Utah Passed a Religious Freedom Law. Then Cops Went After This Psychedelic Church.
A religious group using psilocybin mushrooms in ceremonies "put the State of Utah's commitment to religious freedom to the test," a federal judge wrote.
When Bridger Lee Jensen opened a spiritual center in Provo, Utah, he contacted city officials to let them know the religious group he had founded, Singularism, would be conducting ceremonies involving a tea made from psilocybin mushrooms. "Singularism is optimistic that through partnership and dialogue, it can foster an environment that respects diversity and upholds individual rights," Jensen wrote in a September 2023 letter to the Provo City Council and Mayor Michelle Kaufusi. Seeking to "establish an open line of communication" with local officials, Jensen invited them to ask questions and visit the center.
Jensen's optimism proved to be unfounded. The city did not respond to his overture until more than a year later, when Provo police searched the Singularism center and seized the group's sacrament: about 450 grams of psilocybin mushrooms from Oregon. The seizure resulted from an investigation in which an undercover officer posed as a would-be Singularism facilitator.
That raid happened in November 2024, less than eight months after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, had signed the state's version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The state law likely protects Singularism's psychedelic rituals, a federal judge ruled in February. U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish granted Jensen's request for a preliminary injunction against city and county officials, ordering them to return the mushrooms and refrain from further interference with the group's "sincere religious use of psilocybin" while the case is pending.
"In this litigation, the religious-exercise claims of a minority entheogenic religion put the State of Utah's commitment to religious freedom to the test," Parrish wrote in Jensen v. Utah County. If such a commitment "is to mean anything," she said, it must protect "unpopular or unfamiliar religious groups" as well as "popular or familiar ones."
Parrish noted that "the very founding of the State of Utah reflects the lived experience of that truth by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." In light of that history, she suggested, "it is ironic" that "not long after enacting its RFRA to provide special protections for religious exercise, the State of Utah should so vigorously deploy its resources, particularly the coercive power of its criminal-justice system, to harass and shut down a new religion it finds offensive practically without any evidence that [the] religion's practices have imposed any harms on its own practitioners or anyone else."
Under the federal RFRA, which Congress enacted in 1993, the government may not "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion" unless it shows that the burden is "the least restrictive means" of furthering a "compelling governmental interest." In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that RFRA protected the American branch of a syncretic Brazil-based church from federal interference with its rituals, even though the group's sacramental tea, ayahuasca, contained the otherwise illegal psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.
The Supreme Court has said RFRA cannot be applied to state and local governments. Laws like Utah's, which 29 states have enacted, aim to fill that gap.
The defendants in Jensen's case—Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray, the county, and the city of Provo—argued that Utah's RFRA did not apply to Singularism, which they portrayed as a drug trafficking operation disguised as a religion. Parrish rejected that characterization. "Based on all the evidence in the record," she wrote, "the court has no difficulty concluding that Plaintiffs are sincere in their beliefs and that those beliefs are religious in nature."
Parrish also concluded that "preventing Singularism's adherents from pursuing their spiritual voyages" imposed a substantial burden on their religious freedom that was not "the least restrictive means" of addressing the government's public safety concerns. She noted that Utah allows religious use of peyote and has authorized "behavioral health treatment programs" in which patients can receive psilocybin.
"The most obvious alternative at hand is for the government to simply do nothing," Parrish wrote. "After all, the government waited over a year after Singularism opened its spiritual center—at which time Mr. Jensen had fully disclosed Singularism's practices—to perform its criminal investigation. Defendants have pointed to zero evidence that this do-nothing period threatened its interests in public safety."
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Judge Protects a Utah Church's Mushrooms."
