Money for Missions: Keep the Faith, Baby

Come, all ye faith-based faithful, and get joyful and triumphant over this.

Ten million bucks for California’s missions. Congress voted for it, the White House signed the check, and I approve that message. I think it’s money very well spent.

Hey, hey, easy there -- ye don’t have to be that joyful and triumphant. Try asking for 10 cents of my tax money to so much as buy Windex to keep the shine on the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and I’ll leave everything to Atheists R Us.

The mission money has the ACLU ticked off, though. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is suing. They worry -- and not unreasonably, given the scary pieties beaming forth from Pennsylvania Avenue these days -- that this is about helping any church to separate every state from its tax money.

Most of the time they’re right. This time, spending tax money to shore up a score or so of old missions doesn’t imperil the separation of church and state -- it’s a step toward enshrining it. It’s good-faith money, the public’s ante in the poker pot of history, proof that this country is slowly, inexorably on the way to being a big, grown-up, secular nation. It can demonstrate that we know how to apply the brakes on a slippery slope, that we can discern the difference between giving tax money to restore tumbledown 200-year-old missions and using it to manicure that freakish, 60-foot-tall bronze “Praying Hands” sculpture at Oral Roberts University.

The faith-based faithful won’t like this, but the mission makeover money makes the United States more like ... France. And Spain, and England. Nations that once had fervent, even tyrannical, state religions and whose churches now are mostly historical monuments to that vanished age and philosophy.

The $10 million shows that we too can become a nation mature enough and sophisticated enough to understand the difference between religion as historical relic and religion as present-day bully pulpit (emphasis on bully). We put a little money toward preserving the beauties and lessons of the former, as we would any historic site, and a lot of money toward protecting ourselves from the threat of the latter, like Ten Commandments rocks in courthouses and creationism “science” in public schools.

In “old Europe,” candles still burn and services are still sung in the churches where kings and cardinals shaped the destiny of nations -- and where tourists now shuffle from fresco to tomb in really ugly shoes. California’s missions are not Chartres in France, or Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, or Westminster Abbey in London, but like them, they are inextricable from the past, the bones of the skeleton of Cuerpo Californio.

In the U.S. Capitol, each state is allotted statues of two of its heroes. California chose Junipero Serra, founder of the missions, and Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian and Universalist minister who kept California in the Union and probably tipped the odds in the Civil War. (I’d prefer John Muir and Toypurina, the Indian woman who led a revolt against the San Gabriel mission.) The first of our missions was built in 1769, the last in 1823, that half-century when sword and crucifix subdued California. The $10 million buys us a bonus, preserving reminders of the savageries that can happen when church and state are one.

Mexican independence secularized the missions, then Abraham Lincoln returned them to the Catholic Church, which operates all but two today. What finished off the secularizing was California capitalism. The Mission Revival movement and tourism romanticized them, converted them into a franchise chain, like a string of quaint McDonald’s, and demoted them from agents of crusading Catholicism to stage sets for the “Ramona” pageant or the swallows at Capistrano.

They’re practically post-religious. Five million people visit them every year, only a handful for Mass. Many are fourth-graders and their parents on the forced march of the California history curriculum and about to build their sugar-cube mission models (a tradition threatened by the prefab mission kit, $19.99 online). The only Californian I found in my office who didn’t undergo this fourth-grade rite of passage went to Catholic school.

Ten million dollars is a bargain to pay for proof that we can be a nation that regards its old churches with the same dispassionate historical curiosity as it regards an Ohio canal boat or a Paul Revere silver cup: To be able to visit a mission and not have a religious experience is like being able to hear the “William Tell Overture” without thinking of the Lone Ranger -- congratulations, you’re a grown-up.