On Saturday, 4/20, a day before Easter, a 43-year-old non-denominational Christian pastor named Craig Gross went into the desert for Coachella and shot a video about how much he loves weed.
Gross, raised a Baptist in Northern California, has the look of a Christian utterly at home in the country’s most image-conscious music festival: plain T-shirt, one shaved side of his head, long hair on the top of his scalp parted precisely with gel. He resembles an emo kid grown polite with age.
Gross’s new venture, announced in that YouTube video, is unusual even by the standards of the crowded cannabis industry: Christian Cannabis, a website that sells religiously themed vape pens and CBD balm and which caters to devout Christians who love weed as much as he does.
“I wanted to start a new conversation today,” Gross says in the video, staring into the camera between shots of propeller planes ascending into the sky and Coachella’s Instagram-famous Ferris wheel. “And it’s a larger conversation than just recreational or medicinal, legal or illegal, THC or CBD. But a conversation about the emotional, physical, and—dare I say—spiritual effects that I’ve had with this controversial plant.”
At the moment, Gross said, Christian leaders don’t know how to talk about the plant, since many of them have absolutely no actual experience with it. (Gross himself, he said, didn’t try any drugs until he was 37.)
As cannabis gains cultural and political acceptance and young evangelicals move further to the left than their parents, it seems likely that Christians, along with everyone else, will be casually vaping THC and CBD and snacking on the occasional pot chocolate. And if Christians are smoking weed, why can’t weed be Christian?
“I imagine more and more Christian communities will be grappling with how people will integrate their cannabis use with their Christian beliefs,” Gary Laderman, a professor at Emory University who studies the intersections between religion and drugs.
Christian Cannabis has already gained some traction on social media. Steve Meyers, a pastor based in Los Angeles, lauded Gross in an Instagram comment, writing, “The Church is FINALLY talking about mental health, acknowledging its validity, the importance of seeking medical treatment… Craig is not a drug dealer, he’s not evil, he’s just been on a journey and wants to start an honest conversation.”
Meanwhile, in a sermon posted on Facebook on Sunday, the preacher Charlie McMahon of the SouthBrook Christian Church in Ohio—which, like many churches, helps people recover from drug addiction—came out against it.
“We have a ministry partner who has taken up the business of selling pot,” he said to the audience. “He is going to be soon a former ministry partner of ours. Because he believes, hey, if you take medication, why shouldn’t you be able to take this medication? And in a church based in recovery, that ain’t going to work.”
Gross is ready for both this celebration and blowback.
“I mean, let’s be honest,” Gross said over the phone earlier this week. “Christian Cannabis, there’s no such thing. I hate the name. It’s stupid. But inside the Christian world—and it’s the thing I hate about it—you have to have your own products.