Over time, Flinn says, the Supreme Court has moved away from giving either specific content or Christian bias in defining what religion means. "In a sense, the definition of religion is ultimately left to the people to decide. Maybe 'religion' is one of those words like 'love' that always elude definitive definition."

Last Sunday Ken Larsen sat in a chair in the drum circle at Liberty Park. He was wearing a straw hat and his trademark suspenders, and was periodically beating on a flat drum decorated with a picture of an American Indian chief, oblivious to the fact that his beat wasn't in sync with the African rhythms being slapped out on the other side of the circle. The air was heavy with the smell of burning sage.

Not too far away, six police officers on bicycles surveyed the scene. The park patrol began after a man was fatally stabbed at the drum circle in 2005; the idea, said Sgt. Stefhan Bennett, is to make sure the crowd — which sometimes numbers several hundred — "follows the same laws as everyone else." The tobacco smoking ban, he said, makes it easier to crack down on marijuana smokers, although that's not why the City Council passed the ordinance that went into effect last January. Citizens, as well as representatives from the Cancer Society and the Lung Association, asked for the ban because of what they argued was the deleterious effect of outdoor secondhand smoke.

Last Sunday, officers handed out tickets to several people caught smoking cigarettes, but they missed the joints that were surreptitiously passed around. At one point, Larsen rose, walked to the center of the circle and announced "Attention everybody: It is now 4:20." Several people cheered, since 420 is a code word for marijuana.

It would be easy to dismiss Larsen's petition about the drum circle as insincere, especially given the fact that his first correspondence with Mayor Rocky Anderson about the matter argued essentially that religious smokers were being given more leeway and that this violated 14th Amendment rights. Ten days later he began using the argument that the drum circle is a religion.

Larsen grew up LDS, was an "Indian dancer" with the Brigham Young University folk dancers in the mid-1960s, and has studied with a Native American shaman. He once sued the state for the right to buy a gun without a background check, and got the first ticket for cruising State Street so he could challenge that law before the Utah Supreme Court. In 1994 he invented nine religions, including the Church of the Hemp Goddess. His point was this: Some personal freedoms are illegal, but if they were "religions" they would be protected under the First Amendment. But he also insists that the drum circle has given him spiritual insight and is a "bona fide religion."