His new company, Christian Cannabis, aims to not just sell marijuana to Christians, but to encourage them to use it to deepen their relationship with God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt has a place in your practice of prayer and worship. And that can help you connect to God in a deep and profound way,\u201d says\u00a0the company\u2019s website<\/a>, which has a \u201cspiritual\u201d tab on its homepage to go with \u201crecreational\u201d and \u201cmedical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Gross maintains his brand is the first to target a religious demographic, marijuana itself has a long history\u00a0in religious and spiritual contexts, said Laurie Cozad, a professor of religion at Merrimack College and the author of \u201cGod on High: Religion, Cannabis, and the Quest for Legitimacy<\/a>.\u201d Cannabis is named as one of the most sacred plants on Earth in the Atharva Veda, one of the four foundational texts of Hinduism, and is still\u00a0widely consumed<\/a>\u00a0at Indian religious festivals and ceremonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ancient Assyrians, Egyptians and Hebrews burned cannabis as incense, while\u00a0Sufi Muslims<\/a>\u00a0smoked it at shrines and while observing sacred dances. Perhaps best known for their use of marijuana are members of the\u00a0Rastafarian movement<\/a>, a religion that developed in Jamaica in the 1930s and sees the plant as an integral part of its tradition \u2014 a way to get closer to God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in the 1960s, new ministries formed that were centered on the consumption of marijuana as a sacrament, Cozad said, an \u201cunderground movement of people who understood that drugs could be extremely helpful in helping one step out of the mundane world into the sacred.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the first was the Church of the Universe, which sprang up in Canada in 1969 and drew Christian Scripture, among other texts: Followers associate the plant with the Tree of Life in Genesis and smoke it during services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Church of the Universe, the Church of Cognizance, which formed in Arizona in 1991, and the Hawai\u2019i Ministry of Cannabis Sacrament, popularly known as THC Ministry, which followed in 2000, have faced raids, arrests and jail time for their leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marijuana plants grow under green lights to simulate night in a vegetation room at Compassionate Cultivation, a licensed medical cannabis cultivator and dispensary, on Dec. 14, 2017, in Manchaca, Texas. (AP Photo\/Eric Gay)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Temple 420, a Los Angeles-based church that held Sunday services at 4:20 p.m. (a time associated with after-school marijuana use) and sold marijuana to its followers to help them communicate with God, was shut down shortly after it first opened in 2006. Its founder, Craig Rubin, was arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover officer and spent three years on probation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than forming a religious group based on marijuana, Gross sees himself as bringing cannabis to mainstream Christians, aiming to help them explore their spirituality by smoking before prayer or simply allowing themselves to use it recreationally without shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt takes you down a path that looks spiritual, but it looks different than your mom\u2019s church,\u201d Gross said. \u201cWe have to just be open, I think, to presenting the gospel, presenting the Spirit in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s currently working to attract investors and aims to have products on shelves in dispensaries in California later this year, before expanding to many of the 18 states where marijuana is legal for recreational use. His focus is on cannabis strains that are low in THC \u2014 the psychoactive compound that creates a \u201chigh\u201d \u2014 and in concentrations that won\u2019t be overwhelming for a first-time user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other proposed products include cannabis \u201ccommunion wafers,\u201d a \u201choly water\u201d tincture and cannabis incense sticks. He said that his offerings are partly tongue-in-cheek and partly meant to signal to Christians that cannabis doesn\u2019t have to be scary but can come in familiar forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christian Cannabis logo. Courtesy image<\/p>\n\n\n\n For many Christians, overcoming the stigma of taking a drug can be a challenge, as Gross has experienced himself. After recreational cannabis became legal in California in 2016, Gross said, \u201cI would take a lot of my Christian friends and pastors into dispensaries and say, \u2018Guys, this isn\u2019t the Devil\u2019s lettuce.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of its intoxicating effects, 4 in 5\u00a0Protestant pastors<\/a>\u00a0in the U.S. today say smoking marijuana is \u201cmorally wrong,\u201d as do the majority of Islamic scholars \u2014 though marijuana, unlike alcohol, is not expressly prohibited in the Quran, and some Muslims\u00a0believe<\/a>\u00a0it may be permitted for medical purposes. Orthodox Jewish rabbis have similarly\u00a0diverse opinions<\/a>, with some ruling that medical cannabis is kosher and others prohibiting it. (Some sources suggest, however, that Jews\u00a0use marijuana more<\/a>\u00a0than other U.S. religious groups.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Cozad said that the religious discourse about marijuana use appears to be shifting, with fewer people calling\u00a0its use a sin<\/a>\u00a0or morally wrong than in the past. A 2021 Pew Research Center\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0found that more than half of all religiously affiliated Americans support legalizing marijuana for both medical and recreational use. This number drops to 44% for white evangelical Christians, but\u00a0some deeply religious Christians\u00a0are trying to get<\/a>\u00a0Bible-belt states to legalize medical marijuana; in 2018, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\u00a0pushed<\/a>\u00a0for Utah to do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cozad said that despite these changing attitudes, it\u2019s hard to imagine initiatives like Gross\u2019 swaying the minds of religious leaders or having an impact at the institutional level. The \u201creefer madness\u201d narrative, in which marijuana is portrayed as unequivocally harmful, \u201cstill has resonance for people,\u201d Cozad said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But she said that for a minority of people who might be \u201clooking to get away from the dogma and the rituals\u201d of organized religion, greater social acceptance and new avenues for exploring marijuana legally and safely could lead to a different kind of spiritual experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn every religious tradition \u2026 people will always, in whatever time period, whatever culture you\u2019re talking about, find ways to get around those middlemen \u2026 to have their own divine encounters,\u201d Cozad said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what mysticism is all about. That\u2019s why you have mystic traditions in just about every religion there is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article was produced as part of the\u00a0RNS\/IFYC Religious Journalism Fellowship Program<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Pastor Craig Gross has started Christian Cannabis. Photo by David Tosti (RNS) \u2014 Craig Gross tried marijuana for the first time when he was 36. Suffering from health conditions he couldn\u2019t shake and reeling emotionally from the loss of his father, the Christian entrepreneur and evangelist who grew up hearing about the evils of cannabis …<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5079"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5082,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5079\/revisions\/5082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youngadventists.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Marijuana](\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/webRNS-Oklahoma-Marijuana1-060618-3708695.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Christian](\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/webRNS-Christian-Cannabis4.jpg\")
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