Drum circle: church?

Ken Larsen has already founded nine religions, including The Church of the Beer God and the Church of the Holy Nudity. These were just to prove a point about personal freedom, Larsen admits. But the religion that might possibly be called The Church of the Liberty Park Drum Circle is different, he says.

The weekly Sunday drum circle is "truly a spiritual experience," says the 65-year-old Larsen, a retired genetic researcher and associate professor at the University of Utah, a perennially unsuccessful political candidate and the founder of the Personal Choice Party. The drum circle is a real religion, he says, and therefore should be exempt from a new city ordinance banning smoking in city parks.

The ordinance grants an exemption for tobacco smoking in American Indian/Alaska Native ceremonies, as well as "First Amendment Activities ... such as smoking or use of materials for bona fide religious purposes." Which is exactly why it applies to the drum circle, says Larsen, because smoking tobacco "enhances the spiritual experience" of the drumming.

That's what he argued in a petition signed by 150 drummers and presented to the Salt Lake City Council last month. "We get all kinds of petitions," says council chairman Van Turner, who adds that the council has no plans to put the matter on the agenda. Now Larsen says maybe he'll take the matter to court.

His campaign to have the drum circle classified as a religion is a reminder that — from polygamy to peyote — America is still struggling to define what "religion" means and how religious practices and the law intersect.

As a religious practice, peyote has fared better than polygamy. In February 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an 8-0 opinion that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects a 130-member New Mexico church in its use of a hallucinogenic tea known as hoasca. Chief Justice John G. Roberts noted that using the tea was "a sincere exercise of religion" and that the ruling also included the ceremonial use of peyote. On the other hand, another landmark case ruled that two Oregon Native Americans could be denied unemployment benefits after being fired from their jobs because they had used peyote in a religious ceremony.

That 1990 decision "has undone" the First Amendment, argues Frank K. Flinn, adjunct professor of religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. Flinn has served as an expert legal witness in dozens of cases involving the legal rights of religious groups — "all the oddball cases," as Flinn puts it — and over the years he has come up with a definition of religion that he says has been accepted in "quite a few court proceedings, state, federal and international."