You may know Craig Gross as the former “Porn Pastor” who criticized porn while praising sex workers as God’s own. Today, he’s rebranded as the “Christian Cannabis” pastor, who’s praising the medicinal benefits of weed as a way to grow closer to Christ. In fact, Christian Cannabis is his actual business, and now he’s selling CBD tea, transdermal patches, gummies, and hemp pre-rolls.
In the near future, he’s considering offering holy water tinctures, hemp incense, and cannabis-infused communion wafers, too. However, he cautions his customers to only consume in accordance with the Lord. As he wrote at the Christian Cannabis site:
“We believe that if your desire to consume cannabis stems from emotional wounding that you are trying to stuff or ignore; or if you consume to disconnect from yourself or the people around you; or if your consumption becomes problematic in one way or another, then the condition of your heart is not in alignment to healing, wellness and connection to God.”
Gross rose to fame a little over a decade ago while touring the US to advocate against pornography. At the time, his online base of operations was the cheekily-titled XXXChurch.com. But, in 2019, he pivoted to advocating for weed, which he said has deepened his faithful practices. That same year, he announced his newfound mission with a video about cannabis’s “spiritual effects” that he shot at the Coachella music festival while sporting a Skrillex-esque half-shaven head.
“Christian Cannabis, there’s no such thing,” Gross said to VICE in 2019. “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.”
And now he does, and he’s not alone. That same year, I had the saintly pleasure of speaking with the team at GodsGreenery.com, a Christian weed site that has also made good on its promise to start selling cannabis products, from a full-spectrum CBD “Oil of Gladness” to “Biblical herbs”-infused CBD sleep-aid capsules.
This belief in the godliness of ganja is not shared by everyone in the US Christian community. A 2021 study found that less than one of out every five American pastors don’t believe marijuana should be legal for any purpose.
But newcomers like Gross and God’s Greenery are far from the inventors of religious weed. The cannabis plant has figured in the spiritual practices of a variety of faith followers, noted Religious News, from Hindus to Hebrews to Rastafarians.
Religious News also highlighted that many modern congregations have been persecuted for their marijuana use in modern times. These most certainly include the Rastafari community, which suffered the death of Peter Tosh’s son Jawara McIntosh when the man was serving time in a New Jersey prison for cannabis possession. The Arizona-based Church of Cognizance and the Hawai’i Ministry of Cannabis Sacrament a.k.a. the THC Ministry are religions that have been more recently established, and whose leaders have been subjected to law enforcement persecution for their sacramental use of marijuana.
Fortunately for Gross, his commercial focus on federally-legal CBD products has kept him off of law enforcement’s radar.
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