Pacific Views

Faith-based historical sites.

We've already heard about faith-based prisons and faith-based national parks. Now we find out that Dubya's administration slipped a faith-based historical site into an energy appropriations bill that the president signed in December.

Under a provision of that law, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — the Mormons — now holds a lease (and controls access to) a federally owned historic site in Wyoming. The site, Martins Cove, is (probably) where a party of Mormon immigrants met their deaths while on the way to present-day Utah. Under their lease, the Mormons now control the interpretation of the site; instead of being guided by employees of the Bureau of Land Management, visitors get the Martins Cove story from from Mormon missionaries who are working as guides. In other words, the meaning of a publicly-owned historic site is being determined by a private, religious organization with its own axe to grind.

All visitors must cross private land purchased by the church in the 1990's, and the legislation allows church authorities to decide, in consultation with the bureau, who may be denied admission for, say, improper deportment. On each side of the fence marking the public-private line, missionaries are happy to answer questions of history or Scripture. [...]

Some local residents and advocates for strict separation of church and state say they fear that history is being privatized, that spiritual lessons will supersede facts or that a religious interpretation will distill the complexity of Western history into an overly simplified fable.

"It's historical revisionism — they're using a particular place to enshrine these deaths [on the overland trail west], but in the history of the western movement, thousands of people died, so it's very difficult to claim this particular spot as sacred ground," said Barbara Dobos, a resident of Casper and public-lands advocate who has led the opposition to the church's efforts.

Via NY Times.