Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Pastor Dave is a big guy with a long ponytail, salt and pepper goatee, wire-framed glasses.

Looks a bit like Benjamin Franklin, if he got a job in a corporate IT department.

It doesn't really look like any church I've been inside of before.

Instead of stained glass depictions of saints performing miracles, the walls are covered in a series of trippy technicolor murals.

There's a psychedelic whale pod.

There are contemplative apes stroking their chins.

It feels more like a galactic bowling alley than a sanctuary.

And almost everywhere you look, there are giant images of mushrooms.

That is because Zydor Church is not a Christian church.

It's not Jewish or Hindu.

Zydor is a mushroom church.

It is organized around the belief that psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms offer direct access to the divine.

That's the elevator pitch.

That's the log line.

Zydor is one of a growing number of new psychedelic churches around the country, predicated on the idea that the principle of religious freedom gives them the right to produce, distribute, and consume substances that might otherwise send you to federal prison.

Here, instead of taking communion wafers or wine, parishioners are offered some of the most powerful, mind-altering substances ever known to take home and do with as they please.

To join the church is pretty simple.

You have to fill out an application pledging your sincere religiosity.

Is there an are you a cop checkbox?

Once you are in, you can check in at the front desk before making your way to the place where the church distributes the drugs, all of which the church calls sacrament.