In Jensen v. Utah County, (D UT, Feb. 20, 2025), a Utah federal district court issued a preliminary injunction under Utah's Religious Freedom Restoration Act barring law enforcement personnel from interfering with the sincere religious use of psilocybin by members of a new religious group known as Singularism. The court also ordered return of items that had been seized from the group. The court said in part:
Plaintiffs seek a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the Utah Controlled Substances Act as applied to their psilocybin ceremonies....
Based on the evidence in this case, Plaintiffs have established that the government has substantially burdened their sincere religious exercise. Simply put, Plaintiffs offer a sacramental psilocybin tea to their voyagers, who then embark on a spiritual journey by which they write their own scripture. A law that categorically prohibits the possession and use of the psilocybin sacrament—thereby preventing Singularism’s adherents from pursuing their spiritual voyages and hindering them from producing their sacred scripture—substantially burdens the free exercise of Singularism and its adherents....
Defendants observe that Singularism “does not claim special access to divine truths,” instead encouraging its practitioners to more deeply “discover and define their own beliefs,” and explicitly states that “no organization, including [it], has all the answers to life’s most difficult questions.” In Defendants’ view, these features weaken Singularism’s claim to be a religion because they show that Singularism’s beliefs are not comprehensive.... As the court sees it, however, these features less so detract from Singularism’s religious nature than they illustrate Singularism’s commitment to existential humility...
From all the evidence in the record, the court is hard-pressed to find, as Defendants urge, that Singularism is essentially a drug-dealing business cloaked in a minister’s robe. To the contrary, the court is convinced that Singularism is a legitimate religion and that Plaintiffs are sincere practitioners of it. This is not a case where a group of people claim a religious right to do little more than use and distribute large quantities of drugs.... By establishing the sincerity of their religious beliefs, Plaintiffs have fulfilled their responsibility of establishing a prima facie case under the Utah RFRA, shifting the burden to the government to demonstrate that the Utah Controlled Substances Act accomplishes a compelling state interest using the least restrictive means....
Whatever legal regime a society chooses, however, it must apply its protections equally to unpopular or unfamiliar religious groups as to popular or familiar ones if that commitment to religious liberty is to mean anything. As sang Jonas Gwangwa, a South African jazz musician who was exiled by the apartheid government, “Freedom for some is freedom for none.” Indeed, the very founding of the State of Utah reflects the lived experience of that truth by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps it is ironic then that not long after enacting its RFRA to provide special protections for religious exercise, the State of Utah should so vigorously deploy its resources, particularly the coercive power of its criminal-justice system, to harass and shut down a new religion it finds offensive practically without any evidence that that religion’s practices have imposed any harms on its own practitioners or anyone else.
