marieclaire.com.au (^) | 61
SOCIETY
While young people are turning away from religion, it doesn’t mean they’ve
stopped seeking a spiritual (and literal) high. Jen Doll spends a night with
some of the women who worship at the altar of weed
I
t’s Friday night and I’m at church getting
stoned. Around me, congregants of all ages
are pulling colourful pipes and carefully
rolled joints from their bags and pockets,
lighting up and inhaling slowly, with
purpose, before passing their parapherna-
lia down the pew. Dudes in baseball caps
mingle with young women in sundresses;
retirees rub shoulders with hipsters; a guy in a “Hemp
Hustler” T-shirt shimmies down the aisle. When the
slender, well-dressed woman sitting next to me hands
me a joint, I take a drag. The mood is exuberant, like a
party’s getting ready to start.
Entering the rainbow-streaked sanctuary of the
International Church of Cannabis – which looms large
amid the neat, unassuming rows of houses in this
sleepy, residential neighbourhood in Denver, Colorado
- feels like having some kind of religious fever dream,
or like visiting the Sistine Chapel on acid. Colour
literally drips down the walls. Before the church
opened its doors in April 2017, Spanish painter Okuda
San Miguel spent six days bringing to life a wildly
psychedelic vision involving massive creatures
with beaks, wings and sparkling eyeballs.
Tonight, puffs of smoke float up into the kaleido-
scopic ceiling overhead as church co-founder Steve
Berke, 38, a former all-American tennis player,
ascends to the podium in Converse sneakers. Behind
him are two blue plush-velvet chairs shaped like hands
in a peace sign. At cannabis church, there are no
hymns, no Bible; there’s not even a pastor. (This eve-
ning, we’ll hear from two cannabis activists who host a
web series called Pot Talk on WorldViral TV.)
The house religion is “Elevationism”, described
on the church’s website as the belief (or “lifestance”)
that weed can accelerate and deepen a person’s indi-
vidual spiritual journey, whatever that happens to be.
From the evidence in the chapel, it truly is a
come-one, come-all creed. Some “Elevationists”
practise other religions, too (Berke himself is Jewish,
another of his four co-founders grew up Evangelical).
Here, believers don’t have to “convert” to anything;
they just have to fill out an online application
confirming that, yes, cannabis is a “spiritual sacra-
ment” in their life.
Why they would bother to do this, and not just get
stoned on their own couches at home, is the question
I’ve come to answer. According to Lucy, 28, a yoga
teacher who sometimes leads classes at the church,
“Churches by nature have a high vibrational energy.
Consuming in a community, in a ‘church’ setting,
makes it an even more powerful experience.”
Through the haze of smoke, I see Berke strike a
match and benevolently invite congregants to light
joints on his candle. “We support each other on our
individual spiritual journeys,” he says, “and come
together to burn our sacrament.” At cannabis church,
religious rituals are stripped of guilt and recast as a
communal self-help experience – which is maybe what
they were always supposed to be anyway. The crowd
goes wild, shouting “Amen!” and “Huzzah!”
R.E.M.’s 1991 hit “Losing My
Religion” turned out to be weirdly
prescient: young people have been turn-
ing away from organised belief systems
since the early ’90s, disillusioned by sex
scandals and cultures of intolerance. In
Australia, “no religion” is the most
common religious status, while in the
US nearly four in 10 young adults claim
no religious affiliation. But that doesn’t mean they’ve
stopped seeking spiritual fulfillment.
Alternative forms of soul sustenance, from yoga
to astrology to socially conscious jobs, have gone
mainstream. Weed, bolstered by a growing acknowl-
edgment of its health benefits and a wave of
legalisation (recreational use is now legal in Canada
and across 10 US states), has transcended its reputa-
tion as the preferred party drug of slackers and joined
the firmament of wellness-based options available
to the enlightened young spiritual seeker.
Weed and church are actually not the strangest
bedfellows – cannabis has a long religious history.
Its active ingredient, THC, interacts with the“AT CANNABIS
CHURCH, RITUALS
ARE STRIPPED OF
GUILT AND RECAST
AS A SELF-HELP
EXPERIENCE”