Christian Smoked Weed Before Born Again
The Christian Case for Marijuana
If we are concerned nigh justice and the mitigation of hurting, we must get across the just-say-no mentality.
- 316
Mr. Merritt writes about the intersection of religion, civilization and politics.
I grew upward in an evangelical Christian minister'southward home during America's "But Say No" era, which means I spent most of my life assertive that marijuana was simply one more sinful tool that the devil used to shred America's moral fabric. But that was before I developed a mysterious and debilitating chronic pain disorder against which about traditional medicines proved worthless. Pain, like fourth dimension, has a manner of transforming us.
On a grayness morn in December four years ago, I awoke in my cramped Brooklyn apartment and could not experience my hands. Over the following weeks, the numbness morphed into burning, tingling, stabbing pain that spread all over my body. The pain was before long accompanied past panic attacks, crippling depression and something bordering on suicidal thoughts.
Desperate for answers and relief, I plowed through wellness care professionals — half dozen neurologists, three principal care physicians, two chiropractors, ii concrete therapists, an orthopedist, a cardiologist, a rheumatologist, a physiatrist and one especially earnest Hasidic Jewish healer. They offered me no answers, only instead gave me a cabinet full of nerve pills, painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs that clouded my mind and were accompanied by side effects that were oftentimes worse than the symptoms themselves.
In the depths of my despair, I visited a so-chosen green doctor in Venice Beach, Calif., and did something that the pious childhood version of me would have considered unthinkable: I asked for a medical marijuana prescription. That evening, I sampled a small dose and experienced what some might call a miracle. The excruciating pain receded and the deject encircling my head lifted for the get-go fourth dimension in months. I laid in bed and wept for more an hour.
I used my prescription dozens of times in subsequent weeks, each time with like effect. The reduced level of hurting cleared a path for me to research and experiment with non-substance solutions for my illness including yoga, mindfulness meditation and dietary changes. Fifty-fifty still, the experience forced me to consider that perhaps marijuana should be legalized and regulated like booze and tobacco rather than banned like heroin and meth.
E'er since the newly formed religious right enlisted in the Reagan revolution, conservative Christians have been reliable supporters of the "war on drugs," and by extension, stalwart opponents of legalizing marijuana. But many prominent Christian pastors and leaders I've spoken with told me that they are quietly irresolute their minds on the matter. Others who remain skeptical admit that much has changed since the 1980s and they no longer are sure of what they believe. The faithful need to have an upward-to-date discussion on the morality of marijuana.
For starters, Christians should easily assert the utilize of cannabis for medical purposes. Though recent enquiry has revealed marijuana can accept "a deleterious impact on cognitive development in adolescents," numerous studies have also showcased its remarkable healing potential for adults. This has led more thirty states to legalize it for therapeutic uses. As a doc friend of mine in New York recently commented, if medical marijuana was a synthetic pill produced by Pfizer and not a historically villainized substance, it would be fast-tracked by the Nutrient and Drug Administration and celebrated as a "phenomenon drug" by every respectable health practitioner in America. In clinical trials, medical marijuana has been shown to be prophylactic and effective in relieving pain, decreasing inflammation, controlling seizures, reducing feet and depression, and easing the nausea related to chemotherapy.
America is sick, and the Christian call to compassion obligates the faithful to human activity. Chronic pain and illness at present affect tens of millions of Americans, and in many cases the crusade eludes the brightest medical minds. To fight these ailments, Americans have been prescribed listen-altering anti-depressants, highly addictive pain relievers and opioids, and all manner of legal substances with a listing of side effects then long that drug commercials experience like "Saturday Night Alive" shorts.
Christian ethics has long taught that the true-blue must take an active office in caring for the ailing among us. The New Attestation repeatedly commands the people of God to engage in "healing the ill," an act that plays a central role in Jesus'due south ministry in all four Gospels. In fact, one of Jesus's most famous parables, in Matthew 25, lists humans' willingness or failure to intendance for ill people as one of the main criteria upon which they will be judged by God in the afterlife. And in at least 1 instance, the Campaigner Paul, who wrote more than of the New Testament than anyone else, encourages his protégé Timothy to use a potentially harmful substance for the sake of health and healing. "No longer beverage water exclusively," Paul writes in 1 Timothy 5:23, "merely utilise a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments."
