Innovation, Affect, and "Hypothetical" Ritual at the First Church of Cannabis

On March 26th, 2015, then Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed into law Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), intending to protect conservative Christian groups seeking assurances they would not be compelled to serve LGBTQ+ clients or forced to provide contraceptive healthcare to their employees. Despite the intended beneficiaries of the Indiana law, Bill Levin, a local semi-celebrity, concert promoter, occasional libertarian political candidate, and long-time advocate of cannabis legalization with a mystical streak, sensed an opportunity. Within days, he had established the First Church of Cannabis (FCOC), named himself its Grand Poobah (with acknowledged borrowing from The Flintstones), and secured tax-exempt status from the IRS. After the state threatened criminal arrests if church goers were to smoke their mind-altering sacrament, Levin and the church sued the state to gain that right under RFRA law. In 2018, the church lost its suit, but here is where the story gets particularly interesting from a religious studies perspective: Despite being denied the right to practice what it claims to be its central ritual, the FCOC is still meeting, as it has on Wednesday nights (in person and live on its Facebook page) for more than eight years.

The FCOC raises a variety of fascinating religious studies issues, e.g., the definition of religion (in theory and in the courts) and the relationship of mind-altering substances to spirituality. After briefly discussing these, the proposed paper would then proceed to focus on the central FCOC ritual, which would theoretically involve communal smoking of a joint or ingestion of some other cannabis product/s. I use the word "theoretically" here to indicate, as mentioned above, that the FCOC has never in fact managed to perform this central ritual, at least as initially prescribed.

In the earliest services of the FCOC, Grand Poobah Bill Levin would arrive at this climactic moment and say something like, “If the state of Indiana would allow us, we would at this point in the service open this box and partake of our sacrament.” A certain slapstick spirit has always characterized FCOC services (many of its earliest members were local comics), and Levin’s announcement of this hypothetical ritual would often draw responses from the congregation, e.g., boos or criticisms of the state’s suppression of the practice, or jokes about the size of the box and whether it reflected on the masculinity of the Grand Poobah.

Three years after the founding of the FCOC, when the 2018 Farm Bill made the production and distribution of Delta-8 THC derived from hemp legal-ish, such that it became widely available in Indiana, the FCOC was left with a dilemma: Continue to insist that only Delta-9 THC derived from cannabis had the requisite properties for sacramental use and accordingly continue to engage only in hypothetical ritual, or substitute the similarly mind-altering Delta-8 THC for Delta-9 THC in order to engage in a very similar ritual more or less legally. At first FCOC leaders resisted the use of Delta-8 products, deeming them (relative to Delta-9) “unnatural.” (The “natural” nature of cannabis is regularly extolled in FCOC sermonizing, testimonials, and literature.) Eventually, however, the church began to periodically share Delta-8 products in a kind of ritualized fashion.

The central ritual of the FCOC is therefore interesting to religious studies theorists in several ways. First, though members of the congregation were disappointed that they could not engage in the communal smoking or ingestion of cannabis-derived THC, the ritual, even in hypothetical form, still served as the climax of the service, and the ritual object of cannabis, even in absentia, still appears to have had the power, as a symbol, to solidify the relationship between the FCOC’s “ethic” and “worldview” (to use Geertzian terms). Taking Geertz (1976) as a proto-practice theorist, as Jason Springs (2008) has done, and thereby connecting Geertz to Performance Studies, the proposed paper would emphasize how this ritual, even though hypothetical, still managed to produce, in Catherine Bell’s (1998, pg. 208) terms, a “culturally meaningful environment as opposed to simply communicating ideas or attitudes.”

Second, the paper would explore the FCOC’s tentative, occasional substitution of Delta-8 THC products in the ritual space as a real-time ritual innovation. The possibility of innovation underscores another emphasis of Performance Studies, which is that rituals change. As Bell (ibid., 209) puts it: “Change is…integral to how persons live and reproduce culture and not the disruption of some intrinsically static state of affairs.”

Finally, if time, the paper will also comment on this ritual from the perspective of affect studies. Affect is of central importance to all religious practice and belonging, but its importance is perhaps not always as openly acknowledged as it is in FCOC belief and practice. The idealized good life, in the FCOC, is one in which people feel a certain way (healthy, relaxed, humored, and in good relationship with others), and where that feeling positively affects not only their individual experience of life but also their relating to others. The FCOC therefore offers an interesting opportunity to explore, for example, Teresa Brennan’s (2004, pg. 1) assertion that people “feel the atmosphere” as they walk into a room, and that the affects of a room (or religious service) are incorporated in ways that materially alter “the biochemistry and neurology of the subject.” Or Donovan Schaeffer’s (2015, pg. 125) reminder that religious studies scholars should ask not only what affects do in the context of religion, but also, “What will bodies do for affects?”

Bibliography

Bell, Catherine. “Performance.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, pgs. 205-24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Schaeffer, Donovan. Religious Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Springs, Jason. “What Cultural Theorists of Religion Have to Learn from Wittgenstein; Or, How to Read Geertz as a Practice Theorist.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 4 (2008): 934-69.