The Neo-American Church's theology and its legal defence were the same sentence, which is why it lost. Psychedelics are sacraments because they are the instrument by which the dreamer is woken; forbidding them is therefore forbidding the rite, and the church claimed free exercise accordingly. Kleps testified before a United States Senate subcommittee in 1966 and made the argument directly to legislators. The Native American Church made a structurally similar claim about peyote and eventually secured statutory protection; the Neo-American Church made it about LSD and cannabis and secured nothing. The difference the courts drew was continuity — an inherited tradition with a community versus a body founded the year before the drug in question was criminalised — and that distinction has done a great deal of work in American religion law since.