While a majority of Christians now favor permitting medical marijuana, they are far more resistant to legalizing it completely. Simply the faithful must consider that America'due south drug war has been a catastrophic failure and has perpetuated social injustices against communities of colour.
Justice is ane of the main themes in both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian New Testament. This includes the famed teaching from the Jewish prophet Micah that "to do justice" is 1 of only iii actions that God "requires" from God'south people and Jesus'due south repeated teachings on justice (often translated in English as "righteousness"). The more than ii,000 verses about justice in the Bible have grounded Christians in every major political justice movement in modernistic American history — from abolition to women'due south suffrage to the civil rights movement — and provide solid ground for Christians seeking to rethink this matter equally well.
The Christian rapper Jason Footling, known as Propaganda, has witnessed the injustices of this disparity firsthand as a blackness man. He told me that his cousin spent 25 years in prison for a nonviolent drug offense, and a close friend of his served a 5-yr jail sentence just for riding in a automobile with another person in possession of drugs. Equally he put it, "American Christians have to stop beingness the concluding ones to the table to have discussions similar these. Given the proven racist intent of the war on drugs and the criminalization of marijuana, it's time for Christians to retrieve critically about this issue and non simply default to abstinence."
Indeed, people of color are far more than likely to be searched or harassed, and blackness Americans are imprisoned for irenic drug offenses at a rate 10 times higher than white Americans despite the fact that white Americans use drugs far more than ofttimes.
Even if arguments like these are persuasive to Christians, in that location is the matter of finding respected leaders to take them to the masses. Enter the California pastor and author Craig Gross, who has just started Christian Cannabis, a national effort to educate and engage the faithful on this issue. The organization's flashy website, which includes a logo of a dove with a marijuana leafage in its oral fissure, includes a blog and a podcast. It likewise features a number of cannabis-infused vaporizer pens with names like Praise, Peace and Persevere, which will be for auction on the site in the future.
Mr. Gross is no stranger to sparking difficult conversations among believers. In 2002, later on the explosion of the net, he started a national organization called XXX Church with the mission of starting a conversation well-nigh the negative furnishings of pornography. Virtually Christian leaders felt uncomfortable discussing the topic and so openly at the time, merely Mr. Gross persisted and soon the result went mainstream. More 15 years later, XXX Church building facilitates online Bible report groups and has created porn-blocking software. What Mr. Gross did with pornography he hopes to replicate with pot.
Mr. Gross, who is 42, admits to existence personally invested in the issue. After years of struggling with a health condition that resulted in him beingness hospitalized and on the hook for expensive medical bills, he tried medical marijuana and found both relief from his symptoms and clarity nearly a new calling. He told me, "Through my feel, the Lord met me in ways more than powerful than I've e'er known. It convinced me that I am supposed to atomic number 82 this new conversation."
He is not the only one who is rethinking his views. While I was working on this story, I corresponded with numerous Christian leaders — prominent pastors, radio hosts, authors, organizational leaders. They admitted to me that they believe this outcome needs to exist reconsidered, and several said that they had used marijuana in recent days. Simply few were willing to speak on the record for fear of backlash from more politically conservative believers.
A pastor at 1 of America'south largest and most respected evangelical megachurches spoke to me on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his chore. He has quietly battled unbearable mental illness for more than two decades. To survive the "gruesome ride," as he described it, he tried counseling, reading therapeutic books and a lot of prayer. Years agone, he was forced to begin taking prescription drugs with a host of negative side effects merely to function at home and at work. But in recent years, he secretly added medical marijuana to his therapy regimen. Today he feels "invigorated" instead of "debilitated," and he is no longer taking the prescription drugs on which he once depended. He said that the experience has changed both his political and his theological views.
"I have lived my whole life thinking that using marijuana was wrong and sinful, just at present I cannot deny that God has used this for my good," he told me. "Information technology's made me a amend hubby, a better human and a better recipient of God's love."
For the 70 percent of Americans who claim to exist Christian to rethink and re-engage with this upshot, believers will need to hear more stories like his, recounted by voices they trust. Correct now, almost Christian leaders are unwilling to step up and speak most such a stigmatized topic.
American Christians are as divided as always over all manner of cultural issues, and it remains to be seen whether the mass of the faithful will have the free energy and interest to address this upshot on the level it deserves. Historically, conservative Christians have been Johnny-come-latelys to leading-edge cultural conversations. That needs to change, and not just when it comes to cannabis.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/opinion/legalization-medical-marijuana-christianity.html
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