The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Pastor Emeritus of New Covenant Baptist Church, Bishop Simeon Hall has played a massive role in two watershed events in recent Bahamian history. In the lead-up to the gaming referendum in January 2013 under the previous Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) government, he, along with another Baptist minister, Rev Philip McPhee, campaigned incessantly on public platforms for the decriminalisation of web shop gaming. It was a move which sent shockwaves throughout the Christian community in The Bahamas. The campaign for web shop gaming was overwhelmingly rejected by the Bahamian electorate. Notwithstanding this rejection, however, the PLP would subsequently go on to legalise the industry in 2014.

Hall wholeheartedly supported this measure. Interestingly, neither Hall nor McPhee, to the best of my knowledge, have exerted the same amount of energy in lobbying for the implementation of safety nets for gambling addicts – some of whom are churchgoers. Legalised web shop gaming has essentially undermined the financial viability of many small to medium sized churches, owing to members gambling away their tithes and offerings in the web shops. As co-chair of the Bahamas National Commission on Marijuana, Hall is once again leading the charge for another groundbreaking change in the Bahamian moral fabric, if preliminary reports of the Commission's recommendations for the decriminalisation of recreational marijuana are accurate.

As a seasoned churchman, Hall appears to be oblivious of ganja's history in Hinduism that dates back to thousands of years. In his partial autobiography titled Surprised by Joy, C S Lewis stated that there are only two possible answers either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Whatever the non-evangelical Christian apologist meant by that statement, Hinduism is flexing its religious muscle in a predominantly Christian society via the emergence of legalised recreational marijuana. Hall should've turned down the invitation to sit on the Commission. I appreciate him wanting to be civically engaged. Our loyalty to God must supersede all other loyalties.

In the US, medicinal marijuana is legal in 33 States, while recreational marijuana is legal in only 11 States and the District of Columbia. Coinciding with the widespread acceptance and legalisation of recreational marijuana in the US has been the formation of weed churches throughout the States of California, Colorado and Florida, to list a few. Sacramental Life Church, Hundred Harmonies Church, Jah Healing Church, First Church of Cannabis and International Church of Cannabis are pseudo churches catering to weed smokers who have no genuine interest in Christianity. The foregoing churches are all claiming that weed is just as much a sacrament as the Christian Eucharist.

Consequently, weed church leaders are adamant that they should be beneficiaries of tax exemption like legitimate churches. In California, according to Rolling Stone, the state government in 2018 only took in $345 million of the projected $1 billion in marijuana tax revenue, owing to the existence of dozens of marijuana dispensaries claiming to be churches. The fact that many of these "churches" are selling weed to their parishioners is a clear-cut indication that the analogy of weed and the Eucharist is a weak one at best, seeing that Christian churches don't sell sacramental wine to those partaking in communion. What's more, according to a New York Times article printed in a November 2019 article, an audit conducted by a cannabis trade organisation discovered 2,835 illegal weed dispensaries compared to just 873 legalised sellers in the State of California alone.

This phenomenon means that with the regularisation of recreational marijuana in California, certain unscrupulous elements have simply gone further underground to continue their trafficking without the state getting a huge bite of their profits. In the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, the Rev James Young Phan of Hundred Harmonies Church told the publication that the state "shouldn't be able to tax the sacrament." Bobo Ashanti Rastas of the Ethiopian African Black International Congress in Nassau are in all likelihood entertaining the same thoughts, especially given the fact that their theology considers all Western governments as being a part of Babylon.

Either before or after his interview, Phan would go on to lecture his parishioners on Martin Luther and the German Reformation. Perhaps he views himself as a reformer in the tradition of Luther, albeit for the cause of recreational marijuana. Bahamian weed consumers are probably seeing Hall in the same light. And with our penchant for copycatting our neighbours to the north, in the event recreational marijuana is ever green lighted, there will be weed church planters who will argue along the same lines as their American counterparts for tax exemption. It will be their loophole to avoid having to pay hefty marijuana taxes. One or two of these future leaders might be tempted to name their weed church New Cannabis Baptist Church.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport,

Grand Bahama,

January 26, 2020.