Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

But I wanted to make a good faith effort to understand how Pastor Dave Hodges put all this in the framework of religion.

And he told me he never intended to run the largest psychedelic church in the world.

To him, a small community of like-minded worshipers was all he wanted.

That and greater public access to psychedelics.

Zydor, or the Church of Ambrosia, as Dave calls the broader organization, it actually started as a marijuana church back in 2019.

The latest in a string of weed organizations Dave had run as a sort of quasi-anti-war-on-drugs business activist.

But then in July of 2019, he had a life-altering vision while on mushrooms that he says turned him into a true believer.

Did you feel at the time like you were receiving a kind of divine revelation of some sort?

So Dave re-centered the church around psychedelic mushrooms, specifically around the practice of taking much higher doses than people usually do recreationally, like 10 times more.

At first, growth was relatively slow, mostly people who'd heard about the church on Reddit.

But something happened in August of 2020 that would end up radically accelerating the church's trajectory.

One day, Dave was checking up on one of the church's marijuana grow houses when he got a call from one of his employees.

the Oakland Police Department was at the door.

They were raiding the building.

According to Dave, over the next few hours, the police swept the sacrament room and cut into one of the church's safes, in the end confiscating some $200,000 worth of mushrooms and marijuana and several thousand dollars in cash.

But Dave says he'd been preparing for this kind of thing since he started the church.

He'd done his research, understood things like the Myers test of religious sincerity.

In fact, this was in some ways the point.

He welcomed the chance to stand up against the law, to help defend the religious right to do all of this.

And so by the very next day, Dave was serving sacrament again.