Next week at the American Academy of Religion in Denver, I will once again have the privilege and pleasure of co-leading a tour of intriguing religious sites. One interesting place that we haven’t been able to include on this year’s tour is the International Church of Cannabis. That’s right, it is a church formed around the “lifestance” that “an individual’s spiritual journey, and search for meaning, is one of self-discovery that can be accelerated with ritual cannabis use.” Members of the church refer to themselves as Elevationists.
The Gothic-revival building the church occupies in the Washington Park neighborhood was built by in 1904 for the congregation of Trinity Lutheran.
Barnitz Memorial Lutheran Church – So. Logan & E. Dakota [1910-1930?], Western History and Genealogy Dept., Denver Public LibraryThe congregation soon renamed itself Barnitz Memorial Lutheran in honor of Lutheran pastor and missionary, Samuel Bacon Barnitz (1838–1901). Later it served for over twenty years as the home of Mount Calvary Apostolic Church.
After Mount Calvary left in 2015, the Elevationists purchased it and transformed it with the help of two artists. Los Angeles-based artist Kenny Scharf covered the doors and filed the front windows with a cosmic design. Spanish muralist Okuda San Miguel transformed the sanctuary interior with brightly colored geometric murals in his distinctive style.
International Church of Cannabis, January 2018, Jeffrey Beall [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia CommonsCeiling and rear wall, Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
On their website, the Elevationists advertise hours on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons when the church is open to the public. Because Colorado law does not allow the public consumption of marijuana, cannabis may not be used during these times. That is reserved for member-only events.
Roberto Perin’s Many Rooms of this House: Religious Diversity in Toronto since 1840 tells the history of religion life in Toronto’s West End over a 160-year period. It offers a kind of composite biography of the many Protestant, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist congregations that have been centers of community life. The book is stunning in its detail and scope. You can read my full review at Reading Religion.
“A world civil religion could be accepted as a fulfillment and not a denial of American civil religion. Indeed, such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civil religion from the beginning.”
So wrote Robert Bellah near the end of his famous 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America.” I regularly read this text with students and always find Bellah’s vision of a “world civil religion” arresting. Even more so, his observation that “so far the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to the focus of a cult.”
I’m not surprised that Bellah thought that the UN could not do this symbolic work. But I am struck that that the UN figured so prominently in the social consciousness of his day that he thought it worth mentioning. Recently the U.S. President denounced “globalism” in favor of “patriotism” before the United Nations General Assembly. Bellah’s world was clearly different from ours
If a world civil religion with the United Nations as a focus were to develop, one of its sacred sites would surely be San Francisco, the UN’s birthplace. The UN already figures prominently in the iconography of one of the city’s sacred shrines, Grace Cathedral.
Entering this Episcopal cathedral by its main doors, one of the first things that draws a person’s attention is a mural commemorating the UN’s founding.
Painted by Polish émigré, Jan Henryk de Rosen (1891-1982), it depicts individuals involved in the founding of the UN above the city’s Ferry Building. They are flanked by representations of Peace and Victory. Tellingly however, Victory is depicted by a representation of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in its surviving, headless, form. This underscores that the founding principle of the UN is not victory, but peace. The quotation from the preamble to the UN charter underscores this point, “We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . .”
Just to the left of the mural a metal casting makes the UN’s religious significance more explicit.
Potentially sacred verses of a global civil religion ring the UN emblem symbols of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Daoism, and Hinduism are arranged below.
Venturing further into the cathedral, careful observers may also see the UN symbol shining like a silver moon in a clerestory window honoring President Harry S. Truman.
It is not surprising that the United Nations should be so celebrated in the city of its birth in a mainline Protestant church. As Heather Warren showed in Theologians of a New World Order, Protestant ecumenists were instrumental in its founding. Yet, I can recall only one church in which I have seen the United Nations flag displayed in honor, St. Luke’s Episcopal in Atlanta, Georgia. Grace’s sister Episcopal cathedrals in Washington and New York are among the many Protestant churches of the twentieth-century with expansive iconographic schemes celebrating the unity of humanity. Yet, as far as I recall, neither of them give a prominent role to the United Nations.
A world civil religion, especially one in which the United Nations plays a central role, seems to be something we are only able to explore in fiction. In the 1982 movie The Wrath of Khan, the Star Trek franchise introduced the UN-inspired emblem for the United Federation of Planets for the first time. It was a ritual redolent with civil religious meaning, the funeral of one who had given his life for his friends, Commander Spock.
Paramount Pictures image via Memory Alpha
Since then the Federation and its emblem and have been treated with more religious-like ceremony in Star Trek shows and films. The idea that the United Federation of Planets is the future fulfillment of both the United States and the United Nations is evident throughout the Star Trek franchise. Here perhaps we can see an image of the global civil religion Bellah imagined.
When the American Academy of Religion met in Baltimore in 2013, I was invited to speak on Gothic revival architecture in an arts, film, literature, and media session on “The Gothic.” I believe the topic was chosen because of Baltimore’s association with Edgar Allen Poe, and most of the other panelists were discussing Gothic literature. While all our papers were well received, I didn’t think we were successful in connecting the different senses of Gothic.
