Think of it as one of the defining mantras of America’s church-state orthodoxy: state officials are supposed to avoid getting entangled in deciding what is good doctrine and what is bad doctrine. They are, of course, allowed to worry about matters of profit, fraud and clear threat to life and health.

However, the legal powers that be have also had wrestle with other questions tied to the stunningly liberal (in the old sense of that word) framework created by the First Amendment: Who gets to decide what is a “religion” and what is not? How does the state decide who is sincere and who is, well, sleazy?

You can see all of these issues rumbling about in an important New York Times piece that I have been trying to sort out for some time now. This topic has been covered before (click here for earlier GetReligion posts), but this story — in my opinion — probes deeper. Here is the sweeping double-decker headline:

Inside the War for California’s Cannabis Churches

Illegal marijuana dispensaries outnumber legal ones more than three to one in California. What’s the role of the cannabis church?

Now, church-state experts have — at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Congress — wrestled with issues related to religious rights that involve drugs that are or have been illegal. It’s natural to ask if these religious organizations are offering rites incarnating centuries of religious traditions and doctrines (think Native Americans and peyote) or are they modern innovations to help people avoid laws they do not accept?

At first, I thought that money questions were going to completely dominate this Times piece — which is understandable. Is the Jah Healing flock a church or a cannabis storefront? I was glad when broader church-state issues entered the discussion.

Let’s start with the overture:

LOS ANGELES — Every Sunday, about two dozen people gather at a green cabin along the main drag of Big Bear, Calif., a small mountain town known for its namesake lake. They go there for Jah Healing Church services, where joints are passed around. 

April Mancini, a founder of the church, said she was drawn to the idea of cannabis as a religious sacrament back in 2013, after she met a Rastafarian who was running the place as an unlicensed medicinal dispensary. 

“I’m a Christian, so I wasn’t sure in the beginning,” Ms. Mancini said. “I didn’t want to go against God.” 

But she said she studied the Bible for references to cannabis, and believed she found them in scriptures that mentioned kaneh bosem oil. (English-language Bibles usually render the term “kaneh bosem,” a component of an anointing oil mentioned in Exodus, as “fragrant cane” or “sweet calamus.”)

In October 2017, Ms. Mancini filed paperwork with the state to incorporate the Jah Healing Kemetic Temple of the Divine. The newly registered church stopped requiring medical cards for marijuana for people 21 and over. Its teachings are largely Christian but borrow from a grab bag of religious traditions as varied as Rastafarianism, Buddhism and Judaism.

Old religion? New religion?

In 2018 the state shut the congregation down, kicking off a legal battle over all of the questions I mentioned earlier. I like the details included that the pastor, Frances Valerie Rodriguez, was ordained by the Universal Life Church and that the flock now offers a food pantry and Wednesday-night Bible studies.

This leads to the obvious question:

At the heart of this matter is a possibly unanswerable question: What is religion? And how do you prove faith? 

Critics will try to measure the sincerity of the congregations’ beliefs, Ms. Rodriguez said. But for her, the church is about restoring people’s relationship with God. If the sacrament of cannabis helps people build that connection, she and her church want to facilitate that connection.

Profit or fraud? A “fake” religion? A modern brew created out of pieces of old religions? Does any of this matter?

In terms of questions about finances, note this strategic shift:

Jah Healing Church, which stocks edibles, tinctures, pre-rolls and loose marijuana, has recently changed its funding method from mandatory donations, handed to a minister, to voluntary donations placed in an envelope and dropped into a box.

Cities, law enforcement and the hundreds of licensed and regulated weed dispensaries tend to view this as part of the black market.

But if the congregation had a price list and openly sold weed, wouldn’t it be a store? The story does a fine job, I think, of showing the legal debates about these financial issues.

Eventually, other church-state issues begin to loom in the background. For example, note the threads of legal history implied by this:

Near the center of the legal battle between cannabis churches and law enforcement in California is Matthew Pappas, a lawyer who has made a name for himself fighting to protect marijuana distribution. …

Mr. Pappas has also served as legal counsel to the Oklevueha Native American Church, which asserts that cannabis is a Native American sacrament, similar to peyote. 

The Oklevueha church is not tied to a federally recognized tribe, and is at odds with Native American religious leaders, including the National Council of Native American Churches, which rejects the idea that cannabis is a Native American sacrament. (The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Oklevueha’s request for a religious exemption for cannabis use in 2016.)

So is Pappas — a “blessed” medicine man — working with old religious concept, but in a new form? It’s important that Native American leaders do not agree.

Things get complicated. There are all kinds of fascinating details that show the fact that traditions, rites and doctrines are a crucial part of this debate. I was glad to see the Times team dig into this. For example, there are all kinds of twists and turns in the following:

[Pappas] began to question the way Oklevueha operated and has since severed ties with the group. “I was duped a couple of times by people who said they were sincere and they were not,” he said. “But my job is on the secular side — to represent the churches in court.” 

In recent years, Mr. Pappas has taken on a new role: religious leader. In 2016, he and a childhood friend started Sacramental Life Church, a religious umbrella organization that works with about a dozen cannabis churches in California. (These include Jah Healing Church and Sacramental Life Church in Redondo Beach.) 

In addition to serving as legal counsel, Mr. Pappas holds the title of Steward of the Word for all churches that are members of the umbrella organization. 

The Sacramental Life Church — and all its member churches — has its own series of tenets. The Nine Epiphanies, at the center, are taken from the writings of Mr. Pappas’s daughter. The Ninth Epiphany contains a prophecy, predicting the coming of a day when people will no longer be killed over religious differences; cannabis will be the force that unites all different beliefs.

Old religion? New religion? Does this matter? Do state officials get to ask questions of this kind?

Eventually, the Times does bring in a church-state expert. I would have appreciated a broader approach to this part of the story, noting that many legal minds on both the “left” and the “right” — I’m talking about religion, here — are often asking the same kinds of questions.

Still, the following is way better than nothing. Note that, as always, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (see recent Julia Duin post here) comes into the picture on the side of those wanting to defend minority beliefs from attackers:

Defining what counts as a religion under the law “has been a notoriously difficult question for the courts ever since the founding,” said James Sonne, a Stanford Law School professor and the director of the Religious Liberty Clinic at the university.

The addition of drugs has made that question more complicated. A 1990 Supreme Court ruling against two members of the Native American Church who were fired after taking peyote during a religious ceremony prompted bipartisan backlash in Congress. 

It led to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. This was used by the Supreme Court in 2006 to rule in favor of a church that used ayahuasca, a sacramental tea made from two plants found in the Amazonian rain forest.

But those cases deal with federal laws. In California, where recreational (and before that, medicinal) marijuana is legal, cannabis churches can’t seek protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The law also only applies in states that have passed their own versions of it; California hasn’t.

As I have said many, many times, church-state issues are complicated and, often, labels like “left” and “right” do not apply.

In this case, the Times piece notes that a California court is also trying to “determine whether the belief system in question is ‘sincerely held.’ “

In other words, is this a “real” church or not” Is this a “religion” or a commercial enterprise? What are the secular, neutral standards to test “sincerity”?

Stay tuned. This piece was much better than the norm. I hope that, in subsequent coverage, a wider range of church-state voices get to address these issues in a setting as important as The New York Times. I think many readers will be surprised at the common ground that RFRA can create, when activists on both sides want that to happen and journalists pay attention to the results.