone and practice polygamy is culturally accepted, it’s not hard to assume a religion celebrating cannabis could follow in its path.
“I think it’s going to expand tremendously,” Ruck said.
