Legal Worship

The United States Supreme Court established sound legal standards for psychedelic worship in the UDV case that involved the religious use of ayahuasca. The Court unanimously found that the group’s use of ayahuasca was protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), because it was safe and central to the group’s sincerely-held religious beliefs. They (the UDV) weren’t pretending to be religious. They were religious. A lower court further bolstered these standards in the Santo Daime case. Both court opinions are quite readable.

Use of psychedelic sacraments by TDA members

TDA arose out of sacred psychedelic communion, where mushrooms dropped the veil to the Divine. In those communions, incredible visions of shapes, structures, lights, and colors revealed that mushroom mycelium offered an organizational model that could promote worship and healthy religious communities. By replacing abuse-promoting attributes of religion with the gospel of autonomous religious exploration and devotion, individual worshipers, much like hyphae, organically build healthy, interconnected community that can hold and protect, rather than isolate, vulnerable individuals.

The TDA worship community has expanded beyond the first core group that regarded mushrooms to be a holy sacrament and, also, beyond psychedelic worship in general. Some members feel no call to worship that way. That is how autonomous worship works. While assigned doctrines, rites, and rituals can homogenize religious communities toward isolation, differences among autonomous worshippers actually foster connection. Ideas that aren’t heretical or eternally threatening are liberated to be fascinating, inspiring, tender, and even hilarious.

Still, though, without mushroom sacrament, there likely would be no TDA. For many TDA members, worship would be diminished, if our liturgy lost solemn reverence for sacred psychedelic vignettes or side-splitting laughter about divine divas and over-the-top gods that grab worshippers’ attention to teach, save, and redeem.

Be aware that psychedelic sacraments are schedule-1 controlled substances. This means that psychedelic sacraments carry risks, such as, arrest and incarceration, termination of employment, and custody actions. In other words, don’t think religious protections always work like they should. Anyone who brushes off the possibility of governmental persecution is not thinking clearly.

In the United States, safe and sincere religious worship is legally protected, a tremendous blessing not available in many parts of the world. Even in America, however, worship rights are not equal. In particular, worship with psychedelic sacraments is subject to Government persecution. Because of this risk and because many TDA members do worship with psychedelic sacraments, this form of worship will be discussed.

In brief, psychedelic worship can be legally protected, if it is (1) safe, (2) sincere, and (3) religious. Psychedelic worshipers should know what criteria courts use to determine those three requirements and, then, make it easy for a court to see those things in their worship. By no means does this suggest that worshipers need to engage in religious cosplay, to be legal. The standards laid out by the judiciary are fair and flexible enough to allow for robust authentic worship.

If TDA is legally challenged, it will defend itself. The bigger concern for individual TDA worshipers arises, if they are challenged by Government. Then, they will need to show that their worship is safe, sincere, and religious. This means, TDA members would need to show how they exercise the tenet in their own lives and their own worship. A good way to do this is through a personal religious creed.

In their creed, psychedelic worshipers can detail the specifics of their religious beliefs and practices. Items to consider including are: (1) ultimate ideas (beliefs about life, purpose, death), (2) metaphysical beliefs (addressing a reality which transcends the physical and immediately apparent world), (3) a moral or ethical system (good vs. evil; right vs. wrong), (4) comprehensiveness of beliefs (to provide the believer with answers to many, if not most, of the problems and concerns that confront humans), and (5) accoutrements of religion (scripture, ceremonies and rituals, sacred holidays, appearance and clothing, propagation). These 5 items of consideration are taken from a court’s struggle to decide whether an individual’s marijuana church was legally protected.

Yes, in a pluralistic society that professes religious freedom, it is vulgar that one group of worshipers must worry so much about Government entanglement. But, that is the current reality. The regime is hostile to psychedelic sacraments. However, courts are not blatantly hostile to psychedelic worship, if (and that is a very big and important “if”) worshipers take the time to show courts some combination of the 5 items listed above. And, again, the broadness and flexibility of those items should not interfere with the substance of a mystic’s autonomous journey.

In fact, the judicial standards are so well-reasoned that they might even enhance a mystic’s journey, by presenting a framework for mindful consideration of a creed’s content. Item 3 seems the easiest, since it seems that every human should want a moral or ethical code. Though a mystic’s journey might lack the concrete certainty that many traditional religions have when it comes to ultimate ideas (item 1) and metaphysical beliefs (item 2), a mystic can still describe their musings and investigations of these items, along with any Divine communions that might inform these ideas and beliefs. Even if the mystic believes we arise, live, and die according to purely biologically terms, that belief still affords room for infinite iterations of the Divine. Though a mystic’s journey might (intentionally) lack traditional religions’ comprehensiveness of beliefs (item 4) and religious accoutrement (item 5), a mystic can still describe where they are looking, what they have found and still hope to find, and why they worship as they do.

In the court case that first laid out those 5 items, one sentence sticks out. Ruling against the individual’s claim of religious protection, the court stated, “Though his undeveloped and nascent beliefs may contain within them the seed of a new religion, the seed has not yet germinated.” In other words, the individual did not give the court much to work with. Basically, the individual said that marijuana was medicine for him and made him feel at peace, but little more, other than a passing reference to Christianity. Even there, the court noted, “Had [he] asserted that the Church of Marijuana was a Christian sect, and that his beliefs were related to Christianity, this Court probably would have been compelled to conclude that his beliefs were religious.” In this way, the judiciary is telling people with “heretical” sacraments that, unlike other worshipers, they can (and must) connect the dots for courts, regarding those sacraments and safety, sincerity, and religion.

American courts largely hate when they are forced to determine whether worship is sincerely religious, knowing the task is impossible, since judges cannot read minds. Of course, given the tremendous religious diversity present in America’s pluralistic society, courts have often been forced to make that determination. It is a tough task, even for the fairest judges. The strong trend line in American courts is to expansively interpret religious protections. The best way for psychedelic mystics to fit within those protections is (1) to mindfully learn what the courts are looking for, determine if those items might actually augment their authentic religious worship, and (2) to detail how their worship meshes with that framework (or why it doesn’t). New religions—especially where heretical sacraments are involved—must explain themselves a bit more. Fortunately, American courts take religious protections seriously. Likewise, TDA members should take seriously the opportunity to avail themselves of these meaningful protections.