The Native American Church is not a single body with a central authority. The Half Moon way, associated with Quanah Parker, uses a crescent altar, keeps Christian reference light, and does not use the Bible in the meeting. The Cross Fire way, developed by the Caddo roadman John Wilson from about 1880, is explicitly Christian, uses the Bible, and adds a cross to the altar. Both are Native American Church, and members move between them. Beyond those there are Native American Church of North America, Native American Church of Navajoland, and numerous independently incorporated bodies; a charter is not evidence of affiliation with any other.
The Christian element is real and is not decoration. Many members describe peyote as the means by which God, or the Creator, is approached directly, and some as the sacrament given to Indian people as communion was given to others. Others are less interested in the Christian framing. The church has never resolved this and does not appear to need to.
Adoption was not universal or uncontested. Traditionalists in several nations regarded peyotism as foreign, and some tribal governments banned it. The Navajo Tribal Council prohibited peyote in 1940, describing it as unconnected with traditional Dine practice, and a federal appeals court upheld the tribe as sovereign in the matter in 1959. The Council reversed itself in 1967, adopting a bill of rights guaranteeing freedom of religion and exempting ceremonial peyote from the criminal code. The Navajo Nation now holds one of the largest concentrations of members.
The current pressure is botanical. Peyote grows slowly, takes years to reach harvestable size, and is legally supplied in the United States only through a small number of licensed harvesters, peyoteros, in south Texas. Wild populations there have declined by roughly 30 percent in twenty years under land conversion, improper root-cutting, and demand, while the number of licensed distributors has fallen and prices have risen. Church organisations have responded by buying habitat in Texas and by opposing broad psychedelic decriminalisation campaigns that would include peyote, on the grounds that wider legal demand would finish off a supply already failing the people whose sacrament it is.