LEILA FADEL, HOST:
More psychedelic religious groups have popped up around the country in recent years. They argue that offering psychedelic sacrament should be protected by religious freedoms. Alex Horowitz-Ghazi (ph) of our Planet Money podcast visited a mushroom megachurch to see how these groups can blur the line between business and religion.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: When I visited the Zide Door Church in Oakland, California last month, I didn't find any pews or stained-glass saints. Instead, after I was ushered through a metal detector by a friendly armed guard, I found multiple ATMs and technicolor murals of mushrooms all over the walls. That's because here, as the church's founder, Pastor Dave Hodges explained, instead of taking communion wafers or wine, parishioners get mind-altering substances.
DAVE HODGES: Generally, I say I run the largest mushroom church in the world.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: In 2019, Hodges had a vision while on a massive dose of mushrooms. He says he was visited by three golden beings who told him it was his religious mission to provide spiritual seekers with access to magic mushrooms. So he built his church around them, and joining it is pretty simple.
HODGES: We ask you a few questions of whether or not you accept this as part of your religion, who referred you, what you do for a living.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Is there a are you a cop checkbox?
HODGES: There is.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: As a confirmed member for $5 a month, Hodges says you become a co-owner of the church property. You can then make a cash donation, and a church employee will provide you with a drug or sacrament, as it's known here, that you think might help you get in touch with your soul. There are drawers filled with marijuana joints and psychedelic mushrooms of various strains and potencies, even mushroom candies.
HODGES: Yeah. Those are mushroom chocolates. Taffy. These are little pressed candies that are kind of like sweeties.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: I'm visiting on a relatively sleepy Monday afternoon, but Hodges says on a busy weekend, they can see more than 300 members a day.
HODGES: We now have a little over a hundred and thirty-five thousand members who have all physically come through the church to get sacrament.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So how is any of this conceivably legal? I called up lawyer John Rapp.
JOHN RAPP: It's funny 'cause I come off as kind of a corporate guy. You know, I worked for Exxon. I worked for Microsoft and Lockheed. But these days, what I mostly do is I advise psychedelic churches.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Religious groups, Rapp explains, have been getting exemptions from drug laws since at least the 1960s, when the Native American church was given an exemption to use peyote in their ceremonies. But Rapp says a big legal turning point came in 2006. That's when a psychedelic church in New Mexico won a case at the Supreme Court after arguing that religious protections gave them the right to import and consume ayahuasca tea. Over the past decade, successful efforts to decriminalize substances like psilocybin mushrooms in places like Oakland have emboldened newer psychedelic religious groups to come out into the open. And Rapp says there are now estimated to be more than 300 of them around the country. But psychedelic drugs are still federally illegal. So Rapp sees his job as helping his clients demonstrate the sincerity of their religious beliefs as a sort of preemptive legal defense.
RAPP: I literally help people write Bibles. I mean, that's a big part of what I do.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: He helps them standardize their texts, their ceremonies, their religious garb, even things like holidays.
RAPP: That's one of my favorite parts. I just think that's fun. So (laughter)...
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Now, Rapp says most of these churches are relatively small and more or less scraping by financially. But there are some exceptions. Most notably, the Zide Door Church in Oakland that I visited last month. After a raid by the Oakland police put the church into headlines in 2020, its membership exploded, and all those membership fees and cash donations for psychedelic sacrament easily add up into the millions of dollars. But for those who think he's some kind of fungal kingpin, Pastor Dave Hodges says, consider all the payroll and rent he pays to keep the church going and all the money to supply and test all that psychedelic sacrament. As to the big question of whether Pastor Dave's hundred thirty thousand-plus adherents are sincerely religious or simply using the church to get drugs...
HODGES: For me, the perspective is that whether they know it or not, they are having a religious experience. As they do more, eventually, they end up converting themselves.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: On my way out, Pastor Dave did what all good evangelists do - he handed me a copy of his church's Bible, and it really is a living document. On the back, I notice it reads Draft V 2.0.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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